Everyone warned Laura never to touch Marco Bellini’s father’s chair, but when his heart device started beeping, she cut it open and uncovered a terrifying secret… / Chapter 22 / 100

Chapter 22 - Dual Defibrillation

Marco tried to push himself up, his boots slipping on the slick floorboards. I reached down, hooking my hands beneath his armpits, hauling him up until his back hit the heavy front panel of Samuel’s desk. His tactical vest was soaked in cold sweat, his skin clammy, but the dull, terrifying gray in his complexion was slowly receding into a feverish flush.

"You're alive," I breathed into his ear, my fingers digging into the pulse point on the side of his neck. The rhythm was bounding, irregular, but strong enough to perfuse his brain. "Don't try to talk. Your myocardium just survived an ischemic shock."

Marco’s hand came up, grasping my wrist with surprising ferocity. His dark eyes locked onto mine, burning with a mixture of raw fury and unyielding relief. "Julian..." he croaked, his voice like gravel scraping against iron.

"He's stable for now," I said, glancing over at the gurney where Julian lay, chest rising and falling in shallow, rhythmic breaths under the hiss of the portable oxygen canister. "Your father and the Clockmaker had you trapped in an alternating kill-switch loop. My dad... my dad broke the circuit."

Marco slowly turned his head, his gaze traveling up the frayed coat of the man standing over us, finally coming to rest on my father’s face.

"Jonathan Chen," Marco rasped, a dark, dangerous understanding settling over his features. "Eighteen years. You let me believe I helped bury you in the ash of the St. Jude clinic."

"If you had known I was alive, Marco, Samuel would have read it in the cadence of your stride," my father answered coldly, never taking his eyes off the old man in the high-backed leather chair. "He built your hearts to monitor your pulse, your cortisol, your adrenaline. You were never an actor. You could never lie to the chair."

Samuel Bellini let out a dry, rattling chuckle that devolved into a harsh, phlegm-filled cough. The monitors integrated into the leather wings of his chair flickered, their green data streams jittering like nervous spiders.

"Look at them," Samuel wheezed, his fingers twitching across the inlaid bronze switches on his armrest. "The great Dr. Chen and his dutiful little daughter. You think you’ve performed a miracle here tonight? You think you’ve severed the cord?"

Samuel tapped three buttons in rapid succession on the console.

From deep beneath our feet—not just within the study, but resonating through the very bedrock upon which the lakefront mansion had been constructed—a low, visceral hum vibrated through the floorboards. It was the sound of massive hydraulic turbines awakening, the deep, rhythmic groan of industrial machinery buried miles beneath the surface of Lake Michigan.

"The chair doesn't just read their blood, Jonathan," Samuel whispered, a grotesque smile spreading across his sunken cheeks. "It anchors the vaults. The pneumatic locks on the subterranean containment units are wired directly to the terminal's power draw. When you injected that lithium compound into Julian, you tripped the primary resistance breaker. The lower levels are flooding with the lake bypass."

My father's jaw clenched. "You fool. The servers are down there. The primary bio-synthesis lab—"

"Everything is down there!" Samuel spat, his milky eyes widening with manic ecstasy. "Thirty years of blood money, the physical ledgers, the offshore cryptographic servers, and the true prototypes for the generation-three neural matrices! If my heart stops, or if this chair is unplugged, the lake comes in. It drowns the records. It drowns the city’s underground grid. And it drowns all of you along with it."

"He's bluffing," Marco growled, forcing himself onto his feet, using my shoulder as an anchor. He picked up his discarded rifle from the rug, racking the bolt with a sharp, metallic snap. "He loves his empire too much to sink it into the lake."

"He doesn't have an empire anymore, Marco," the Clockmaker interrupted calmly.

The slender man took two steps backward, sliding smoothly toward the open elevator shaft. In his hands, he held a small, circular device of brushed chrome—a secondary remote frequency transmitter.

"Your father died the moment he allowed Dr. Chen to step through that door," the Clockmaker said, tipping his bowler hat with mock elegance. "The Bellini syndicate has already been liquidated. The syndicates in Milan and Chicago have transferred the master tokens to the Swiss nodes. The only thing left in this house is the disposal of the bio-waste... which includes all four of you."

The Clockmaker slammed the emergency descent button on the elevator wall.

"Stop him!" Marco barked, raising his rifle.

He fired two rounds, but the heavy, brass-grilled elevator gates slammed shut in the same millisecond, the high-caliber bullets sparking uselessly against the bulletproof glass of the descending car. The Clockmaker’s pale, smiling face sank into the shadows beneath the floor.

"Laura, grab Julian's transport gurney!" my father commanded, stepping toward the desk. "The hydraulic fail-safes are already engaging. The main stairwells will be sealed by blast doors within three minutes."

"And what about him?" I yelled, pointing at Samuel, who remained seated in the monstrous leather chair, watching us with the cold, unblinking eyes of an ancient lizard.

"Samuel stays where he belongs," my father said, his voice entirely devoid of pity. He reached into his coat and produced a set of heavy, industrial steel clamps wired to a portable car-battery capacitor. "In the chair he sacrificed his sons to build."

My father slammed the clamps onto the exposed wiring harness beneath the armchair’s right armrest, jamming the master console into an infinite loop of simulated cardiac feedback.

Samuel let out a choked scream as an intense static jolt arced across his withered forearms, pinning him against the leather cushions by his own neuro-stimulator. "Jonathan! You will burn for this!"

"I already burned, Samuel," my father whispered. "Eighteen years ago."