Chapter 6 - The Confession in the Archives
Detective Miller didn't arrest the grandmother right there in the hallway; instead, he issued a formal hold on both her and Arthur, dragging them down to the precinct for questioning while I stayed by my husband's bedside in the intensive care unit.
By evening, my husband—let’s call him Julian—was awake, though his voice was little more than a dry rasp.
"They do it to all of them," Julian whispered, his fingers weakly gripping mine as the heart monitor ticked steadily beside us. "My father. My uncles. Every single man who marries into or carries the Sterling name. They don't just 'sleep beside the matriarch' on their wedding night. They're harvested."
My blood ran cold. "Harvested? Julian, what are you talking about?"
He turned his head slowly, wincing from the lingering stiffness in his neck. "It’s not tradition. It’s biology. The Sterling family fortune... it isn't from real estate or stocks. My grandmother is over a hundred and ten years old, Elena. She looks eighty. She moves like sixty. Do you know why?"
I shook my head, unable to form words.
"She needs young, vital male blood every generation to sustain cellular regeneration," Julian said, tears slipping silently down his pale cheeks. "They paralyze us, hook us up to an extraction drip while we're completely conscious, and take what they need to keep her alive. My older brother vanished three years ago during his wedding weekend. They told the family he ran off to Europe. He never left that estate."
The door to the ICU unit clicked open softly. I expected a nurse or Detective Miller.
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Instead, stepping out of the shadows of the hallway was a man I had never seen before—an older man wearing a maintenance uniform, holding a thick, leather-bound ledger.
"You shouldn't be poking around the estate archives, young lady," the old man said, pulling down his cap to reveal eyes that matched the matriarch's terrifying stare. "And neither should the police."
