Beneath the Billionaire Mask - Chapter 42: Chapter 42
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Safe Zone Theta – Training Grounds – 6:14 AM
The desert was quiet at dawn, save for the rhythmic crack of fist against foam padding.
Mara moved like a ghost—faster than the others. Stronger. More precise.
The other Cruz-Line children watched her warily, unsure whether to follow her lead… or keep their distance.
Elena stood beside Liana on the overlook, arms crossed, jaw tight.
“She’s not just remembering training,” Liana murmured. “She’s predicting the next move before it happens. That’s not muscle memory. That’s neural acceleration.”
“She’s adapting,” Elena said. “She’s evolving.”
“She’s activating,” Liana corrected. “Something in her code is still live.”
Elena’s throat tightened.
“Then we shut it down.”
Medical Bay – 8:03 AM
Julia pulled up Mara’s latest neural scan. The display flickered—red markers lining her brain’s parietal and temporal lobes.
“Something’s waking up,” Julia said. “A secondary layer of memory, hidden under the conscious core. I ran a comparison to SIGMA’s codebook.”
“And?” Elena asked.
“This isn’t standard SIGMA programming.” Julia paused. “It’s something older. Buried. Like it was meant to remain dormant—until now.”
On the monitor, Mara twitched in her sleep. Her fingers curled like she was holding a weapon. Her lips moved.
Elena leaned closer.
“She’s whispering in Spanish,” she said. “Old dialect.”
“What’s she saying?” Julia asked.
A beat.
“She’s giving coordinates.”
Elsewhere – SIGMA Ghost Archive – Unknown Server Timestamp
VIREX Protocol: Thread Unspooling
NODE: Mara Cruz
STATUS: Infiltration Complete
AWAITING SIGNAL
A blinking prompt appeared.
PROCEED TO STAGE TWO?
Someone or something clicked yes.
Safe Zone Theta – Communications Lab – 9:27 AM
Adrian burst into the lab, voice tight. “We just picked up a shortwave burst from the perimeter relay tower.”
“SIGMA?” Elena asked.
“No,” he said. “It came from here. From Mara’s room.”
Liana swore under her breath. “She pinged someone.”
“No,” Elena whispered. “Someone pinged her.”
The comm screen glitched—briefly revealing a string of binary across the interface.
Elena translated it aloud:
“She is not yours to save.”
Mara’s Quarters – 9:41 AM
The door creaked as Elena stepped inside. Mara sat on the floor, staring at her hands.
“They’re shaking,” she said.
“I know.”
“I see things… but I don’t remember living them.” She looked up. “There are people I know. Places I’ve never been. It feels like I’m two people.”
Elena crouched in front of her.
“You’re not alone in this.”
Mara blinked. “What if the other me… doesn’t want to share?”
Safe Zone Theta – Mara’s Quarters – 10:17 AM
The room was empty.
Too empty.
No bedsheets. No datapads. No signs of forced entry. Just silence and something carved—deep and deliberate—into the wall.
Adrian stepped in behind Elena, eyes narrowing.
“What the hell…”
Elena ran her fingers over the message etched into the concrete.
The Queen doesn’t hide. She conquers.
Liana’s voice crackled through the comms: “We’ve lost Mara. Infrared scan confirms she’s outside the perimeter wall. She’s not running… she’s hunting.”
Elena stood frozen for a beat.
“She’s following the coordinates she whispered in her sleep.”
Adrian nodded grimly. “And whatever’s waiting there—SIGMA left it behind for her.”
Outskirts – Ruined Observation Outpost – 11:06 AM
They reached the site by vehicle—an old SIGMA listening post buried in the rock. Covered in sand. Forgotten by maps.
But not by memory.
Julia stayed back to coordinate comms.
Elena, Adrian, and Liana entered with weapons drawn.
No sign of life.
Until they found her.
Mara stood in the center of the hollow structure, hands raised, eyes black with data stream overlays—streams of code flickering across her irises.
Around her: holographic memories. Glitches. SIGMA experiments. Broken children. Synthetic wombs. Old files corrupted with time—but not lost.
“She’s activating the core,” Liana said. “This is a retrieval vault. SIGMA stored everything they couldn’t risk deleting.”
Adrian took a step forward.
“Mara,” he called, “you don’t have to do this.”
She turned slowly.
And smiled.
But it wasn’t her.
Not entirely.
“I am not Mara,” she said, voice doubled, distorted. “I am what you left buried beneath her bones.”
Inside the Vault Core – Minutes Later
Elena followed her inside.
Walls lit up with biometric data—blueprints, weapons projects, ghost missions… and a familiar face flickering on every panel: her own.
“Mara, if you can hear me,” Elena said gently, “this isn’t you.”
“No,” the distorted voice replied. “It’s better.”
The data began rewriting itself across the vault—compiling a new protocol.
PROJECT: VIREX
PHASE: RECLAMATION
HOST: STABILIZED
Adrian moved toward the terminal. “We have to pull her out. If that program fully syncs—”
But before he could reach it, Mara lifted her hand—and everything in the vault shut down at once.
Lights off. Systems down. Total blackout.
Then, in the dark—
“You saved me…
But who saves you?”
Safe Zone Theta – Julia’s Lab – 1:03 PM
The team returned, Mara unconscious, locked in a medical stasis pod.
Julia worked furiously to isolate the corrupted VIREX code in her system.
“I don’t think this was just a fallback,” she said. “VIREX was SIGMA’s true heir protocol. They didn’t want soldiers.”
“They wanted a sovereign,” Elena said bitterly. “And they built her in Mara.”
Julia looked up, shaken.
“If we don’t stop this code… you won’t just lose Mara. You’ll lose yourself.”
Safe Zone Theta – Medical Containment Unit – 2:14 PM
Mara lay motionless inside a high-density neurostasis pod, encased in a field of soft blue light. Her breathing was steady, but faint. Every few seconds, her eyes twitched beneath the lids—as if dreaming something coded and electric.
“She’s trapped in a loop,” Julia said, monitoring the screens. “The VIREX protocol is building a neural cage inside her subconscious. The more we try to pull her out, the deeper it embeds itself.”
“She’s not just infected,” Liana muttered. “She’s being rewritten.”
Adrian leaned against the wall, jaw tight. “By who?”
“No,” Elena said quietly. “By what.”
Julia pointed to a section of scrolling data. “This isn’t SIGMA architecture. At least not fully. It’s hybridized.”
Elena frowned. “With what?”
Julia hesitated. “You.”
Surveillance Deck – 3:03 PM
Alone, Elena stared at the looping footage from the vault. Frame by frame. The flicker of recognition in Mara’s eyes. The code that burst across her neural signature.
Every line of it… mirrored Elena’s own profile.
SIGMA hadn’t just cloned children. They had copied Elena’s mind—her instincts, her traumas, her leadership flaws. Then they injected those echoes into the Cruz-Line.
Adrian approached quietly.
“You okay?”
Elena didn’t answer.
“She’s not just a creation,” she said. “She’s my consequence.”
Adrian sat beside her.
“You didn’t build SIGMA.”
“No, but I was the blueprint they studied when they perfected manipulation. Every scar I earned—they replicated. Every instinct I sharpened—they copied. I thought I’d escaped them… but they never let go. Not really.”
A long pause.
Then Elena turned to him, voice barely above a whisper:
“What if Mara’s not meant to survive this?”
Adrian met her eyes. “Then we fight like hell to rewrite that ending.”
Containment Core – Later That Night – 11:41 PM
The stasis pod hissed.
Mara’s body jerked slightly as if something inside her had just shifted.
Elena stood at the console, fingers trembling above the neural bridge interface. Julia and Liana had warned her: any attempt to link minds with Mara could backfire—physically, mentally, even fatally.
But there was no other way.
“I’m going in,” Elena said into the comm.
Julia’s voice crackled: “If the VIREX construct identifies you as a threat—”
“Then I do what I’ve always done,” Elena replied. “I adapt.”
She placed the interface nodes across her temples, exhaled slowly… and activated the link.
INTERNAL NETWORK – Mara’s Neural Core – ???
The moment she opened her eyes, she knew she was inside something engineered.
The world around her was surreal—fractured stone floors, mirrored walls reflecting false versions of herself, and in the distance, a massive throne sculpted from glass and bone.
Mara stood in front of it.
But it wasn’t just Mara.
Her eyes glowed gold.
Her voice echoed with layers.
“You came into my kingdom alone.”
Elena took a cautious step forward. “This isn’t your kingdom. It’s a cage.”
“Then why do I feel so free?”
Elena stared at the throne—where she sat.
Not Mara. Herself. Another Elena. Regal. Cold. Wearing SIGMA’s crest like a crown.
A voice echoed through the digital chamber:
“VIREX Protocol: Sovereign Initialization – Phase III.”
Elena realized the truth.
This wasn’t just a hijack.
This was an ascension.
Safe Zone Theta – Control Room – Same Time
Alarms flared.
Liana cursed. “The link’s destabilizing. Her vitals are spiking—she’s stuck!”
Julia’s hands flew across the console. “VIREX is pulling Elena in deeper—it’s trying to overwrite her memory profile. If it finishes, she won’t remember who she is.”
“She’ll become part of the system,” Adrian said, eyes dark. “And SIGMA gets their Queen back.”
Neural Construct – VIREX Core
“You can’t rule them,” Elena said, stepping closer to the golden-eyed Mara. “You’ll destroy them.”
The throne-Elena smiled. “They were made to be ruled.”
“No. They were made to choose.”
The digital storm around them cracked—lightning flashed across shattered walls, code shattering like glass.
“You think free will is strength?” VIREX-Elena hissed. “It’s disorder. Chaos. Pain.”
Elena walked up to her clone and whispered, “It’s human.”
Then—she ripped the neural crown off the false queen’s head and slammed it into the throne’s core.
The system screamed.
Everything glitched—walls fell apart, code unraveled, and the construct began to burn.
Mara collapsed.
Elena pulled her close.
“Come back with me,” she whispered. “You’re not a program. You’re a girl. My girl.”
And everything went dark.
Safe Zone Theta – Medical Bay – 12:22 AM
Both pods hissed open.
Elena gasped awake. Mara followed a second later.
She burst into tears.
“I heard you,” she whispered. “I didn’t think I would… but I did.”
Elena held her. Tight.
“You’re not a queen,” she whispered. “You’re better. You’re free.”
Elsewhere – SIGMA Hidden Uplink – 2:17 AM
A shadow watched the failed sync attempt.
A whisper through the network:
“The Queen has fallen.”
Another voice responded.
Cold. Calm. Mechanical.
“Then send the King.”
Safe Zone Theta – Barracks Hallway – 1:31 AM
The compound was still, but no one was sleeping.
Elena sat alone on the floor outside the medical bay, knees to her chest, fingers pressed to her temples like she was holding her thoughts together.
The memory of the VIREX construct still pulsed behind her eyes. That version of herself—cold, powerful, almost divine in her ruthlessness—hadn’t just been a hallucination.
It had been a warning.
Liana approached quietly, a thermal blanket draped over her arm. She didn’t speak. Just sat down beside Elena and waited.
After a long silence, Elena murmured, “She knew me too well.”
“She was you,” Liana replied. “Or a version of who you might’ve been if you hadn’t walked away.”
Elena clenched her jaw. “I didn’t walk far enough.”
“No,” Liana said softly. “But you came back.”
Medical Bay – 2:04 AM
Mara lay sleeping, pale and damp with sweat. The bio-nodes along her temple flickered steadily now. No spikes. No anomalies.
Just a girl.
Julia finished logging the new scan.
“She’s stable. For now.”
“For now?” Adrian asked.
Julia hesitated. “VIREX didn’t fail. It receded. Think of it like a tide. It knows when to retreat… and when to rise again.”
Adrian glanced through the glass. “So we build walls.”
Julia looked at him. “Or teach Mara how to swim.”
Operations Deck – Elena’s Command Room – 3:12 AM
Elena stared at the decrypted VIREX core log now restored from the encounter inside Mara’s mind.
It was a list.
But not of targets.
It was a family tree.
Clones. Carriers. Contributors. Every Cruz-Line subject. Every facility.
And near the bottom, in red:
SUBJECT 117-A: “ALPHA MALE”
STATUS: ACTIVE
LOCATION: REDACTED
PRIMARY DNA CONTRIBUTOR: ADRIAN BLACKWOOD
SECONDARY GENOME SEQUENCE: CRUZ-VR_01
Her heart sank.
Julia stepped into the room, holding a separate file—one that hadn’t been in the archive.
She placed it on the desk.
“He’s real,” she said. “SIGMA didn’t just create daughters, Elena.”
Elena flipped the folder open.
A boy. Seventeen. Sharp-featured. Eyes like Adrian. Cold like her. Standing amid a burned-out training compound.
Under the photo:
CALLSIGN: NOVA
CODE DESIGNATION: THE KING PROTOCOL
Elsewhere – Deep SIGMA Facility – Unknown Location – 3:47 AM
A steel door hissed open.
Inside stood NOVA. Barefoot. Shirtless. Perfectly still.
He didn’t blink.
A technician approached.
“Mission parameters uploaded. The Queen failed. You’re next.”
NOVA turned his head slowly.
And smiled.
“Then let’s remind them why kings never kneel.”
The desert was quiet at dawn, save for the rhythmic crack of fist against foam padding.
Mara moved like a ghost—faster than the others. Stronger. More precise.
The other Cruz-Line children watched her warily, unsure whether to follow her lead… or keep their distance.
Elena stood beside Liana on the overlook, arms crossed, jaw tight.
“She’s not just remembering training,” Liana murmured. “She’s predicting the next move before it happens. That’s not muscle memory. That’s neural acceleration.”
“She’s adapting,” Elena said. “She’s evolving.”
“She’s activating,” Liana corrected. “Something in her code is still live.”
Elena’s throat tightened.
“Then we shut it down.”
Medical Bay – 8:03 AM
Julia pulled up Mara’s latest neural scan. The display flickered—red markers lining her brain’s parietal and temporal lobes.
“Something’s waking up,” Julia said. “A secondary layer of memory, hidden under the conscious core. I ran a comparison to SIGMA’s codebook.”
“And?” Elena asked.
“This isn’t standard SIGMA programming.” Julia paused. “It’s something older. Buried. Like it was meant to remain dormant—until now.”
On the monitor, Mara twitched in her sleep. Her fingers curled like she was holding a weapon. Her lips moved.
Elena leaned closer.
“She’s whispering in Spanish,” she said. “Old dialect.”
“What’s she saying?” Julia asked.
A beat.
“She’s giving coordinates.”
Elsewhere – SIGMA Ghost Archive – Unknown Server Timestamp
VIREX Protocol: Thread Unspooling
NODE: Mara Cruz
STATUS: Infiltration Complete
AWAITING SIGNAL
A blinking prompt appeared.
PROCEED TO STAGE TWO?
Someone or something clicked yes.
Safe Zone Theta – Communications Lab – 9:27 AM
Adrian burst into the lab, voice tight. “We just picked up a shortwave burst from the perimeter relay tower.”
“SIGMA?” Elena asked.
“No,” he said. “It came from here. From Mara’s room.”
Liana swore under her breath. “She pinged someone.”
“No,” Elena whispered. “Someone pinged her.”
The comm screen glitched—briefly revealing a string of binary across the interface.
Elena translated it aloud:
“She is not yours to save.”
Mara’s Quarters – 9:41 AM
The door creaked as Elena stepped inside. Mara sat on the floor, staring at her hands.
“They’re shaking,” she said.
“I know.”
“I see things… but I don’t remember living them.” She looked up. “There are people I know. Places I’ve never been. It feels like I’m two people.”
Elena crouched in front of her.
“You’re not alone in this.”
Mara blinked. “What if the other me… doesn’t want to share?”
Safe Zone Theta – Mara’s Quarters – 10:17 AM
The room was empty.
Too empty.
No bedsheets. No datapads. No signs of forced entry. Just silence and something carved—deep and deliberate—into the wall.
Adrian stepped in behind Elena, eyes narrowing.
“What the hell…”
Elena ran her fingers over the message etched into the concrete.
The Queen doesn’t hide. She conquers.
Liana’s voice crackled through the comms: “We’ve lost Mara. Infrared scan confirms she’s outside the perimeter wall. She’s not running… she’s hunting.”
Elena stood frozen for a beat.
“She’s following the coordinates she whispered in her sleep.”
Adrian nodded grimly. “And whatever’s waiting there—SIGMA left it behind for her.”
Outskirts – Ruined Observation Outpost – 11:06 AM
They reached the site by vehicle—an old SIGMA listening post buried in the rock. Covered in sand. Forgotten by maps.
But not by memory.
Julia stayed back to coordinate comms.
Elena, Adrian, and Liana entered with weapons drawn.
No sign of life.
Until they found her.
Mara stood in the center of the hollow structure, hands raised, eyes black with data stream overlays—streams of code flickering across her irises.
Around her: holographic memories. Glitches. SIGMA experiments. Broken children. Synthetic wombs. Old files corrupted with time—but not lost.
“She’s activating the core,” Liana said. “This is a retrieval vault. SIGMA stored everything they couldn’t risk deleting.”
Adrian took a step forward.
“Mara,” he called, “you don’t have to do this.”
She turned slowly.
And smiled.
But it wasn’t her.
Not entirely.
“I am not Mara,” she said, voice doubled, distorted. “I am what you left buried beneath her bones.”
Inside the Vault Core – Minutes Later
Elena followed her inside.
Walls lit up with biometric data—blueprints, weapons projects, ghost missions… and a familiar face flickering on every panel: her own.
“Mara, if you can hear me,” Elena said gently, “this isn’t you.”
“No,” the distorted voice replied. “It’s better.”
The data began rewriting itself across the vault—compiling a new protocol.
PROJECT: VIREX
PHASE: RECLAMATION
HOST: STABILIZED
Adrian moved toward the terminal. “We have to pull her out. If that program fully syncs—”
But before he could reach it, Mara lifted her hand—and everything in the vault shut down at once.
Lights off. Systems down. Total blackout.
Then, in the dark—
“You saved me…
But who saves you?”
Safe Zone Theta – Julia’s Lab – 1:03 PM
The team returned, Mara unconscious, locked in a medical stasis pod.
Julia worked furiously to isolate the corrupted VIREX code in her system.
“I don’t think this was just a fallback,” she said. “VIREX was SIGMA’s true heir protocol. They didn’t want soldiers.”
“They wanted a sovereign,” Elena said bitterly. “And they built her in Mara.”
Julia looked up, shaken.
“If we don’t stop this code… you won’t just lose Mara. You’ll lose yourself.”
Safe Zone Theta – Medical Containment Unit – 2:14 PM
Mara lay motionless inside a high-density neurostasis pod, encased in a field of soft blue light. Her breathing was steady, but faint. Every few seconds, her eyes twitched beneath the lids—as if dreaming something coded and electric.
“She’s trapped in a loop,” Julia said, monitoring the screens. “The VIREX protocol is building a neural cage inside her subconscious. The more we try to pull her out, the deeper it embeds itself.”
“She’s not just infected,” Liana muttered. “She’s being rewritten.”
Adrian leaned against the wall, jaw tight. “By who?”
“No,” Elena said quietly. “By what.”
Julia pointed to a section of scrolling data. “This isn’t SIGMA architecture. At least not fully. It’s hybridized.”
Elena frowned. “With what?”
Julia hesitated. “You.”
Surveillance Deck – 3:03 PM
Alone, Elena stared at the looping footage from the vault. Frame by frame. The flicker of recognition in Mara’s eyes. The code that burst across her neural signature.
Every line of it… mirrored Elena’s own profile.
SIGMA hadn’t just cloned children. They had copied Elena’s mind—her instincts, her traumas, her leadership flaws. Then they injected those echoes into the Cruz-Line.
Adrian approached quietly.
“You okay?”
Elena didn’t answer.
“She’s not just a creation,” she said. “She’s my consequence.”
Adrian sat beside her.
“You didn’t build SIGMA.”
“No, but I was the blueprint they studied when they perfected manipulation. Every scar I earned—they replicated. Every instinct I sharpened—they copied. I thought I’d escaped them… but they never let go. Not really.”
A long pause.
Then Elena turned to him, voice barely above a whisper:
“What if Mara’s not meant to survive this?”
Adrian met her eyes. “Then we fight like hell to rewrite that ending.”
Containment Core – Later That Night – 11:41 PM
The stasis pod hissed.
Mara’s body jerked slightly as if something inside her had just shifted.
Elena stood at the console, fingers trembling above the neural bridge interface. Julia and Liana had warned her: any attempt to link minds with Mara could backfire—physically, mentally, even fatally.
But there was no other way.
“I’m going in,” Elena said into the comm.
Julia’s voice crackled: “If the VIREX construct identifies you as a threat—”
“Then I do what I’ve always done,” Elena replied. “I adapt.”
She placed the interface nodes across her temples, exhaled slowly… and activated the link.
INTERNAL NETWORK – Mara’s Neural Core – ???
The moment she opened her eyes, she knew she was inside something engineered.
The world around her was surreal—fractured stone floors, mirrored walls reflecting false versions of herself, and in the distance, a massive throne sculpted from glass and bone.
Mara stood in front of it.
But it wasn’t just Mara.
Her eyes glowed gold.
Her voice echoed with layers.
“You came into my kingdom alone.”
Elena took a cautious step forward. “This isn’t your kingdom. It’s a cage.”
“Then why do I feel so free?”
Elena stared at the throne—where she sat.
Not Mara. Herself. Another Elena. Regal. Cold. Wearing SIGMA’s crest like a crown.
A voice echoed through the digital chamber:
“VIREX Protocol: Sovereign Initialization – Phase III.”
Elena realized the truth.
This wasn’t just a hijack.
This was an ascension.
Safe Zone Theta – Control Room – Same Time
Alarms flared.
Liana cursed. “The link’s destabilizing. Her vitals are spiking—she’s stuck!”
Julia’s hands flew across the console. “VIREX is pulling Elena in deeper—it’s trying to overwrite her memory profile. If it finishes, she won’t remember who she is.”
“She’ll become part of the system,” Adrian said, eyes dark. “And SIGMA gets their Queen back.”
Neural Construct – VIREX Core
“You can’t rule them,” Elena said, stepping closer to the golden-eyed Mara. “You’ll destroy them.”
The throne-Elena smiled. “They were made to be ruled.”
“No. They were made to choose.”
The digital storm around them cracked—lightning flashed across shattered walls, code shattering like glass.
“You think free will is strength?” VIREX-Elena hissed. “It’s disorder. Chaos. Pain.”
Elena walked up to her clone and whispered, “It’s human.”
Then—she ripped the neural crown off the false queen’s head and slammed it into the throne’s core.
The system screamed.
Everything glitched—walls fell apart, code unraveled, and the construct began to burn.
Mara collapsed.
Elena pulled her close.
“Come back with me,” she whispered. “You’re not a program. You’re a girl. My girl.”
And everything went dark.
Safe Zone Theta – Medical Bay – 12:22 AM
Both pods hissed open.
Elena gasped awake. Mara followed a second later.
She burst into tears.
“I heard you,” she whispered. “I didn’t think I would… but I did.”
Elena held her. Tight.
“You’re not a queen,” she whispered. “You’re better. You’re free.”
Elsewhere – SIGMA Hidden Uplink – 2:17 AM
A shadow watched the failed sync attempt.
A whisper through the network:
“The Queen has fallen.”
Another voice responded.
Cold. Calm. Mechanical.
“Then send the King.”
Safe Zone Theta – Barracks Hallway – 1:31 AM
The compound was still, but no one was sleeping.
Elena sat alone on the floor outside the medical bay, knees to her chest, fingers pressed to her temples like she was holding her thoughts together.
The memory of the VIREX construct still pulsed behind her eyes. That version of herself—cold, powerful, almost divine in her ruthlessness—hadn’t just been a hallucination.
It had been a warning.
Liana approached quietly, a thermal blanket draped over her arm. She didn’t speak. Just sat down beside Elena and waited.
After a long silence, Elena murmured, “She knew me too well.”
“She was you,” Liana replied. “Or a version of who you might’ve been if you hadn’t walked away.”
Elena clenched her jaw. “I didn’t walk far enough.”
“No,” Liana said softly. “But you came back.”
Medical Bay – 2:04 AM
Mara lay sleeping, pale and damp with sweat. The bio-nodes along her temple flickered steadily now. No spikes. No anomalies.
Just a girl.
Julia finished logging the new scan.
“She’s stable. For now.”
“For now?” Adrian asked.
Julia hesitated. “VIREX didn’t fail. It receded. Think of it like a tide. It knows when to retreat… and when to rise again.”
Adrian glanced through the glass. “So we build walls.”
Julia looked at him. “Or teach Mara how to swim.”
Operations Deck – Elena’s Command Room – 3:12 AM
Elena stared at the decrypted VIREX core log now restored from the encounter inside Mara’s mind.
It was a list.
But not of targets.
It was a family tree.
Clones. Carriers. Contributors. Every Cruz-Line subject. Every facility.
And near the bottom, in red:
SUBJECT 117-A: “ALPHA MALE”
STATUS: ACTIVE
LOCATION: REDACTED
PRIMARY DNA CONTRIBUTOR: ADRIAN BLACKWOOD
SECONDARY GENOME SEQUENCE: CRUZ-VR_01
Her heart sank.
Julia stepped into the room, holding a separate file—one that hadn’t been in the archive.
She placed it on the desk.
“He’s real,” she said. “SIGMA didn’t just create daughters, Elena.”
Elena flipped the folder open.
A boy. Seventeen. Sharp-featured. Eyes like Adrian. Cold like her. Standing amid a burned-out training compound.
Under the photo:
CALLSIGN: NOVA
CODE DESIGNATION: THE KING PROTOCOL
Elsewhere – Deep SIGMA Facility – Unknown Location – 3:47 AM
A steel door hissed open.
Inside stood NOVA. Barefoot. Shirtless. Perfectly still.
He didn’t blink.
A technician approached.
“Mission parameters uploaded. The Queen failed. You’re next.”
NOVA turned his head slowly.
And smiled.
“Then let’s remind them why kings never kneel.”
End of Beneath the Billionaire Mask Chapter 42. Continue reading Chapter 43 or return to Beneath the Billionaire Mask book page.