Chapter 48 - Blood and Steel
The bullet struck the lead flanking operative directly through his helmet visor, dropping him instantly to the floor.
David froze, glancing up toward the darkened balcony twenty feet above the rotunda floor. Through the swirling smoke and flashing emergency lights, a figure emerged from behind the iron railing.
It was a woman.
She wore a long, tattered grey coat over dark clothes. Her face was weathered, lined with deep scars of age and trauma, her grey hair cut jagged and short. In her hands, she held a smoking, stainless-steel .44 Magnum.
David’s breath hitched in his throat. His entire universe seemed to stop spinning.
"Mom...?" David whispered, his voice lost beneath the roar of the sirens.
It was Evelyn.
The woman who had tried to smother Maya in the nursery. The woman who had been locked in a maximum-security psychiatric ward a thousand miles away.
She stood on the balcony above them, her eyes blazing with the same terrifying, unyielding madness that had haunted David's nightmares for months.
"Get away from my son, Julian!" Evelyn's voice shrieked through the chamber, raw and deafening.
Julian looked up, his face draining of all blood. "You... you were contained. I had you buried in that facility under triple sedation!"
"You forgot who designed the facility's security protocols, you arrogant bastard!" Evelyn shouted back. She racked the hammer of the revolver and fired again, blowing out a high-pressure hydraulic pipe directly above the remaining Blackwood operatives.
Pressurized, boiling steam hissed into the corridor, blinding the attackers and forcing them back into the hallway with screams of agony.
"David!" Evelyn screamed, leaning over the rail, locking her wild, tear-filled eyes onto his. "Don't listen to him! The pod isn't curing Maya! He's not stabilizing her—he's uploading her neural core into the central mainframe! He's erasing her mind to turn her into an empty vessel!"
David whipped his head around toward Julian.
Julian’s face tightened into a cold, murderous mask. The facade of the benevolent patriarch vanished in an instant. Without a word, Julian raised his pistol, aiming it directly at Leah’s head.
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"Give me the child, David," Julian snarled, his finger tightening on the trigger. "Or your wife dies where she stands."
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