Chapter 12 - A Mother's Currency
"Are you insane?!" Nate roared. "I will die before I let you touch her!"
"That can be arranged with very little bureaucratic friction, Mr. Reed," Vance said softly.
Two men stepped out from the second Escalade. Both were dressed in tactical gear, their hands resting deliberately on the holstered Tasers and sidearms at their belts.
Elena looked at the men, then at Nate’s bloody face, and finally through the tinted rear window of the truck, where Maya’s small silhouette was visible against the headrest.
A sudden, terrifying calm settled over Elena’s features. The corporate ambition, the panic, the fear—it all vanished, replaced by an ice-cold calculation that only a high-level executive possessed.
"Forty-eight hours, Arthur?" Elena asked, stepping forward, raising her chin.
"Elena, what the hell are you doing?!" Nate lunged to grab her, but his broken shoulder gave out, dropping him to one knee in the gravel with a gasp of agony.
"Forty-eight hours," Vance confirmed, nodding with approval. "At our Westchester testing facility. Top-tier medical staff. She won't feel a thing."
"And the contract?" Elena walked toward Vance, her voice steady, professional, cutting through the damp night air. "My equity stake. The full seventeen percent IP royalty on the neural-cortex patent?"
Vance smiled, clearly relieved to be dealing with a rational sociopath rather than an emotional father. "Drawn up and ready for your digital signature. You made the right call, Elena. You're a visionary."
Nate watched in sheer, paralyzed horror as Elena stood within arm's reach of Vance. "Elena... no... please, God, no..."
"Let me see the authorization agreement on your tablet, Arthur," Elena said smoothly. "I want to verify the indemnity clause."
Vance turned the iPad toward her, tapping the screen to unlock the master terminal. "Right here. Section 4, Paragraph—"
Elena didn't look at the screen.
May you like
Her hand dropped to her trench coat pocket and re-emerged with the heavy, solid-brass handle of the industrial wire-cutters she had grabbed from Nate’s toolbox in the front hallway.
With the vicious, desperate speed of an enraged mother, she drove the hardened steel tips of the cutters straight into Arthur Vance’s throat.
