Chapter 14 - The Mirror Dynasty
Marcus drew his Glock, switching the tactical light to strobe mode as he stepped through the fissure into the hidden passage. The air dropped ten degrees instantly. Dust motes swirled in the beam of his weapon, floating over rough-hewn stone walls that transitioned, twenty feet in, into smooth white subway tiles slick with condensation.
This was not an escape tunnel; it was an umbilical cord linking the surface world to an underground empire.
On the walls hung framed photographs, protected by thick Plexiglas. Marcus paused, his flashlight lingering on the portraits. Each photograph showed a young boy at age seven, standing before the marble fireplace of the Montgomery library. They all had the same piercing hazel eyes, the same sharp jawline, the same hairline. But the dates beneath the brass plaques defied biological reality.
*Julian Montgomery — 1984.*
*Julian Montgomery — 1991.*
*Julian Montgomery — 1998.*
*Julian Montgomery — 2005.*
"No," Marcus breathed, his fingers trembling against the grip of his pistol. "It’s not an inheritance. It’s a sequence."
The history they had uncovered—the records of Julian’s childhood abuse, the documents showing he had poisoned his father to claim the estate—was a manufactured narrative. Julian wasn't a patricidal heir who snapped under pressure. He was merely the current iteration. When one Julian reached his biological expiration or became a liability to the board of trustees funding the family trust, he wasn't retired. He was replaced by a younger clone cultivated from Alistair Montgomery’s frozen genetic vault.
The man Marcus had put behind bars at Blackwood wasn't the mastermind. He was Julian-3, a decaying decoy whose immune system was failing, deliberately sacrificed to the legal system to convince the world that the monster had been caged.
And the man in the video feed—the surgeon holding the scalpel over the gurney—was Julian-4. Younger, faster, completely indoctrinated, and currently active.
Marcus heard a faint, rhythmic sound echoing from further down the corridor. *Drip. Drip. Drip.*
He pressed onward, his boots making no sound on the rubber runner lining the floor. The corridor opened into an expansive subterranean rotunda. In the center stood eight cylindrical glass vats, illuminated from below by faint ultraviolet lights. Six of the vats were drained, their glass stained with dried biological residue. The seventh was shattered, shards littering the concrete floor.
May you like
The eighth vat was full.
Floating inside the emerald fluid was a figure suspended by intravenous cables. Marcus stepped closer, his breath catching in his throat. The face behind the curved glass was identical to his own.
