Chapter 161 Chapter 161
Dominic’s POV
By the time I reach the hospital, the hallway outside intensive care smells of antiseptic and panic. Reporters have already found their way in.
A nurse blocks my path. “Family only.”
I flash a badge that doesn’t exist anymore. “I’m his attorney.”
Stanley lies half-propped on the bed, wrapped in too-white sheets. Tubes curl from his arms like translucent vines. The monitor beside him blinks slow, steady.
“Dominic.” His voice is a rasp, thin as air.
I pull the chair closer, sitting where he can see me. “You tried to take the easy way out.”
He smiles faintly, the old arrogance flickering through the ruin. “There’s nothing easy left.”
“You shouldn’t be alive.”
“Neither should she.”
I lean forward. “Who?”
He closes his eyes, lips trembling. “Elia.”
For a long moment, the room is silent except for the soft, wet rhythm of machines.
“She wasn’t dead,” he whispers. “Not when they buried her.”
My pulse stutters. “What did you just say?”
He turns his head slowly, eyes unfocused, as if looking through me instead of at me. “They thought she was gone but she….she moved.”
“She was cold… quiet but her pulse, it came back. They didn’t see. I told them not to open the casket. It was too risky”
My hands grip the armrest until my knuckles ache. “You’re telling me you buried her alive?”
Stanley shakes his head weakly. “No… not me. They did. I…tried to fix it. She woke later and I saved her. I rebuilt her.”
He coughs, the monitor beeping faster. “But she didn’t remember, she couldn’t remember. I made sure of that, it was safer.”
“Where?” I demand. “Where did you take her?”
His eyelids flutter. “The island, The first site before Z-Core. The project before the company.”
“What project?”
He laughs dryly “You think this started with her? You think you were the first casualty? No, Dominic. You were just the test that worked.”
The words twist in my gut. “What the hell are you talking about?”
But he’s fading again, voice sinking beneath the hiss of oxygen.
The nurse appears at the door, frowning. “You need to leave. He’s not stable.”
“Neither is anything he built.” She doesn’t get the reference.
I step into the hall, heart pounding so hard it hurts. She wasn’t dead when they buried her, the sentence loops in my mind, each repetition worse than the last.
If it’s true that Elia survived the burial then the body they found wasn’t hers at all. Which means Stanley didn’t just fake her death, he trapped her between both. Alive in one world, dead in another.
I press my back to the wall, pulling out my phone. The number I need is burned into my memory. Liana answers after the second ring.
“Dominic.” Her voice is brittle, exhausted.
“Stanley’s alive.”
“I know. They’re saying it was an overdose.”
“It wasn’t just that. He said something, something you need to hear.”
A pause. “What did he say?”
“He said Elia wasn’t dead when they buried her.”
The line goes dead quiet. “Liana?”
Her breath catches. “That’s not possible.”
“Neither is anything else in this case, but here we are.”
“I saw her body, Dominic.”
“No. You saw what he wanted you to see. The body wasn’t hers.”
She doesn’t respond. I can almost hear her mind spinning on the other end.
“Where is he now?” she finally asks.
“St. Raphael’s. Under guard. But he won’t last long.”
“Then we don’t have time.”
“For what?”
“To find the island he mentioned,” she says. “Before someone cleans it.”
I hang up, the walls closing in. Stanley’s words echo through my head again. The island. The first site.
I’ve heard whispers of it before, in documents buried under Z-Core’s research archives, a place off the coast, listed as Project Eden. Supposedly shut down after a bioethics scandal fifteen years ago.
The same year Elia “died.”
I pull out my notes. Coordinates. Weather patterns. Satellite pings. There’s a cluster of anomalies north of the Azores small, uninhabited, off any shipping routes.
Back inside the ICU, Stanley begins thrashing. The machines scream. Nurses rush in.
I stay at the window, watching him seize against the restraints, babbling through a haze of drugs.
Snatches of words slip through the noise:
“Wake her… wrong face… wrong name…”
“Stop the blood, don’t let it spread…”
“She remembers the grave” Then nothing but alarms and chaos. They push me out as they fight to stabilize him.
I don’t move. I just stand there, frozen, listening to a man choke on his own words.
Outside, the rain has started again. I walk toward the car, the city lights reflecting in puddles like fractured memories.
I can still hear him: She wasn’t dead when they buried her.
It replays in rhythm with the rain, a confession, a curse.
And in that rhythm, I start to see the shape of what he did, how he blurred the border between life and death, between truth and invention.
Elia wasn’t just his experiment. She was his proof and now that proof is loose, walking the world with someone else’s face.
I drive until the city disappears behind me. Until the highway opens into dark coast and wind. Somewhere out there is an island, a laboratory disguised as a graveyard.
If Elia woke up in that coffin, if she clawed her way back through Stanley’s machines and lies, then the real question isn’t how she survived.
It’s what came back in her place. Because if Stanley’s last words are true then the thing we’ve all been chasing isn’t resurrection. It’s the aftermath of something that was never meant to live.