Chapter 16 - The Ultimate Betrayal
"Julian, go!" Cora shouted, grabbing his arm as the titanium doors descended to waist height. "Save my mother! I can get out through the ventilation shafts!"
"I am not leaving you behind again!" Julian roared. Instead of running for the exits or the pod, he sprinted straight toward Elena, tackling his sister through the glass display cases of the upper laboratory.
Sparks flew as surgical equipment shattered across the floor. Elena fought with ruthless, lethal precision, pulling a hidden blade and slashing across Julian’s chest, reopening his old wounds. But Julian ignored the pain, disarming her with a brutal twist of her wrist and pinning her to the steel deck.
"The override code, Elena!" Julian yelled over the deafening blare of the self-destruct sirens. "Give me the code!"
"Never!" Elena spat, pulling a emergency detonator from her collar. "We all die in the dark together!"
Before Elena could press the button, a flash of silver flew through the air.
A surgical scalpels thrown with terrifying medical precision pierced clean through Elena’s right hand, severing the nerve cluster and forcing her to drop the detonator.
Elena screamed in agony, clutching her useless wrist. Cora stepped over the broken glass, holding a second scalpel in her hand, her gaze unfazed by the smoke and alarm lights. "You might be a criminal mastermind, Elena," Cora said calmly, "but I know every tendon in the human hand."
Cora grabbed the override remote from the floor, punching in her mother's medical identification number. The titanium blast doors reversed direction, sliding back up into the ceiling.
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Julian grabbed the remote, overriding the thermal charges just as the timer reached four seconds. The sirens cut out, leaving only the quiet hum of the cryogenic pod.
Elena lay on the floor, laughing hysterically through her pain. "You think you won?" she whispered, coughing blood onto the white tiles. "The Serpent's Ring has already deployed the biological strike on New York. By midnight, your entire empire will be a graveyard!"
