Chapter 193 God, No
Fennigan stood by the heavy vault door, the weight of the silence from inside pressing against his chest. He turned to Jax, his voice dropping to a low, jagged rasp that barely carried in the concrete corridor.
Fennigan gripped Jax’s shoulder—a silent, heavy pact between brothers—before he turned and sprinted toward the exit. He burst out of the pack house into the biting night air.
He had to get inside that bunker. He climbed into an Suv and headed to the bunker.
The heavy steel door of the bunker groaned as Fennigan and the elite team breached the inner sanctum. The air inside didn't smell like the forest; it smelled of bleach, blood, and the cloyingly sweet scent of industrial-grade nutrients.
Fennigan stepped over the cooling, lifeless bodies of the technicians who had stayed true to their "dead man's switch" protocols. They lay slumped over consoles, the bitter scent of cyanide hanging around them like a shroud. He didn't spare them a glance. His boots crunched over the half-shredded remains of files that were supposed to be the Blackwood legacy.
He kicked the shredder box aside, the metal shrieking against the floor, and moved toward the heavy, reinforced door marked Damon – Private.
The room inside was silent, save for the rhythmic, wet hum of filtration pumps. Fennigan stopped dead. His heart, usually the steady drum of an Alpha, missed a beat. Rows of giant glass beakers lined the walls, filled with a shimmering, amniotic fluid that glowed with a faint, bioluminescent light.
Fennigan stood frozen in the center of the nightmare. The faces in the glass—mutilated, hollowed-out versions of Caspian and Briar—were a jagged blade to his soul. These weren't his children; they were biological echoes, failed drafts with vacant eyes that lacked the spark of a true soul.
"Dada?" one of the creatures seemed to mouth through the fluid, its pale fingers twitching against the reinforcement.
"God, no," Fennigan choked out, his voice cracking. A sob he hadn't let out all night finally tore from his chest. He reached out, his hand trembling, before pulling back in visceral horror. "They're just evidence to him. They aren't lives; they're files in a cabinet."
"Alpha! We have to move!" the sentry shouted, pointing at a terminal flashing a crimson sequence. "The Purge Protocol is live! It’s an oxygen-depletion and white phosphorus dump. It’s designed to incinerate every organic trace. In ninety seconds, this whole place is going to be a furnace!"
"You mean this whole place is going to blow?" Fennigan roared.
"It’s going to melt into the mountain!"
Fennigan looked one last time at the room marked Damon – Private. He couldn't save them—they weren't truly alive—but the sight of them would haunt him forever. "Move! Everyone out!" he commanded, shoving the elite team toward the hatch as the air began to hiss with priming chemicals.
While the mountain shuddered with the internal destruction of the bunker, Jax was pacing the stone corridor outside the safe room. He wasn't just the Beta; he was Fennigan’s brother, and the weight of their family's survival felt like lead in his veins.
Inside the vault, the situation was reaching a breaking point. Elana, Ginny, and Leela were slipping away, their breathing becoming dangerously shallow.
The chemist Jax had summoned was hunched over a mobile workstation, frantically running simulations. This was a separate, localized nightmare—a parting gift from Magda that had nothing to do with the bunker's machinery.
"Talk to me, Miller," Jax growled, his eyes fixed on the frost creeping across the monitor. "The bunker is currently turning into a slag heap, but these women are still freezing. This toxin is independent. Find the antitoxin, now!"
"I'm working as fast as the processors allow, Jax!" Miller whispered, tapping a complex molecular map on his screen. "This isn't a simple sedative. It’s a wide-spectrum neuro-inhibitor. It’s designed to paralyze the cellular response in any host—it doesn't care if you're a wolf like Elana, a human like Ginny, or whatever Leela is. It’s locking down their nervous systems at a molecular level."
Jax gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles white. "My wife is human, Miller. She doesn't have the healing factor to fight a 'molecular lock.' And both she and Leela are pregnant. If their heart rates drop any further, the babies' hearts will stop first."
"The frost is a byproduct of the cellular shutdown," Miller explained, pointing to the dropping metabolic charts. "It's not ice; it's a chemical crystallization. I need to synthesize a high-velocity catalyst to 'restart' the cells. But if I get the dosage wrong, I could cause a massive seizure."
Jax slammed his hand against the vault’s control panel. "Then don't get it wrong. You have ten minutes before I override this door and start CPR myself."
Fennigan stumbled through the packhouse doors, his clothes smelling of white phosphorus and the metallic tang of the bunker. He looked like a man who had seen the end of the world. The image of those beakers—the faces of his children staring back at him with vacant, milky eyes—was burned into his retinas.
He didn't say a word as he reached the corridor outside the safe room. He just leaned his forehead against the cool stone wall, his shoulders shaking. The Alpha, the mountain, the protector—he was momentarily shattered by the depth of his father's depravity.
"Fenn?" Jax called out, stepping out of the sweltering heat of the vault, his shirt drenched in sweat. He saw the look on his brother's face and stopped. "Fennigan, what happened at the bunker?"
Fennigan's breath hitched—a wet, jagged sound—as if his lungs had forgotten how to expand without pain. The scent clinging to him wasn't just phosphorus and bunker rot; it was the acrid sweetness of preservation fluid, the kind used in labs to keep specimens from decaying. His fingers left smears of something dark and viscous on the stone where he braced himself.
"Experiments, Jax." Fennigan choked back a sob, "They looked like Caspian and Briar. HE HAD MADE COPIES OF MY CHILDREN!"