Chapter 7 - The Betrayal Within
My blood ran cold. I looked down at the baby, who was now awake, staring up at me with wide, dark blue eyes.
“They have James,” I whispered, my voice trembling.
Dr. Vance glanced at the rearview mirror, his face pale under the dashboard lights. “Eleanor... you can’t go there. It’s a trap. Marcus will kill James the moment he gets his hands on the child, and then he’ll eliminate you.”
“I’m not leaving my husband to die!” I snapped. “There has to be another way! Where is Sarah?”
“Sarah is with the authorities—or at least she was trying to reach them,” Vance said nervously. “But Marcus has federal judges and local precinct captains in his pocket. You can’t trust anyone.”
We pulled into an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of the city. Rain pelted the windshield like gunfire. I opened the baby’s swaddling blanket, looking for anything that might help us—a clue, a document, anything Sarah might have tucked away.
Hidden inside the folds of the pink blanket was a small, encrypted flash drive and a handwritten note in my sister’s precise script:
“Eleanor, if you’re reading this, the nightmare has come to light. The flash drive contains the full medical ledger of Marcus’s illegal bio-tech network. But more importantly... it contains the DNA test results for the baby. Look at file 04.”
My hands shook as I plugged the drive into Dr. Vance’s dashboard computer setup. A few moments later, the screen flickered to life, displaying a genetic sequencing report.
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I scanned the names on the screen, and my heart stopped dead in my chest.
The mother was listed as Eleanor Grayson. The father... was not James.
