Chapter 3 - THE CROSBY VANE SYNDICATE
The underground medical facility of the Mercer estate hummed with the sterile, mechanical coldness of a morgue. Dr. Yates, visibly shaking under my intense scrutiny, drew vial after vial of dark red blood from Clara’s arm. She sat in the leather medical chair, her face impassive, showing no sign of pain as the thick needles pierced her bruised skin.
I paced the length of the glass-walled room. My phone buzzed incessantly in my pocket. The outside world was catching fire. Crosby Vane, a rival syndicate boss who had been trying to usurp the Mercer territory for a decade, had sensed weakness. The streets whispered that the great Lawson Mercer had gone soft, that he was too busy sitting by a hospital bed to run his empire. Vane was making his move.
My head of security, Marco, stepped into the lab, his face grim. "Lawson. We have a problem. Three SUVs just tried to ram the south gates. We repelled them, but they had heavy artillery. Rocket-propelled grenades. Vane isn't just probing anymore. He's trying to crack the shell."
I stopped pacing. The blood in my veins turned to ice. "Casualties?"
"Two of our men down. The gate is holding, but it’s compromised. We need to retaliate, Lawson. If we sit here and play defense, Vane is going to bring the whole city down on our heads."
I looked through the glass. Yates was feeding Clara's blood samples into the massive centrifuge, his eyes glued to the monitors. Clara caught my gaze through the reflection. She looked so utterly exhausted, yet anchored by a bizarre sense of purpose.
"Marco," I said, my voice dropping to that lethal register that usually preceded a massacre. "Take a tactical team. Hit Vane's distribution center in the port. Burn it to the ground. Leave no one breathing. I want Vane to understand that even while I am occupied, my reach is absolute."
"Yes, Boss." Marco nodded and vanished down the corridor.
I walked into the testing room. "Yates. Talk to me."
The doctor swallowed hard, adjusting his glasses. He looked from the computer screen to me, then to Clara. "It's... it's impossible, Mr. Mercer. Her cellular structure. The white blood cell count is highly abnormal, but not malignant. It’s hyper-regenerative. The genetic markers she carries are a perfect, one-hundred-percent counter-agent to the leukemic mutation in Jonah and Blythe's blood."
The breath left my lungs. Ten days. That was what Yates had told me hours ago. Ten days until I had to buy small coffins.
"Can you do it?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "Can you transfer it?"
"It requires a direct, live bone marrow and plasma transfusion," Yates explained, wiping sweat from his forehead. "Simultaneous. We have to filter her blood directly into theirs while extracting the marrow. It will be excruciating for her. The Vanguard protocol she mentioned... it bypasses standard anesthesia because the sedatives compromise the stem cells. She will feel every ounce of it."
I looked at Clara. She was already rolling up her other sleeve.
"Do it," Clara said to Yates.
"Clara," I started, stepping closer to her. "You don't owe me this. You don't know my children."
"No," she agreed, looking up at me, her gray eyes softening for the first time. "But I knew Genevieve. In the dark, when the doctors left us in those cages, she used to talk through the walls. She talked about you, Lawson. She talked about the twins. She said you were a terrifying man to the world, but to her, you were just a man who loved too fiercely. She kept me sane. I owe her this. I owe her everything."
May you like
A sharp, agonizing pain seized my chest. Hearing Genevieve's words out loud, preserved by a stranger in a nightmare laboratory, broke a dam inside me that I had kept fortified for two years.
"Prep the kids," I told Yates, my voice thick. "We do this now."
