Chapter 10 - Fifty-Nine Seconds
The countdown continued.
00:38.
Maya grabbed the scanner.
“Can you stop it?” Dante demanded.
“I don’t know what protocol it uses.”
Katherine moved beside her.
“The original command system had a dual override.”
“Where?”
“Neural key plus founder authorization.”
“You’re the founder,” Arabella said.
“My authorization was revoked years ago.”
00:29.
Below them, alarms echoed through Facility Nine.
Subjects collapsed as their implants heated beneath their skin.
Luca fell against the wall.
Dante caught him.
“Stay with me.”
Luca looked up with confused eyes.
“You really are my brother.”
“Yes.”
“I remember your motorcycle.”
Dante’s throat tightened.
“You hated that motorcycle.”
“You crashed it.”
“Twice.”
00:19.
Maya connected the scanner to her laptop.
“The implant is requesting a biometric phrase.”
Katherine stared at the code.
“I wrote that sequence.”
“What phrase?”
She closed her eyes.
Arabella remembered the lullaby.
Her father humming beside her bed.
“Where the stars are painted,” she said.
Katherine looked at her.
“What?”
“Dad used that phrase for Grand Central.”
Katherine leaned over the scanner and spoke.
“Where the stars are painted, the living remember.”
The countdown stopped at seven seconds.
For one breathless moment, no one moved.
Then the screen changed.
SECONDARY AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED.
Maya cursed.
“Whose?”
The scanner displayed a fingerprint symbol.
Arabella pressed her thumb against it.
Access denied.
Katherine tried.
Denied.
Luca reached toward the scanner.
His finger touched the glass.
Access granted.
The toxin protocol disengaged.
Dante lowered his brother into a chair.
“Why Luca?” Arabella asked.
Katherine stared at him.
“Because Richard used him as the replacement key after you escaped.”
Luca’s memories returned in fragments.
He remembered following a Vale transport truck.
He remembered being captured.
He remembered Richard telling doctors to make him obedient.
Most of all, he remembered refusing.
The subjects from Facility Nine were taken to independent hospitals under federal protection. The files had spread too widely to suppress.
Within hours, Richard’s allies began turning on one another.
Senators denied knowledge.
Doctors disappeared.
Private contractors destroyed records.
Maya had anticipated that.
She released mirrored copies to journalists in five countries.
Richard remained under guard in a secure hospital.
Arabella should have felt safe.
Instead, she could not sleep.
At the church, she stood before the stained-glass windows until dawn.
Dante found her there.
“You saved thirty-one people,” he said.
“I helped put them in danger.”
“Richard did that.”
“My family created Lazarus.”
“You are not your family.”
“Aren’t we?”
Dante did not answer immediately.
His father had built a criminal empire. Dante had inherited it and expanded it.
He understood the question too well.
“We are what we continue,” he said at last. “Not what we inherit.”
Arabella looked at him.
“What will you continue?”
He glanced toward the room where Luca slept.
“I don’t know.”
It was the first time Dante Serrano had admitted uncertainty.
Arabella sat on the front pew.
“My mother is alive, but I don’t know her.”
“You have time.”
“Do I?”
The toxin had been stopped, but her implant remained unstable. Doctors warned that removing it could cause paralysis, memory loss, or death.
Leaving it in carried risks too.
Katherine believed Eleanor could perform the surgery.
Eleanor refused.
“Not without the original surgical map,” she said later that morning. “Richard kept it offline.”
“Where?” Dante asked.
Eleanor hesitated.
“On the yacht.”
Arabella frowned. “The yacht exploded.”
“Part of it sank intact. The lower laboratory was designed to survive fire.”
The wreck lay off the coast of Maine in restricted waters.
Federal agents now controlled access.
But some of those agents appeared in the Lazarus files.
Dante arranged a salvage vessel under a false registration.
Arabella insisted on joining the dive.
“You nearly died hanging from a helicopter yesterday,” Dante said.
“And today is a new opportunity.”
“You don’t have diving certification.”
“I sailed before I could drive.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“My body remembers.”
Dante gave her a long look.
“That phrase is becoming inconvenient.”
They traveled north with a small crew.
Katherine joined them, as did Luca, though he remained weak.
On the second night, Arabella stood at the ship’s rail.
The ocean was black.
Dante approached.
“This is where it happened,” she said.
“Twelve miles east.”
“I dreamed of fire every winter. I never knew why.”
“You know now.”
“Knowing doesn’t always help.”
“No.”
She looked at him.
“What happened to Rosa’s daughter?”
Dante’s jaw shifted.
“Her name was Sofia.”
“How did she die?”
“Because of me.”
Arabella waited.
“I was twenty-four,” he continued. “I believed I could end a war by trusting the wrong man. Sofia delivered a message for me. The car exploded.”
“Did you love her?”
“Yes.”
The admission came quietly.
“I thought guilt was the same as love,” Dante said. “For years, I kept them together because separating them felt like betrayal.”
Arabella touched his hand.
He looked down, surprised.
She did not pull away.
“You saved me under the bridge,” he said.
“You were bleeding.”
“Most people would have kept walking.”
“Most people kept walking past me for years.”
Dante closed his fingers around hers.
A light flashed across the water.
Once.
Twice.
Then a third time.
The captain shouted from the bridge.
A vessel without identification was approaching at high speed.
Dante’s men armed themselves.
Arabella saw the black lion painted on its hull.
“Richard’s people,” she said.
“But Richard is in custody.”
Katherine came onto the deck.
Her face tightened when she saw the vessel.
“That isn’t Richard’s team.”
“Then whose?” Dante asked.
Katherine looked toward Arabella.
“The person who gave Richard his orders.”
A woman’s voice came over the radio.
“Return the living key, and we may allow the rest of you to survive.”
Katherine went pale.
Arabella noticed.
“You know her.”
Katherine nodded.
“My sister.”
Arabella stared at her.
“I have another aunt?”
May you like
Katherine’s answer was nearly lost beneath the approaching engines.
“She was supposed to be dead.”
