He Grabbed The Boy To Protect His Pregnant Wife, But When The Syringe Pierced Her Belly, Blue Liquid Poured Out—And The Camera Above Revealed Her Gruesome Secret!

"Step away from the boy, Vanessa!" Nathan roared, raising his rifle, centering his holographic sight directly between her eyes. "Move an inch, and I’ll paint this entire gallery with your brains!"

Vanessa didn't even flinch. She gently rested the cold tip of the mechanical injector against Leo’s exposed carotid artery.

"Go ahead, darling. Pull the trigger," she whispered, her voice amplified across the cavern. "The injector has a dead-man switch wired to my heart rate. The millisecond my pulse stops, twenty cubic centimeters of the Cerulean compound will be fired directly into Leo’s brainstem. He will die screaming in front of you. Do you want to gamble your nephew’s life on your marksmanship?"

Nathan’s finger froze on the trigger. His breath came in ragged, burning gasps. Beside him, Kane cautiously raised his sidearm, scanning for the other surgeons, but they stood motionless, like statues guarding an altar.

"What do you want, Vanessa?" Nathan demanded, his voice cracking beneath the agony of his restraint. "You have the money. You stole hundreds of millions from Vance Enterprises. You killed Julian. What is this?"

"Money?" Vanessa laughed, a melodic, terrifying sound that reverberated off the steel walls. "You foolish, shortsighted little man. You think this was ever about paper currency? Julian discovered the key to cellular immortality. But the body rejects the synthesis unless the genetic lineage is unbroken. Julian’s marrow gave me the baseline. But Julian is dead. His cells died with him."

She stroked Leo’s cheek with the back of her manicured hand. The boy shrank away in terror, tears streaming down his face into his hair.

"Leo carries Julian’s uncorrupted genome," she continued, her eyes burning with fanatic obsession. "When I combine his blood with the Cerulean core inside me, the incubation will finally take hold. I won't just be an heir to an empire, Nathan. I will be the progenitor of a new human species. Immune to disease. Immune to aging. Untouchable."

"You're insane," Kane said through gritted teeth. "You’re injecting yourself with toxic industrial sewage. You’re a cancer patient chasing a hallucination!"

"Am I?" Vanessa’s smile turned grotesque. With her free hand, she unbuttoned the front of her crimson gown, exposing her abdomen.

Nathan felt his stomach heave.

Her stomach was not flat, nor was it the silicone prosthesis they had punctured two months ago. Her flesh was stretched tight, pulsating with a horrific, bioluminescent blue radiance from within. Thick, dark blue veins spiderwebbed across her ribs and down her thighs, glowing faintly beneath translucent skin. Something inside her was writhing, shifting in violent, unnatural rhythms.

"The needle your precious little nephew drove into me didn't kill it," Vanessa hissed, her eyes dilating until the irises were almost swallowed in black. "It fed it. The exposure to the open air accelerated the mutation. It’s hungry, Nathan. And it demands its brother’s blood."

She raised the pneumatic injector, her finger tightening on the valve over Leo’s throat. "Say goodbye, Nathan!"

"LEO, DUCK!" Nathan screamed.

Instead of cowering, the ten-year-old boy, with the last ounce of his strength, bucked violently upward against the leather restraints, driving his forehead hard into Vanessa’s wrist.

The pneumatic injector slipped from her grasp, crashing onto the metal grate floor with a deafening metallic clang.