Chapter 51 - THE HEIR TO THE ASHES
Mia reached over and picked up the phone, her brow furrowing in confusion. The number on the screen was a scrambled sixteen-digit string that bypassed the hospital's federal signal scramblers.
She swiped the screen and brought the phone to her ear.
"Hello?" Mia said.
I saw the change happen in an instant. The warmth, the color, the soft sixteen-year-old smile—all of it vanished from Mia's face in the span of a single heartbeat. Her hand began to tremble so violently that the phone rattled against her ear.
I pushed the glass door open, stepping into the room with my hand immediately dropping to my hip. "Mia? Who is it?"
Mia didn't answer me. She slowly lowered the phone, her eyes wide, staring at Genevieve with an expression of paralyzed, unspeakable dread.
"Put it on speaker," I ordered, my voice dropping into the hard, combat-ready tone I thought I had buried an hour ago.
Mia tapped the screen with a shaking finger.
From the phone’s tiny speaker came the sound of a voice—not Vanessa Sinclair’s cold, aristocratic purr, and not Madame Laurent’s polished cadence.
It was a girl's voice. A voice that sounded young, brittle, and terrifyingly familiar.
"Did you really think there were only two of us, Mia?" the voice whispered from the speaker, accompanied by the distinct, rhythmic beep of a fetal heart monitor in the background.
Genevieve gasped, clutching her blanket to her throat.
"Julian was sloppy," the voice continued, a dark, playful giggle bubbling through the static. "And Vanessa was arrogant. They thought St. Jude's was a clinic for twins. But the Sinclair protocol was never about pairs. It was a tri-service genetic trial."
The sound of footsteps on polished concrete echoed over the line, followed by the heavy clank of an iron door being unlocked.
"Vanessa is in handcuffs at the airport," the girl on the phone said, her voice dropping into a menacing whisper. "And the Swiss police think they cleared the building. But they didn't check the sub-basement beneath the boat house, Clara Thorne."
My blood ran cold. The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.
"Who are you?" I demanded, leaning over the phone.
A video file pinged onto the screen.
The screen flickered, displaying a live security feed from an underground bunker lit by harsh halogen strips. In the center of the concrete chamber stood a girl who looked identical to Mia and Genevieve—except her hair was cropped short, her right eye was pale and blind with scar tissue, and she was wearing the exact same ripped, torn princess dress that Mia had worn on the day everything fell apart.
Around her neck hung the master electronic ledger key that Julian Vance had sworn was destroyed in the furnace.
"My name is Victoria," the third sister whispered into the camera, a cold, empty smile spreading across her scarred face as she raised a detonator in her left hand. "And while you two were playing victims in the hospital, I just transferred every dollar of the Sinclair trust into an encrypted ledger."
She stepped forward, bringing her face inches from the camera lens.
"You took my mother," Victoria whispered. "You took my legacy. And now, I’m coming to take your lives. Look out your window, Mia."
Mia, Genevieve, and I turned simultaneously toward the expansive glass wall overlooking the lake.
May you like
Across the water, the Sinclair boat house erupted into a towering, apocalyptic pillar of black smoke and roaring orange flames, the shockwave rattling the hospital glass until it groaned under the pressure.
And from the phone, the line clicked dead.
