Chapter 4 - The Broken Syringe
By two o'clock in the morning, the mansion had settled into a forced, uneasy silence.
Sarah and Lily had been moved into a luxurious suite in the east wing. Lily was sound asleep under a heavy down comforter, her breathing steadier thanks to a temporary nebulizer machine Dr. Thorne had brought up.
Sarah sat by the window, unable to close her eyes. The luxury of the room felt surreal, almost terrifying. Just twelve hours ago, she was worrying about how to pay rent on their tiny basement apartment in Queens. Now, she was housed in a palace owned by a man who controlled the city's underworld.
Downstairs, Lucas walked silently into his private study. The room was lined with floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves, an antique desk, and a large safe concealed behind a replica of a Renaissance painting.
He didn't turn on the main lights. Instead, he used a small tactical flashlight to scan the rug near the sofa where he had been sitting earlier that evening before the attack.
Julian had claimed he was in the downstairs office reviewing shipping manifests when Lucas collapsed. But Lucas knew the timeline didn't add up.
As Lucas knelt near the velvet sofa, the beam of his light caught a tiny glint of silver near the wooden baseboard.
He pulled a pair of leather gloves from his pocket and reached underneath the furniture.
His fingers closed around a tiny, shattered glass ampoule and a specialized micro-needle syringe—the kind used by high-level military labs for frictionless, silent administration of liquid toxins.
The syringe was empty.
Lucas held the tiny piece of glass up to the light. Printed near the collar was a serial code: X-774-B.
Lucas’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
He walked over to his desk, unlocked a hidden drawer, and pulled out an encrypted laptop. He entered a complex password, opening a private file that had remained untouched for three years.
It was the official forensic report from the crash that killed his wife, Isabella, and his son, Daniel.
He scrolled down past the gruesome police photos of the crushed sedan, down to the secondary toxicology report performed on Isabella’s body. The police had dismissed the elevated chemical levels in her blood as a byproduct of seawater inhalation and car engine fluids.
Lucas scanned the chemical breakdown codes listed in the three-year-old report.
Code: X-774-A.
The exact same synthetic family.
A cold, terrifying realization washed over Lucas, leaving him paralyzed.
Isabella hadn't lost control of the car because a rival gang drove her off the road. She had been poisoned before she got behind the wheel. The paralytic had kicked in while she was driving along the cliffside road with four-year-old Daniel in the backseat.
And rival gangs hadn't done it.
Rival gangs didn't have access to military-grade X-series paralytics. Only one person in Lucas's organization had connections to foreign arms dealers and illicit medical laboratories in Eastern Europe.
Julian.
Lucas slumped into his chair, pressing his hands against his face as heavy, silent sobs shook his frame. For three long years, he had lived with the unbearable guilt that his violent lifestyle had brought death to his wife and child. He had killed dozens of men in retaliation, thinking he was serving justice.
And all the while, the monster who had murdered his family had been standing beside him, comforting him, drinking his whiskey, and managing his money.
A soft knock on the study door snapped Lucas back to reality.
He instantly wiped his face, closed the laptop, and placed the shattered ampoule inside a velvet pouch in his pocket.
"Come in," Lucas said, his voice flat and dead.
The door opened, and Julian walked in, carrying two glasses of twenty-year-old Scotch.
"Thought you might need a drink, brother," Julian said smoothly, walking over and placing a glass on the desk. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
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Lucas looked up into the eyes of his best friend—the man he had trusted with his life.
"I think I have, Julian," Lucas said softly. "I think I've been living with ghosts for three years."
