Chapter 20 #2
“Maybe you shouldn’t have pretended to be dead and let my deranged brother raise me,” Rose snapped back, clearly not intimidated by her mother.
“Did you know what he was doing to me? Did you know that he tortured me for my entire childhood? I was four when you supposedly died, and eighteen when I escaped him and started building my own life. That’s fourteen years of hell I lived through. ”
“Your brother served his purpose,” River said.
“Supposedly to keep the focus off you,” Rose said, taking another step closer. “You think you can create a drug that will give you immortality? Is that really something you think is possible?”
“Anything is possible,” River replied. “But now you're ruining everything. I needed the girl. The genius one. Ridge kept ruining her drugs, but I kept every single one of them. I worked on them myself, improved them, and made sure I received copies of all her notes sent to me. You worked with them to free her, and that ruined everything.”
“She worked to free herself, mother,” Rose corrected. “That’s the problem with you, isn’t it? Always underestimating everyone else, always overestimating yourself. You did know, didn't you? That Ridge was torturing me.”
“He was training you, preparing you. But you turned out to be a disappointment, not smart enough to work with us.” River tutted in annoyance, but Kate had already been told that Rose was perfectly smart enough to understand chemistry and biology, she just understood that pretending not to get it was her only way out.
If anything, Rose was smarter than the rest of her family, and the only one of them with a conscience.
“So you thought I was too stupid to be of any use to you, but you still let him abuse me. What kind of psychopath are you?” Rose demanded, and despite the anger in the other woman’s voice, Kate could hear the pain as well.
Rose might hate her mother, but River was still her mother, and there was no doubt a part of her craved her mother’s love.
“The kind that changes the world,” River answered simply. “At least I would have if people hadn't kept interfering with my work.”
“Why did you fake your own death?” Rose asked, taking another step closer.
While River might be too preoccupied with this little catch-up session with her daughter to notice that Rose was continuously closing the distance between them, Kate was not.
Rose had a plan, she was sure of it, and the guys were watching, ready and waiting to do whatever they had to do to make sure that what Rose was planning worked, and they all walked out alive.
“Is Dad really still alive, too? Was I supposed to die along with my grandparents, or did someone really push me under the table like I remember?” Rose asked.
“You were supposed to die, too,” River replied, not bothering to sugarcoat the words. “But your father saved you.”
“Dad? He’s the one who pushed me under the table?”
“He lost faith in the program, lost faith in me,” River muttered.
“What does that mean, mother?” Rose growled.
“Stop beating around the bush and tell me. You said you're going to blow us all up if we don’t agree to do what you want, but you have to know that’s not going to happen.
We’d all rather be dead than be your prisoners.
So if you want to live, then you’d better tell me everything, I want it all. ”
“You want it all?” River roared, and Kate flinched as the loud sound hurt her ear, which was millimeters from the old woman’s mouth.
“Fine. Your father and I were both chemistry and biology students when we met.
Both of us had survived childhood illnesses that should have killed us.
Both of us had lost siblings to childhood illnesses that they hadn't been able to survive. We wanted to understand.”
“Understand?” Rose asked.
“Why we lived and they didn't. What makes people different. If people who already had a specific advantage built into their DNA could be improved upon. Twenty/ten vision,” River said, nodding to Lion. “Perfect hearing. A sense of smell better than the average person. High-density myofibrils for greater force production, combined with neuromuscular adaptation, which means better brain-to-muscle communication, along with healthy and abundant mitochondria for better muscle contractions to increase a person’s strength. Muscle power and force production, fast-twitch muscle fibers, springy tendons, neuromuscular coordination, aerobic capacity, and running form combined to enhance speed,” she explained, nodding to each of the other men as she went.
“All naturally occurring, the way a body developed, in the DNA, but look what I did with it. How I manipulated the body’s natural resources and exponentially improved them. ”
“What about me?” Voodoo asked.