Free Web NovelChapter 49: Chapter 49 Crazy Experiment
_Rowena’s POV_
Kasper arrived in eighteen minutes.
That was fast enough that he had clearly been closer than the estate when I called, which meant he had not gone home after dropping me off and had instead positioned himself within response distance without telling me. I filed that away, equal parts irritating and something I was grateful in ways I wasn’t going to say out loud.
He came through the fire door with four people I recognized as Ashthorne security and two I didn’t, who had the quiet competence of professionals Kasper had sourced from somewhere and vetted personally.
The eight people I had freed were sitting along the far wall, wrapped in the emergency blankets someone had thought to bring. Three of them were strong enough to be alert and talking. Two were in the dazed state of people whose bodies had been depleted past a certain point and were running on relief rather than energy. The remaining three needed medical attention that went beyond what I could provide.
Kasper looked at the chairs. At the lines. At the equipment.
His jaw set in a way I had seen before.
“Medical team is four minutes out,” he said to me. Then he looked at Corby, still on the floor against the wall. “Him?”
“He’s not talking,” I said.
Kasper looked at Corby for a moment. “Give me ten minutes.”
I stepped back.
I am not going to describe in detail what the next ten minutes contained. What I will say is that Kasper had a particular skill set developed over years of security work that involved understanding exactly how much pressure was required to move a person from silence to speech.
Soon, he started spilling.
Apparently, Dickson Ashford’s project had a name. He called it the Continuance Program. I had to sit in horror as I listened to Corby explain what the program was for.
It was for immortality.
Dickson had been funding experimental research for eleven years into a compound that, when introduced to a werewolf’s system at specific periods of time, was designed to stop the degradation of the aging process entirely.
The compound required human blood as its base. Not wolf blood, human, specifically, drawn from individuals whose systems had no wolf genetics and whose blood carried a particular protein structure that occurred in roughly one in six humans and could not be synthesized.
The people in those chairs were human. All eight of them.
They were ordinary people who had been identified, taken, and used as a resource.
Several had already died.
Corby told me the number. I am not going to write it down because writing it down makes it more real than I was currently wanted to process.
What I needed to process cleanly was the operational structure.
Dickson supplied the science and the hospital. The private facility ran under Ridgeline Medical’s documentation but its actual research division was unlicensed and unregistered, operating beneath the legitimate hospital.
That was where my grandmother came in.
Alice supplied the cover.
The Ashthorne Wine Company’s shipping documentation, its facility access, its company name on paperwork that moved the compound’s components through distribution channels that otherwise would have flagged. She had approached Dickson, not even the other way around, Corby was clear on this. Alice had come to Dickson with an offer that amounted to: I have access to a legitimate company’s infrastructure. Tell me what it’s worth to you.
Dickson had told her.
The arrangement had been running for nine years.
Nine years of my family’s name on documents that moved materials produced from human beings held in a room beneath a building my family owned.
“Your father probably found this,” Kyra said.
Yes, my father had been reading ledgers at midnight. My father had spoken to my grandfather about Alice. My father had seemed resolved about something.
My father had found this and he had died on a clear spring morning on a road his driver knew and a single witness had reported ice.
I stood in that room and held that thought and did not let it become something unmanageable because I needed to be functional for the next several hours and unmanageable was a luxury I did not currently have.
The medical team arrived and I stepped aside to let them work.
Kasper appeared at my elbow. “Dickson,” he said.
I looked at where Dickson had been on the floor.
The space was empty.
I looked at Kasper.
“The far door,” he said. “While we were focused on Corby. The lock was electronic, he had a remote override on his phone.”
“He’s gone,” I sighed.
“He’s gone,” Kasper confirmed. “I have people on every exit from the district. If he’s still in the city...”
“He won’t be in the city,” I said. “He’s been running this for nine years. He has an exit plan.” I looked at the door. “He knew I was coming back tonight. Corby told him this afternoon.”
Kasper’s jaw did the thing again.
I looked at the empty floor where Dickson had been and understood that the most dangerous person in the room had walked out of it while I was busy doing the right thing, which was the specific calculation he had relied on.
That was fine.
He had walked out of this room. He had not walked out of the region, the country, the world, or a trail of documentation that Celeste’s lawyers were already pulling apart. He had eleven years of paper that connected him to an Ashthorne subsidiary, and I now had Corby, and eight people who were alive and coherent and had seen his face.
He could run.
I had time.
“Get everyone out,” I said to Kasper. “The people, the documentation, everything in this room that isn’t bolted down. I want it all secured before morning.” I looked at Corby. “And I want him held somewhere with a lawyer present. I’m not giving Dickson’s defense team anything to work with.”
Kasper nodded and moved.
I went to the woman I had freed first, the one who had been here longest, who had helped me with the others, who had something still intact behind the exhaustion in her eyes.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sera,” she confimed. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm
“Sera.” I crouched to her level. “You’re going to a hospital tonight. A legitimate one, with a doctor who knows what to look for. After that, I would like you to speak to an attorney. Everything you remember, everything you saw, it matters.”
She looked at me steadily. “Who are you?”
“My family’s name is on the building above us,” I said. “I’m the one who’s going to make sure that means something different from tonight forward.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“They told us no one was looking for us,” she said. “That no one knew.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry it took this long.”
She looked at her hands, the marks on the inside of her arms, the evidence of repeated extraction. Then she looked back at me.
“Alice,” she said. “The older woman. She came twice.”
Something cold moved through me.
“You saw her?” I asked.
“Clearly,” Sera said. “She smiled at one of the people in the chairs.” Her voice was completely flat. “Like she was satisfied.”
I stood up.
Kasper was directing the movement of equipment and documentation across the room.
I took out my phone.
Alice was at the Ashthorne estate. Had been, as far as anyone knew, all evening, performing grandmother acts.
I called Celeste immediately.
She answered on the second ring. “What happened?”
“I need you to make sure Alice doesn’t leave the estate tonight,” I said
She paused. “How bad?”
I looked at the chairs. “Bad enough,” I said. “I’ll explain everything when I’m there. Just keep her there, Celeste.”
“Done,” Celeste sighed.
I hung up, thankful for my cousin.
