He Opened the Nursery Door and Found His Mother Attacking His Wife—Then Her Shocking Accusation Revealed a Secret That Could Destroy Their Entire Family. / Chapter 44 / 80

Chapter 44 - The Mother’s Ghost

"Neither of them dies," David growled, his knuckles tightening on the tire iron. "You're going to use whatever medicine you have to treat Maya without touching this baby, or I swear to God I'll tear this entire room apart."

Julian sighed, an expression of profound weariness settling over his aged features. "Always the stubborn defiance. You inherited that directly from Evelyn. She stood in this very chamber thirty years ago and said the exact same words."

Julian reached into his waistcoat, pulled out a small, tarnished brass key, and slotted it into a manual override port on the console. "Let me show you how her defiance ended."

The central holographic display flickered. The genetic tree vanished, replaced by grainy, high-definition surveillance footage dated twenty-eight years prior.

The setting was unmistakable: the same rotunda, though the walls then had been lined with monitors of an older design. A young Evelyn stood in front of an armed security team, her hair wild, clutching an infant wrapped in a blue blanket—David.

In the recording, Evelyn’s voice echoed across the room through the overhead speakers, shrill and frantic: *"You don't understand what you've done, Julian! The synthetic telomeres—they aren't stable! You haven't cured mortality, you've created a delayed terminal sequence! If he reaches thirty, the cellular collapse begins! You didn't create gods, you created walking time bombs!"*

David froze, his gaze locked on the video. In the footage, a younger Julian stepped forward, a pistol in his hand. *"Then give him back, Evelyn. We can recalibrate. We can start over."*

*"Never,"* Evelyn screamed in the recording. *"I will wipe the registry. I will scatter the code so deep you'll never find the sequence!"*

The video showed Evelyn detonating a small incendiary device against the main data core, plunging the room into smoke and flashing red alarms. In the chaos, she darted into the pneumatic service shafts, vanishing with the baby.

The screen went black.

Julian turned back to David, his expression devoid of triumph, filled only with a terrifying, calculating urgency. "She was right, David. The Alpha series possessed a fatal flaw. The telomeres begin a rapid, catastrophic degradation at age thirty. How old are you, David?"

A cold sweat broke out across David’s forehead. His breath caught in his throat.

*Thirty-one.* He had celebrated his thirty-first birthday three weeks before the attack in the nursery.

"You've been experiencing tremors, haven't you?" Julian asked, his voice dropping to a sinister, knowing whisper. "Unexplained joint pain. The sudden, momentary loss of peripheral vision. The sudden spikes in your resting heart rate. You thought it was stress from the baby. You thought it was exhaustion from protecting your family."

David stared at his own trembling left hand. For the past six months, his fingers had occasionally locked up without warning. He had dismissed it as fatigue, as nerve pinches from lifting boxes at work.

"You are dying, Subject Alpha," Julian whispered. "Your body is consuming itself from the inside out. And the only genetic blueprint capable of repairing both your cellular degradation and Maya’s acute failure lies within the pristine, uncorrupted marrow of Asset 409."