Chapter 438
Chapter 438:
My heart shattered and reassembled in the exact same breath. My son.
“Hey, sweet boy,” I whispered, kneeling beside him. My eyes immediately darted around the room, landing on his navy school blazer draped over a wooden chair.
While he turned his attention back to attaching a thruster to his ship, I moved. I shifted my body to block the line of sight from the hallway. Three seconds. That was all it took to pluck a single dark hair — root follicle intact — from the collar of his blazer and slip it into the sterile evidence bag hidden in my pocket.
“I have to go, Jaxon,” I said, my voice thick with a vow only I understood. I brushed a hand over his soft cheek. “But I will see you very soon p>
I didn’t go back to my apartment. I drove my rental Porsche straight to an international logistics center in Midtown. Under the bleak Manhattan sky, I walked up to the business counter.
Using a fake name and an untraceable prepaid credit card, I shipped the evidence bag containing Jaxon’s hair and my own cheek swab to a top-tier private genetics lab in Geneva. They specialized in supernatural biology and absolute discretion. I paid double the exorbitant fee for the highest level of encryption and expedited processing.
The clerk handed me the receipt across the counter.
Five days. That was the timeline the lab guaranteed. Grant Blackwell thought he had buried my past and stolen my future, resting comfortably in his den of lies. He had no idea I had just set a five-day timer on his entire empire.
Leo POV
The subterranean Security Hub beneath Grant Blackwell’s Upper East Side townhouse was a fortress of humming servers and glowing monitors. The air was sterile, laced with the faint, metallic scent of ozone — but right now, it was entirely suffocated by the sharp, sour stench of my own panic.
It had been exactly ten minutes since Carmella Golden’s rental Porsche pulled away from the curb.
𝘛𝗵𝗲 𝘣𝖾ѕ𝘁 r𝘦а𝘥𝗂ng е𝗑𝘱еr𝗂en𝖼𝖾 𝗼𝘯
As the Gamma and head of security for a Lycan Senator, my primary duty was the absolute protection of my Alpha’s bloodline. Carmella’s sudden, unannounced visit had set my teeth on edge. I sat in the heavy leather chair, my fingers flying across the keyboard as I pulled up the high-definition footage from the hidden camera embedded in the smoke detector of Jaxon’s bedroom.
I scrubbed the timeline back, watching the silent interaction. I saw Carmella kneel beside the boy. I saw her brush his cheek.
Then I slowed the footage frame by frame.
While Jaxon was distracted by his Lego spaceship, Carmella shifted her body, perfectly blocking the line of sight from the open doorway. With surgical, almost imperceptible speed, her fingers darted to the collar of Jaxon’s navy school blazer draped over the chair. She plucked a single dark hair — the root follicle clearly intact — and slipped it into a sterile plastic evidence bag hidden in her palm.
My blood instantly turned to ice.