The doctor gave my six-year-old twins ten days to live, but that afternoon a penniless woman appeared at my gates claiming she knew how to save them

The steel interrogation room felt like it was closing in on me. The walls seemed to draw inward, pressing against my chest until breathing became an exercise in pure willpower.

“That’s impossible,” I muttered, backing away half a step. My mind, usually sharp, calculating, and cynical, scrambled to reject the absurdity of her words. “Genevieve was my wife. We were married for eight years. I knew everything about her.”

“Did you?” Elena asked quietly, stepping around the metal table. Up close, I could see silver threads woven prematurely into her dark hair, and the faint, jagged scar tracing down the side of her jawline—a mark that looked remarkably like an old burn. “You knew the elite socialite. You knew the daughter of the shipping magnate. You knew the woman who smiled beside you at charity galas and played the part of the devoted Mercer wife.”

She paused, her dark eyes piercing straight through me.

“You didn't know the woman who grew up in the subterranean research labs of the Vane biomedical syndicate. You didn't know the geneticist who realized too late what her father had engineered into her own DNA.”

Prescott shifted nervously near the door. “Boss, she’s playing games. This could be a psychological operation orchestrated by Crosby Vane to break your focus while his men are moving on our perimeter.”

“Crosby Vane wants me dead,” I said, keeping my eyes locked on Elena. “If he wanted to break me, he’d send a bomb, not a woman spinning fairy tales about my dead wife.”

“It’s not a fairy tale, Lawson,” Elena said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. She reached up, her trembling fingers catching the collar of her worn coat and pulling it back.

Beneath the collar, across her collarbone and disappearing down toward her shoulder, was a dense, symmetrical pattern of pale, geometric scars—burn marks shaped like serial numbers and barcode matrices.

“Vane’s syndicate didn't just fund illegal gene-therapy trials twenty years ago,” Elena continued, her voice shaking with repressed trauma. “They bred human subjects to test synthetic immune boosters designed to withstand radiation and chemical warfare. Genevieve was subject forty-two. I was subject thirty-nine. We escaped when the Chicago facility was burned down in the late nineties.”

The pieces began to violently snap together in my head, forming a picture so dark and twisted that I almost wished the lie were true.

“Genevieve... she wasn't running away from me when she disappeared,” I realized, the horror dawning slowly across my thoughts. “She was running from them. Or... she was trying to protect the twins from inheriting whatever was coded into her blood.”

“She knew,” Elena nodded, a tear finally breaking free and tracking down her scarred cheek. “When the twins were born, their white blood cell counts were erratic. Genevieve knew Vane’s legacy was waiting in their chromosomes. She begged me to take them, to hide them, to raise them where your enemies would never look.”

“I found them,” I said harshly. “I brought them home.”

“Because Genevieve trusted you to keep them safe from bullets and bombs,” Elena shot back, her voice flashing with sudden, fierce maternal anger. “She never imagined you’d bring them into a fortress built on blood and vengeance, where the real enemy could reach them from the inside out.”

I opened my mouth to argue, to defend the empire I had built to protect my family, but the words died in my throat.

Ten days.

Dr. Yates’s words echoed mockingly in my mind.

“If what you’re saying is true,” I said, my voice dropping into a desperate plea masked as a command, “then you didn't just come here to tell me ghost stories. How do we stop it? How do we save Jonah and Blythe?”

Elena walked past me toward the heavy steel door, stopping just before the threshold. She didn't look back.

“We don't use Yates’s medicine, and we don't use modern oncology,” she said quietly. “We use the one thing Crosby Vane spent thirty years trying to destroy, and the one thing your money can't buy.”

“And what is that?”

“An antigen synthesized from the original unmodified marrow of subject thirty-nine. My marrow.”