Chapter 305 Living Test Subject
She handed it to him. Chatmory took the page, his eyes dropping to the text. In an instant, his stomach plummeted straight through the floor.
The wave of nausea hit him with the force of a physical blow. He gripped the edge of the desk, swaying slightly, genuinely terrified he might actually vomit directly into his wastebasket. Right there, printed at the bottom right corner of the sheet in stark, damning black ink, were the numbers that just signed his death warrant: Page 3 of 5.
He hadn't given them all the paperwork.
In his blind, pathetic, shaking panic to appease those monsters and get them out of his office, he had accidentally dropped a crucial section of Ginny Ellery Blackwood's file. The High Council men were meticulous, paranoid killers. They were going to read the file, realize a page was missing from the middle of the sequence, and assume he had deliberately held out on them. They were going to think he was protecting the Beta’s mate. They were going to come back to this hospital and tear his throat out for real this time.
He stared at the paper, his chest heaving as he began to hyperventilate. But as he stared at the page, anticipating his own gruesome murder, his medical brain—the hyper-focused, brilliant diagnostician part of him that had saved hundreds of lives—suddenly snagged on the actual columns of numbers he was looking at.
He completely froze, his breathing hitching in his chest. With a trembling index finger, he pushed his wire-rimmed glasses higher up the bridge of his nose, bringing the cytological data into sharp focus.
Earlier that night, he had sat across from Ginny and Jax, looking them dead in the eye, and confidently delivered his diagnosis. Ginny, looking pale and fragile, had explained how the pack healer had been systematically injecting her with what she claimed were "special vitamins" meant to support her and the baby. Chatmory had reviewed the initial, surface-level toxicology screen and assured the terrified young woman that it was a heavy-metal based toxin, yes, but that her resilient body was slowly and successfully fighting it off. He had confidently written her a script for real, high-grade prenatal vitamins and heavy iron supplements to help her flush the poison and regain her strength, sending the fiercely protective Beta and his mate on their way with a completely false sense of security.
But looking closely at the deeper cytology sequencing printed on page three right now—the complex cellular breakdown he hadn't fully scrutinized in his rush—something was horribly, impossibly off. The numbers didn't align with any known toxicological decay.
"Never mind, Sarah," Chatmory said suddenly, his voice dropping to a harsh, tight whisper that made the nurse jump. He sank slowly back into his leather chair, the coat forgotten, his eyes absolutely glued to the impossible data. "I need to do something first. Shut the door behind you. Make sure it locks."
Completely bewildered and increasingly alarmed, the nurse hesitated in the doorway, but ultimately nodded. "Yes, Doctor." The door clicked shut leaving him alone once more in his fabricated tomb.
Ignoring the imminent, lethal threat of the Council's return for just a fraction of a second, Chatmory spun his chair around and aggressively woke his computer monitors back up. His fingers flew frantically across the keyboard, bypassing the hospital's standard, heavily monitored network entirely. He entered a sequence of complex, randomized passwords, diving deep into an encrypted, partitioned shadow drive that only he had access to.
He pulled up the dark files—the classified, blood-soaked medical archives the High Council had forced him to maintain under duress for years. He scrolled rapidly past the routine wolf health reports, past the illicit genetic trackers they forcibly implanted into smaller, vulnerable packs to monitor their breeding and population growth. The Council had their aristocratic noses buried in a lot of deeply unethical, horrific things, but human-werewolf DNA splicing was one of their most guarded, fanatical obsessions.
Sweat dripping down his temples, Chatmory scrolled through pages and pages of dense, highly classified genomic data, frantically cross-referencing Ginny's abnormal blood markers with the Council's most secretive experimental profiles.
He found the specific sequence file. Holding his breath, he hit 'Enter', overlaying Ginny's active lab results directly on top of the Council's theoretical data model.
A cold, digital chime echoed in the room as the graphs aligned perfectly. All the blood rushed completely out of Chatmory's head, leaving him dizzy and sick.
His initial diagnosis had been dead wrong. Fatally wrong. And Ginny's body wasn't fighting the foreign substance off at all.
It was synthetic DNA. And looking at the aggressive, active cellular replication chart glowing on his screen... the synthetic strands weren't just attacking her system; they were aggressively taking it over. It was actively, forcefully turning her human DNA into werewolf DNA. But it wasn't the natural, Goddess-given biology of a Lycan. It was a completely synthesized, heavily mutated laboratory strain.
Staring in muted horror at the chaotic, violently unstable cellular structure forming on the digital rendering, Chatmory realized the absolute most terrifying part of the entire conspiracy: the Council was using Ginny as a blind, living test subject. They had absolutely no idea what this synthesized, corrupted DNA would actually do to the delicate human part of a person. They didn't know if her fragile human biology would survive the violent forced transition, if she would mutate into something monstrous and unrecognizable, or if her body would slowly, agonizingly tear itself apart at the molecular level as the two opposing genetics went to war inside her veins.
Chatmory buried his face in his hands, his fingers digging brutally into his scalp as the sheer, apocalyptic scale of what they were doing to the Blackwood Beta's mate completely washed over him. He had sent her home, telling them she was fine, while a biological time bomb was ticking inside her cells.
And for what felt like the thousandth time that horrible, endless night, he winced, the terrifying, soul-crushing reality of it all escaping his lips in a whisper. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."