Chapter 20 - THE BROTHER WHO STAYED DEAD
Mara placed her palm against the glass.
Elias mirrored the gesture from the other side.
“You’re alive.”
“I’m sorry.”
She wanted to strike him and embrace him at the same time.
Instead, she asked the only question that mattered.
“Why didn’t you come home?”
Elias looked toward the cameras.
“Because Ward installed a transmitter near my heart. If I leave the airport network or if Orpheus loses contact with me, it triggers a fatal response.”
Mara forced herself to remain calm.
“We’ll remove it.”
“It also activates if anyone attempts surgery.”
Ward had turned Elias into a living security key.
Elias explained that Lena had helped him disappear after discovering Orpheus. The twins were his children, born while he lived under a protected identity.
When Ward found them, Elias surrendered in exchange for their safety.
“Lena told me she was running from Ward,” Mara said.
“She was.”
“Then why did she bring the children here?”
Elias’s expression changed.
“She didn’t.”
Mara stared through the glass.
“We saw her.”
“You saw someone wearing her face.”
Cass had used Mara’s appearance.
Another impersonator could have copied Lena.
“Where is the real Lena?”
Elias entered a code.
A recording appeared from eighteen months earlier.
Lena was being taken into Project Cradle.
The timestamp was the night Elias vanished.
“She has been beneath the runway the entire time,” Elias said.
Mara remembered the second transmitter signal.
The stationary one.
The woman traveling with Theo and May had never been their mother.
Then the vault speakers activated.
Lena’s voice said, “Children, come to me.”
Theo and May stepped from behind a row of servers.
Their eyes fixed on the far door.
May you like
It opened.
The false Lena was waiting.
