Chapter 17 - Blood Against Blood
My brain refused to process the image in front of me. I had held her hand while her heart stopped. I had laid her body in the grave. I had spent seven years mourning her loss every single day.
"Elena?" my voice cracked, stripped of all authority, reduced to a hollow whisper.
"Hello, Dominic," she said through the comms speaker, her expression devoid of love or warmth. "You look tired."
"How... how are you alive?" I staggered forward, my gun lowering slightly. "I buried you!"
"You buried a bio-synthetic decoy with my facial structure," Elena said flatly. "I needed to disappear so I could run Vanguard without the Moretti syndicate or rival families interfering. My entire marriage to you was an assignment, Dominic. You were the capital, the muscle, and the shelter I needed to build this facility."
Every warm memory I had of her—our wedding, our quiet evenings, the night Ethan was born—shattered into a thousand jagged pieces.
"And Ethan?" I choked out. "Was he an assignment too?"
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"Ethan is the pinnacle of our research," Elena said, pointing toward the containment pod. "A child born with modified cellular resilience. He doesn't age normally, he doesn't contract illnesses, and his blood is the key to universal cellular regeneration. He belongs to science, Dominic. Not to a mobster."
"He belongs to me!" I roared, raising my weapon and firing three rounds directly into the glass of the observation deck.
