Chapter 12
Harrison Hastings
The twelfth step into my father’s office always required lifting my left heel slightly higher to clear the warped floorboard he’d refused to fix for decades.
A test, like everything in this mausoleum of a mansion.
I counted the amber light patches thrown by leaded windows—seven across the Persian rug, each precisely avoiding the path to his desk.
His Montblanc scratched across bond paper like a scalpel, cutting flesh as I waited the required seven breaths before he acknowledged me.
The pen didn’t pause. I noted the new vein map on his temple, tributaries of mortality undermining his marble complexion.
The silence stretched into its eighteenth second when he finally looked up. His eyes mirrored mine, polished gunmetal assessing the kill radius picking up the vial. “Reassessment or failure?”
The air conditioner hummed. I adjusted my cuffs to display 1.5 cm of shirt sleeve. “The shifter gene can complicate tracking. Thermal imaging becomes unreliable when their core temp can drop twenty degrees.”
Her laugh suddenly echoed in my skull, that throaty vibration she’d made when I’d presented the Cartier necklace on her twenty-fourth birthday. I’d recorded the decibel level. 67.3 dB, well within human parameters.
Father’s signet ring clacked against the humidor. “The team reports promising results with the new transfusions.”
I saw the lab then, white coats moving through steam rising from jungle floor grates, the way Subject 14’s claws had torn stainless steel restraints. “We’ve accelerated Phase Three. The longevity serum shows an eighty-three percent viability rate in primate trials.”
His eyebrow twitched - the equivalent of a standing ovation. “And the other seventeen percent?”
“Neurological degeneration. Fascinating, really. The cerebral cortex liquefies within…”
Charles set down the vial with surgical precision. “The Bettencourt girl. It was quite fortunate for us you discovered this DNA phenomenon after Jules made her a part of his infusion of money into the company.”
“It was a very fortuitous stroke of luck,” I said, sliding my Montblanc folio across the table.
Lab reports stamped with the Hastings Industries logo fanned out between us.
“I knew there was something special within her DNA after several months of her recovering quickly to minor injuries that seemed to,” I cleared my throat so my father understood my meaning, “befall her with frequency.”
His greasy smile told me he understood my meaning fully.
Charles grunted approval. “Clever girl never suspected?”
“Her accelerated healing is something she never questioned. It’s apparently always been a part of her physiological makeup, and so her assumption is that it’s normal for her.
Her parents have a private physician who must have knowledge of her special circumstances.
” A lifted eyebrow and nod from my father told me to continue.
“And that’s what prompted my closer look at her family tree, finding the wolf shifters we now have in our possession in our underground lab in Costa Rica. The deal Jules Bettencourt made for his daughter will be the thing that will win me the Nobel Prize.”
My father seemed to ponder my actions where Juliet was concerned. “I don’t understand why you didn’t just use the girl as your specimen as soon as you realized she had this healing gene. Could have saved you the trouble you’re having currently.”
He was such a damn fool. He did not understand what we were accomplishing here.
“There are a few reasons we are proceeding as we have. Finding the source of Juliet’s DNA was paramount.
We needed a baseline. Then, almost as important, our labs were not built when I discovered Juliet’s abilities.
There was nowhere for her to be placed where she could thrive in good physical health until we were ready to start working on the serum.
She needed to be in an environment that was more conducive to a healthy lifestyle.
Her being in good physical condition was paramount in getting the best results for our testing.
Keeping her locked up in a cell for two years would not be conducive to that outcome.
Married, living in a penthouse in Manhattan with a highly successful man whom her parents approved of seemed like a much better alternative. ”
The confession tasted of Scotch and betrayal.
I remembered forcefully taking Juliet in our penthouse bathroom; her frightened eyes staring at me as my fingers wrapped around her delicate neck, her breath coming out in small gasps.
I’d yanked the skirt of her dress up and ripped off the lace panties she wore.
I’d managed to undo my belt and get my pants and boxers off with one hand and spread her legs with my knees.
That same free hand reached between us and found her bare pussy dripping wet, despite her fear and loathing.
“Look at you, little slut. You pretend you don’t want me, but your body knows its master.
” Deep down, I knew it was only physiology.
But I pretended it was more as I slammed my impossibly hard dick into her tight wet heat until she screamed out her pleasure, my hand squeezing her throat hard enough to bruise.
I pulled out of her and spilled my cum all over her stomach and dress, rubbing it in with my softening cock.
When I released her neck, I noticed the bruises that had started dark black and blue had already started to fade.
It made her the perfect canvas for my sadistic torture.
I vaguely remembered how she’d stared past me immediately after, looking at the heated towel rack, whispering numbers in French, her childhood trick for dissociating from trauma.
The truth burned tart behind my teeth: how her body betrayed her during those forced couplings under crystal chandeliers—how I told myself this was dominance, not some deplorable assault even greed couldn’t purge from my veins.
Shaking off the memory and calming my hardening dick, I continued. “Phase three trials can’t proceed without viable mitochondrial donors.” I clicked open my pen; the sound sharp. “I have her within my grasp.”
Charles pressed; cold calculation steadied me again, numbers slotting into place like bank vault tumblers: extraction costs and contingency plan.
His shadow bisected Juliet’s file photo when he stood smiling approval sharp as a scalpel.
But when he mentioned mother crying over our failed wedding, it took everything not to snap
“Your mother cried when she heard there would be no wedding, you know. Actual tears.”
(Only thing Catherine Hastings mourned was losing access to belittling Juliet on a weekly basis). “She cried harder when you sold her Matisse.” He laughed his first genuine laugh. I wondered if she’d cry when the old fuck has a stroke. Because one was coming.
My driver materialized curbside with an umbrella raised against nonexistent rain.
The ride to the private airfield was quiet.
Two and a half hours later, we landed on the private airstrip in Costa Rica where the lab was located.
Changing into a lab coat, I entered an observation chamber where our principal scientist was about to try a new protocol on her latest subject.
I watched. My mind imagined it was Juliet on the receiving end of the torture.
I leaned against the cold observation glass, my breath fogging a small circle as Lab 7’s sterile white lights glared below. My team moved like specters around Subject 23—strapped to a reinforced table this time, after what happened with 19.
“Administer Protocol Kappa,” I said into the intercom, my voice flat.
Dr. Chen’s gloved hands trembled as she pressed the injector to 23’s neck. The subject, a wiry ex-Marine named Coleson—jolted against restraints as neon-blue serum flooded his veins. Good. Pain meant his cells weren’t rejecting it outright.
Monitors screamed to life.
“Cardiac output doubling.”
“Adrenaline off the charts.”
“Muscle mass increasing—”
Coleson roared, tendons writhing like cables beneath sudden slabs of muscle.
The steel cuffs snapped like twigs. My pulse quickened as he staggered upright, heaving the 500-kilogram bench press rack overhead like it was Styrofoam.
Laughter bubbled in my throat—after nine months of corpses and combustions—
Then, his head snapped toward the observation deck.
Blood streaked from his nostrils first, black and viscous. His eyes met mine—pupils blown wide, sclera webbed with ruptured capillaries—as he hurled the weight straight at us. Safety glass spider-webbed under impact; scientists dove under consoles as shards rained down on me like diamond hail.
“Get out,” I barked into my comm, as Chen was uselessly pounding the lockdown button she’d already overridden.
The subject lunged for her, eyes black-dilated and spittle flying.
She backpedaled, tripping over a toppled crash cart as he loomed.
Seven feet of engineered muscle twitched under synthetic adrenaline. His hand closed around her throat.
Then he froze.
A wet, guttural gasp echoed through the lab speakers. The subject’s grip slackened; Chen scrambled free as he crumpled like a puppet cut from its strings. The cardiac monitor flatlined into a single merciless tone.
Silence pooled in the observation deck. I realized I’d stopped breathing.
“V-fib induced,” came a clipped voice from behind me, Ellis, sounding almost bored. “As requested.”
Requested. My jaw clenched. They’d waited until his bio-data crossed the fail-safe threshold. Let Chen dangle in those final seconds because regulations demanded certainty.
Below, she knelt beside the corpse, fingers pressed to its still-warm neck as if she could will back a pulse she’d fought so hard to stop minutes earlier. Her hands shook.
So did mine.
The alarms kept blaring long after the system crashed.
I stared at the screens, now flickering with error codes, my hands numb on the keyboard.
We’d been right there. A three-second delay in the stabilizers—three goddamn seconds—and the entire sequence unraveled like cheap thread.
Jenna slammed her fist against the console behind me, cursing in that sharp, clipped way she does when she’s trying not to yell. For once, I didn’t blame her.
I replayed it in my head: Vargas shouting coordinates over comms, Johnson’s hands shaking as he rerouted power cells, the readouts glowing green-green-green until everything flared red. We’d followed protocol to the letter. Done everything by the book this time. And still—still, it wasn’t enough.
“We underestimated the variables,” I muttered later in debriefing, pacing the dimmed lab as the others glared at holograms of failed equations like they owed us answers.
“The feedback loop—it wasn’t just about timing sensitivity.
We need redundancies inside redundancies.
” I paused while I swallowed bile, thinking of how violently close we’d come before it burned out: 89% convergence rate glimmering for half a heartbeat before it disintegrated our sample core into stardust and ash.
Kiran leaned back in his chair, arms crossed tight over his chest like he was holding himself together. “So what? Another layer of safeguards? Double-check every output manually?”
“If that’s what it takes,” I said flatly. “Or we scrap phase three entirely and rebuild from waveform algebra instead of particle models.”
They groaned in unison—another month down, another untested rabbit hole—but nobody fought me on it this time. Not after tonight’s spectacular clusterfuck of wasted data and near-meltdown protocols humming under our feet like a threat even now.
Later, alone in my quarters with synthetic coffee and metrics spiraling behind my eyelids every time I blinked, I forced myself to think past frustration’s iron chokehold.
So close. Close enough that when I closed my eyes, I still saw that flicker of almost-success—a jagged crack in some unreachable door we hadn’t even known existed two weeks ago.
But almost doesn’t stabilize reactors or move investors, Lila had snapped earlier today before storming out. Today, it almost got people killed.
She wasn’t wrong. We’ll fix this; I swore silently.
Or next time we won’t walk away with just scorched pride.
Until now, we’d been using 100 percent shifter DNA to synthesize the serum.
I knew Juliet was going to be the key. She’s a hybrid, both human and shifter.
My mind raced. Until I could get my hands on Juliet, I needed someone like her.
I knew what I had to do. I picked up my phone.
“Dane. I’ve got a job I can trust only you to do.”