Chapter 5 - THE PHANTOM MOTHER
The pressurized cabin of the Gulfstream felt instantly claustrophobic, the hum of the jet engines sounding like a roaring gale in my ears. Cold sweat broke out across my forehead as I stared down at the crisp white paper in my hands.
Mother's Blood Type: AB-Positive.
It was a biological impossibility. Sylvie was O-negative. Universal donor. She could never, under any medical law of nature, give birth to infants carrying AB-positive markers without extreme, targeted genetic engineering.
I slowly looked sideways at Sylvie. She was fast asleep, her breathing deep and rhythmic, her face looking smaller and more fragile under the cabin lights than it ever had. Was she lying to me? Had she been playing an even deeper, more sinister game than Julian Thorne?
No. I remembered the sheer terror in her eyes in Room 203. I remembered the blood on her sheets, the visceral physical trauma of a woman who had just undergone a chaotic labor. She had genuinely delivered these babies. I had seen her holding them in her arms.
Then what in God's name was written in this folder?
I stood up silently, stepping away from the leather sofa so as not to wake her, and walked to the rear galley of the jet. I dialed Viktor's secure line in Switzerland on my watch.
"Damon?" Viktor answered instantly. "I’m monitoring Julian’s processing at the FBI field office in Manhattan. He’s singing like a canary, trying to cut a plea deal. What’s wrong? You sound off."
"Viktor," I said, my voice barely a whisper, turning my back to the main cabin. "Run a secondary deep-trace on the medical servers at Mount Sinai. Specifically the laboratory records for Room 203 from two hours ago."
"Why? Did the Delaware court order resurface?"
"Just run it, Viktor. Compare Sylvie’s historical blood profile from our corporate health records with the labor delivery printouts Dr. Vance handed me."
A brief silence followed, broken only by the rapid clicking of Viktor’s mechanical keyboard over the satellite link. Ten seconds passed. Twenty.
"Damon..." Viktor’s voice dropped into a dark, confused tone. "This doesn't make sense."
"Tell me."
"The file Dr. Vance handed you... it wasn't generated by Mount Sinai’s automated lab system. The digital signature on that PDF belongs to an external, private server located in Bethesda, Maryland. A private bio-tech facility called Aegis Genetics."
A cold spike of dread drove into my chest. "Aegis Genetics? That’s a defense contractor. They specialize in high-level bio-data storage for government officials."
"Damon," Viktor continued, his typing speeding up furiously. "I’m looking at the live biometric log from Mount Sinai’s delivery ward. Sylvie did give birth to twins tonight. But three hours before she went into labor, another woman was brought into the same maternity suite under a top-secret medical protocol. A woman named Elena Vance."
My breath hitched in my throat. "Elena Vance? Dr. Jonathan Vance’s daughter?"
"Yes. And Damon... Elena Vance died on the operating table at 6:15 PM tonight after delivering twin infants. The cause of death was sudden amniotic embolism. Ten minutes after she died, Sylvie was rushed into the exact same room in premature labor."
The world seemed to tilt on its axis.
Dr. Vance hadn't just been a terrified doctor trying to help me save my ex-wife. He had manipulated the entire scene. He had swapped the medical files. He had handed me his dead daughter’s newborn children—or had he?
"Viktor," I gasped, my mind racing through a nightmare maze of possibilities. "Did Sylvie actually deliver her own twins, or did her pregnancy fail?"
"I don't know, Damon," Viktor whispered hoarsely. "The video logs from the delivery room during those critical two hours have been completely wiped from the hospital's central server. Someone deliberately scrubbed the physical births!"
I hung up the phone, my heart pounding against my ribs like a sledgehammer. I walked back into the main cabin, staring down at the two infant bassinets.
Ethan and Clara.
The boy opened his tiny dark eyes, looking up at me in the dim cabin light. He had the exact same tiny, distinct crease between his eyebrows that I had carried my entire life—the Vexley family trademark. There was no doubt in my soul that this boy was my blood. But who was the girl?
At that exact moment, Sylvie stirred on the sofa. She opened her eyes, blinking against the cabin light, and looked up at me standing frozen over the bassinets.
"Damon?" she asked softly, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. "What's wrong? Why are you staring at them like that?"
I didn't answer right away. I pulled the yellow folder from behind my back and placed it gently on the small table between us.
"Sylvie," I said, my voice dead serious, stripped of all warmth. "I need you to tell me the absolute truth. And if you lie to me now, whatever is left of our life together ends tonight."
Sylvie’s smile vanished, replaced by a expression of sudden, guarded fear. "Damon... what are you talking about?"
"Whose babies are these, Sylvie?"
She froze, her eyes dropping to the yellow folder on the table. "They’re ours! I told you! I carried them for seven months!"
"Your blood type is O-negative," I said coldly, leaning down until my face was inches from hers. "These records state the mother of these children is AB-positive. They belonged to Dr. Vance’s daughter, Elena, who died on the operating table three hours ago."
Sylvie gasped, covering her mouth with both hands. Tears instantly flooded her eyes, but to my utter shock, it wasn't the expression of a caught liar.
It was the expression of a woman whose worst nightmare had just been confirmed.
"Oh God..." she sobbed, burying her face in her hands. "He did it. Dr. Vance actually did it..."
"Did what, Sylvie?!" I demanded, grabbing her wrists gently but firmly. "Talk to me!"
"Damon... I lost our baby six weeks ago!" she sobbed hysterically, her body shaking with violent, uncontrollable grief. "I had a massive placental abruption in Lake Placid! I was alone in the cabin! By the time the ambulance reached me, our baby boy... our son... was dead!"
The air rushed out of my lungs as if I had been hit by a semi-truck. "Our... our son died?"
"I was destroyed!" she cried out, her voice tearing with raw agony. "I wanted to die, Damon! But then Dr. Vance called me. He was my father’s oldest friend. He told me his daughter Elena—who had been impregnated through an anonymous IVF program at his clinic—was terminally ill with a brain tumor and wouldn't survive childbirth. He told me that Julian Thorne was planning to use Elena's pregnancy to claim the Vexley estate because Elena had used your stored biological samples from our old fertility treatments five years ago!"
My head was spinning. Five years ago, during our first year of marriage, Sylvie and I had stored biological embryos at Vance’s private clinic before my corporate empire took off.
"Dr. Vance knew that if Elena died, Julian’s men would seize her newborn twins and use them to destroy you," Sylvie whispered through her tears. "He begged me to come to Mount Sinai. He faked my labor records. He told me to claim the twins were mine—that they were born from our long-lost biological embryos—so you would protect them with your life!"
She looked up at me, her face wet with tears, her voice breaking into tiny pieces. "I lost our real baby, Damon... I was so broken, so filled with grief... and when Dr. Vance put those two motherless infants in my arms, I looked into their eyes and I saw you. I couldn't let Julian kill them! I couldn't let them be destroyed! I lied to you... because I wanted to save them. And because... I couldn't bear to tell you I had failed to give you a child."
I stood there, paralyzed in the middle of the sky, staring at the woman I had loved, hated, and fought for.
She hadn't played me for money. She hadn't played me for power. She was a grieving mother who had lost her own child in the frozen mountains, who had stepped into a burning war to save two helpless infants who carried my genetic code through a dead woman’s tragedy.
Before I could say a single word, the plane suddenly lurched violently downward.
ALARM! ALARM! TERRAIN AHEAD!
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The bright red emergency lights in the cabin began to flash rhythmically, blindingly red. The cockpit door flew open, and the pilot’s voice screamed over the intercom:
"Mr. Vexley! Hydraulic failure in engine two! Someone sabotaged the landing gear controls before takeoff! We’re dropping fast over the Pennsylvania mountains!"
