Chapter 2 - The Crimson Bargain
"What do you mean, take his blood?" Clara shrieked, backing toward Daniel as the mercenaries began hammering a battering ram against the solid oak door.
"Get into the panic room! Both of you, now!" Daniel bellowed, ushering Clara, Annie, and the crying baby into his hidden walk-in safe behind the bookshelf.
As the heavy reinforced door sealed with a pneumatic hiss, Daniel typed the override code into the console, locking them in a soundproof vault. Through the internal CCTV monitors, Daniel watched as his front door splinters, giving way to four armed operatives who fanned out into his home, ransacking his belongings with military precision.
Inside the safe, Annie sat on the floor, rocking Noah back and forth. The baby’s fever was spiking; his skin was red and burning.
"Tell me everything, Annie," Daniel demanded, his voice shaking with a mixture of rage and terror. "Why would Julian care about a six-month-old baby?"
Annie wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "Momma told me before she disappeared... Noah isn't just my brother. He's... he's a tube baby. Created in a lab using Momma’s eggs and... and Mr. Arthur Whitaker’s preserved genetic material."
Clara gasped, dropping to her knees beside the child. "Arthur? Daniel's father?"
"My father died five years ago," Daniel said, disbelieving.
"Before he died, he was sick," Annie whispered. "Momma said Arthur had a rare, terminal bone marrow disease. He cloned his stem cell lines and created a viable embryo before he died, storing it in a cryogenic facility in Geneva. He wanted a genetic match for a bone marrow transplant in case he ever fell ill—or in case his legal heir needed a pure genetic donor. But Momma carried the child to term in secret after she got out of prison!"
The horror dawned on Daniel with crushing force. Julian had been diagnosed with leukemia six months ago—a secret guarded closely by the board of Whitaker Global. Julian didn't want to adopt Noah; he wanted to harvest the baby’s bone marrow to save his own life, regardless of whether the Infant survived the invasive procedure.
On the CCTV monitor, the lead mercenary approached the bookshelf hiding the vault. He reached into his vest and pulled out a thermal imaging scanner. The red heat signatures of three bodies showed up clearly on his screen.
He didn't try to hack the keypad. Instead, he pulled a small, black cylindrical canister from his belt, pulled the pin, and shoved it directly into the vault’s external air ventilation intake.
Within seconds, a faint, sweet-smelling chemical vapor began hissing into the panic room through the overhead grates.
"Gas!" Clara cried out, coughing instantly.
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Annie screamed as Noah began to choke, his faint gasps turning into silent spasms. Daniel lunged for the manual air-purge valve, but the system had been fried from the outside.
"We have to open the door," Daniel snarled, his eyes streaming with tears from the neurotoxin. "We open it, or we die in here in three minutes!"
