Chapter 7 - The Inheritance of BloodThe safe house was gone, reduced to a smoking skeleton of charred limestone and twisted steel by the time dawn began to break over the gray skyline of the city.
Inside a high-end, anonymous penthouse suite overlooking the harbor—rented under a blind corporate trust three hours earlier using an encrypted satellite phone—Laya sat curled up in a plush velvet armchair, wrapped in a clean white bathrobe that swallowed her small frame. A bowl of hot soup sat untouched on the mahogany coffee table before her.
Ethan stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass window, staring out at the choppy, lead-colored waters of the bay. He had spent the entire night on the encrypted terminal, stripping away the outer layers of the Lancaster Group's board of directors, freezing corporate accounts, and cross-referencing twenty-year-old medical patents filed under fictitious shell companies in the Cayman Islands.
The picture that emerged was more monstrous than he could have ever imagined.
Julian Vance hadn't just been running unauthorized medical trials; he had been building an immortal dynasty financed by the genetic material of the Lancaster bloodline—a bloodline that possessed a rare cellular mutation capable of halting rapid cellular degradation. Clara had found out four years ago when she noticed her own blood samples being diverted from her personal physician to a clandestine facility in the Pacific Northwest. She had tried to run, hiding her pregnancy from Ethan to keep him—and the board—from using their child as raw material for Vance's biomedical empire.
The car crash in Oregon hadn't been an accident. It had been an extraction attempt. Clara had jumped from the vehicle before it went over the cliff, hiding her infant daughter in the care of a trusted loyalist before Vance's men caught up with her and drove her underground.
“Ethan?”
The small voice broke the heavy silence of the penthouse.
Ethan turned away from the window and walked over to the velvet armchair, kneeling down so his eyes were level with hers.
“Are you cold?” he asked gently, brushing a strand of dark hair away from her forehead.
“No,” Laya said, looking down at the silver bracelet still secured tightly around her wrist. “Are they coming for us again?”
“No,” Ethan said, his voice carrying an absolute, unyielding resolve that brooked no argument. “Not ever again. Because today, the hunter becomes the hunted.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a heavy, platinum keycard embossed with the private crest of the Lancaster Group—the master key to the global board chambers on the fifty-fifth floor downtown.
“Laya,” Ethan said softly, taking her small, cold hand in his large, scarred palm. “Do you trust me?”
May you like
Laya looked into his eyes—eyes that held the same fierce, unyielding determination she had seen in her mother’s mirror before the world fell apart. She slowly nodded.
“Good,” Ethan said, standing up and buttoning his charred suit jacket. “Because today, we’re going to a family meeting. And we’re going to show your great-uncle Julian what happens when you steal from a Lancaster.”
