Chapter 23 - The Poisoned Bloodline
"You died..." I whispered, my mind shattering into a thousand jagged pieces. "I held your hand in the hospice room! I watched the heart monitor flatline!"
"You watched a state-of-the-art bio-synthetic clone flatline," Evelyn corrected coldly, gently stroking newborn Leo’s soft cheek. "I created the Vance Medical Syndicate forty years ago, Eleanor. Marcus and Victoria were merely my front figures, the public faces meant to absorb the legal risks while I worked in the dark."
Sarah stepped forward, her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. "You faked your death? You abandoned two young girls to build a black-market genetic empire?"
"I didn't abandon you! I engineered you!" Evelyn spat, her motherly veneer cracking to reveal a terrifying fanaticism. "Eleanor, why do you think your doctor told you twelve years ago that another pregnancy would kill you? Why do you think your uterus was scarred?"
A cold drop of sweat trickled down my spine. "You..."
"I planted microscopic cellular suppressants in your reproductive system when you were eighteen!" Evelyn revealed, her eyes gleaming with mad pride. "Your entire life—your marriage to James, your inability to have a girl naturally, your forced reliance on frozen embryos—was a grand, meticulously calculated stage play! I needed your frozen eggs kept in cold storage until our genetic sequencing technology reached perfection!"
"Why?" I screamed, tears freezing on my cheeks. "Why treat your own daughters like lab rats?"
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"Because you carry the ultimate biological slate!" Evelyn yelled back, standing up and holding Leo high in her arms. "The Grayson bloodline is the only human cellular structure capable of host-binding synthetic immunity! Hope and Leo aren't just twins, Eleanor. They are the Adam and Eve of a new human era—disease-free, genetically flawless, and worth billions to every world government!"
She turned toward the balcony edge, where a massive military transport drone was hovering in the blizzard, its heavy mechanical arms preparing to lower a retrieval harness.
