He didn’t say it like a threat—not exactly. More like a natural law, an immutable outcome. An event horizon that, if I crossed it, would atomize me into something unrecognizable. I let the silence drag, watched the condensation from my water bottle inch down the label, pooling at the base like tears.
“I need time,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “A day. Maybe two. I’m not saying I’m not doing it, but I need…I have to process all this.”
Victor nodded, masking his impatience with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “We’ll have your credentials ready by tomorrow. You’ll have full access.” He tapped the table, a little rhythm, likehe was counting heartbeats. “If you need anything, ask Heller. If you need to see the protocols, just say so. We’re very open here.”
I almost laughed at that, but the sound caught. “That’s new,” I said.
He stood, smoothed his coat, and glanced at Dante. “Mr. Moretti, a word?”
Dante’s jaw flexed, but he stood. Marco stayed slumped, head down. I watched them walk to the end of the glass hallway—Victor’s hand on Dante’s arm, Dante’s whole body leaning away, like the contact was radioactive. I couldn’t tell if they were negotiating or threatening each other, but I recognized the choreography: two predators circling, neither sure which one was the tiger and which one was the goat.
I took the chance. Slid the tablet off the table, thumbed through the open documents, snapped photos of every page with my burner phone. The protocols weren’t just mine; they were improvements. Ugly, clever hacks that cut the safety margins to the bone. There were emails, too, buried in the file tree—messages between Heller and someone called “D. Smith,” discussing test subjects, timelines, budgets. The most recent email was timestamped two hours ago. They were watching us even before we arrived.
I scrolled through the attached reports. One caught my eye—a case study, marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” with a list of subject numbers and daily logs. I read the first few lines and felt my stomach twist. They’d started human trials already. The test subjects weren’t patients. They were prisoners, shipped in from somewhere up north, names redacted but birth dates intact.
Thirty-four. Thirty-six. Nineteen. One was pregnant.
I closed the file. My hands shook, but I tucked the phone into my bag and stood, breathing steady.
I nodded, grabbed Marco’s arm, and herded him toward the elevator. Victor was nowhere to be seen, but I could feel his shadow behind every camera lens, every badge swipe, every door that snapped shut one second too soon. I wondered if he’d always been this way, or if the job had peeled him down to nothing but leverage and hunger.
The ride down was silent. Marco stared at the floor numbers, his hand unconsciously covering the fresh bruise on his side. He didn’t ask what I’d seen, didn’t try to crack a joke.
“So what now?” Dante said as we walked to the car.
I looked back over my shoulder. “I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” I said. “But we have to stay here and take them down.”
Chapter 17: Dante
We got back to the hotel.
Marco needed rest. And I needed to be with Jade…alone.
We put Marco in his own room—with an adjacent door, in case he needed anything—then closed it softly so we could have a private conversation.
Jade didn’t wait for the door to close before she started talking. “They’re using prisoners,” she said. “Human test subjects, Dante. They started already.” Her voice was flat, the way it got when she’d been running numbers in her head and didn’t like where they landed.
“So what?” I said, more harshly than I meant. “You saw the lab. You saw the people running it. Did you think they were going to stick to the Geneva Convention?”
She glared at me, but it was a tired glare, one that came from too many days and too little sleep. “It’s not just that. They havea pregnant subject. And the protocols—they’re using mine, but they’ve stripped out every safeguard. It’s weaponized now. If they get this right, the first thing they’ll do is sell it to the highest bidder.”
I sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed my face with both hands. It was all so fucking familiar: the pitch, the false promises, the way monsters put on their best suit and called it progress. “I mean, I assume you want to go to the press?”
“We can’t. Victor’s got enough leverage to shut down any newspaper, and the feds are in on it. You think a black site in Toronto just happens? You think Heller’s running this for fun?”
“So what are you saying?”
“That the only way we shut this down is if we do it ourselves,” I told her. “And I don’t want you to do that. I don’t want you to take on that responsibility. You’re pregnant. You need to look after yourself.”
“One of the test subjects is pregnant,” she replied, sitting next to me.
She said it like a dare, like she wanted to see if I’d flinch. But there was something else in her voice, something raw and scared and small, and it hurt to look at her.
I reached for her hand, but she snatched it away, pacing the carpet like an animal in a cage. “We can’t walk away,” she said. “I know what you want, Dante. I know you’d drive us to Saskatoon if you thought it would keep me safe, but—” Her voice cracked. “But we have to do this.”
I stared at my hands, at the scars along my knuckles, at the half-moons of Jade’s nails from the last time I’d tried to hold her and she’d fought me off. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that we could still get out, that I could take her somewhere with real trees and no cameras and Marco could maybe stop coughing up blood. But the lie stuck. She was right. There wasn’t anywhere to run.
“I can’t let this happen,” she said. “You can’t let this happen. If you care about your IP at all, actually, you can’t let this happen.”
