Chapter 212 To Harvest
Fennigan and Jax finished off Leela's sandwiches as they navigated the dimly lit, labyrinthine corridors of the packhouse basement, letting the heavy, soundproof doors of the secure tech hub click shut behind them.
Inside, the room was a stark contrast to the warm, vibrant kitchen. It was freezing cold, the air humming with the low vibration of massive cooling fans and the sterile, blue glow of a dozen high-definition monitors. Miller was hunched over the main console.
But he wasn't working alone.
Displayed across the largest screen in the center of the room was a heavily pixelated, scrambled silhouette. The Weaver.
Fennigan and Jax stepped up behind Miller’s chair, the Alpha's towering presence instantly dominating the small room.
"Alpha Fennigan," a heavily modulated, metallic voice echoed from the computer speakers, stripping the elusive hacker of any identifiable age or gender. "I've started Pulling the threads on the encrypted drives your Beta requested."
The pixelated figure shifted on the screen, lines of dense, scrambled code scrolling rapidly over their silhouette.
"I'm not going to lie to you, Alpha," the Weaver continued, the artificial voice dropping into a grave register. "Your father's roots run deep. We are talking about decades of shadow accounts, encrypted shell corporations, and deeply buried black-market ledgers. His funding is tied to some incredibly deep pockets. Whoever was bankrolling his operation knew exactly how to hide their tracks. This is going to take a while to figure out."
Jax crossed his arms over his chest, his jaw clenching as he stared at the scrolling code. Damon had built a digital fortress of lies to protect his sick obsessions.
Fennigan leaned forward, planting his heavy hands flat on Miller's desk. He didn't care about the time or the difficulty. He only cared about the results.
"But it can be done, right?" Fennigan demanded, his silver eyes locking onto the scrambled silhouette on the screen. The Alpha rumble in his chest vibrated against the thick wood of the desk.
"With enough time?" the Weaver replied smoothly. "Yes. I can crack anything."
"Then do it," Fennigan growled, his voice turning to absolute ice. "I don't care what it costs or how deep you have to dig. I want every single ledger. I want every name on the High Council who funded him. I want to know every crooked, twisted thing that man did."
Fennigan stood up straight, his face a hardened mask of cold, unforgiving hatred for the man who had smiled at his grandchildren while planning to carve them open.
"Find the money," Fennigan whispered, the venom in his voice chilling the already cold room. "I hope he rots in the afterlife for what he did to my family. But the people who paid him are going to rot in this one."
For a long moment after Fennigan's vow, the only sound in the room was the hum of the cooling fans. The rapid scrolling of code on the main monitor suddenly paused.
Miller stopped typing. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, his eyes darting nervously between his keyboard and the pixelated avatar of the Weaver on the screen. A line of encrypted text flashed rapidly across the bottom of the Weaver's feed—a silent, private communication between the two hackers.
Miller swallowed hard, his throat clicking in the quiet room. He looked up at Jax, then slowly up to his Alpha, his face entirely drained of color.
Fennigan’s eyes narrowed, his Alpha instincts instantly catching the spike of pure anxiety rolling off his tech expert.
"What?" Fennigan demanded, his voice dropping into a dangerous, vibrating rumble. "Miller, what are you looking at? Whatever it is, just say it."
The modulated, metallic voice of the Weaver crackled through the speakers, devoid of emotion but heavy with grim finality. "It's not just financial ledgers, Alpha. There are visual logs attached to the shadow accounts. Progress reports for his investors. Miller and I were just discussing whether you needed to see the visual proof."
"Put it on the screen," Fennigan ordered, leaving absolutely no room for debate.
Miller's trembling fingers hit a few keys.
The scrolling green code vanished from the massive central monitor, instantly replaced by a grid of high-resolution, starkly lit photographs.
Jax let out a choked, visceral gasp, stumbling a step backward as if he had been physically struck. Fennigan went entirely, terrifyingly still.
Staring back at them from the screen were faces they recognized. They were looking at themselves.
There were dozens of photos. Toddlers, young boys, and teenagers standing in sterile, white-tiled observation rooms. They had Fennigan’s broad shoulders. They had Jax’s sharp jawline. They had the signature, silver-tipped Blackwood hair. But as Fennigan stared closer, the sheer, nauseating wrongness of the images made his stomach violently heave.
Their eyes.
Just like the infant replicas floating in the suspension tanks in the bunker, the eyes of these older boys were completely, milky white. They were entirely devoid of life, devoid of a wolf, devoid of all humanity. They weren't boys. They were just biological shells—flesh and bone grown in a lab, wearing the faces of the Alpha and Beta.
"Goddess..." Jax whispered, his hands coming up to grip the back of Miller's chair so hard the metal frame groaned. "He... he grew them. He raised them."
"Not to raise, Beta," the Weaver's voice corrected flatly. The screen clicked, shifting to the next slide of photos. "To harvest."
The new images were a scene of pure, psychopathic butchery. The photos showed the same boys, the same empty-eyed shells wearing Fennigan and Jax's faces. But they were dead.
They were slumped against cold concrete walls or lying on metal grates, their silver-tipped hair matted with dark blood. Each and every one of them had a single, devastating gunshot wound to the head.
"When he was done with a batch," the Weaver explained, the clinical detachment of the hacker making the horror somehow even worse, "when he had extracted the bone marrow, the spinal fluid, or whatever twisted genetic material he needed... he disposed of them. Execution style. Then he just started over with a new batch of embryos."
Miller finally spoke, his voice cracking with tears he couldn't hold back. He pointed a shaking finger at the corner of the screen. "Alpha... look at the timestamps."
Fennigan’s glowing silver eyes tracked to the tiny white numbers burned into the bottom corner of the oldest photograph.
Fennigan’s breath physically left his lungs.
Damon hadn't started this recently. He hadn't just descended into madness in the last few years. The monster who had kissed them goodnight, who had taught them how to track in the woods, who had held their mother’s hand and smiled for family portraits... he had been running a subterranean slaughterhouse the entire time.
He had been doing this since the exact moment Elana had first come to him, glowing with joy, to tell him she was pregnant with Fennigan.
Jax couldn't take it anymore. The Beta turned away from the monitors, bracing his forearms against the cool cinderblock wall of the basement, his shoulders heaving as he violently dry-heaved into the corner.
Fennigan didn't look away. He forced himself to stare at the dead boys on the screen. The boys who looked exactly like him. His entire life hadn't been a family; it had been a control group. He and Jax were just the successful baseline, completely unaware of the mountain of corpses their father was building in the dark beneath their feet.