Chapter 55 The Truth About Evelyn

Chapter 55 The Truth About Evelyn
Ryan Cross - POV
My fingers moved faster than I could track them. Muscle memory took over hours ago. The screen glowed blue in the dark, numbers scrolling past too quick for normal eyes. Three AM. Sleep wasn't an option anyway.
The bond sat hollow where Emma should be. Empty space that ached in ways I couldn't categorize or treat. At least real pain had observable symptoms, measurable causes. This was just wrong. Deep wrong that made my brain loop the same image. Her walking through those admin doors. Choosing surrender.
I should have physically stopped her.
My hands froze over the keys. No. Emotions later. Find her first.
Project Ascension kept appearing in fragments across databases I'd been cracking since the moment she disappeared. Military research. Black budget classification. No paper trail that admitted existence. But money always left traces if you knew accounting patterns, and I'd spent childhood memorizing financial structures most people never saw.
A firewall appeared. Military encryption, the expensive kind. I routed through servers in three countries and ran my decryption code. The wall split open. Files flooded my screen.
Too many. I filtered by date range. Twenty years back.
One file surfaced. Subject Zero. Original Conduit. Status: Active.
My heart kicked. First real physical sensation since Emma left. I opened it.
Evelyn Stone's face filled the monitor. Younger than university portraits showed, maybe thirty. But definitely her. Same bone structure Emma inherited, that sharp intelligence in her eyes.
Medical records. Pages and pages. Experimental procedures listed clinical and cold. Psychic enhancement attempts. Neural mapping. Genetic alterations. Each entry noted failures like grocery lists.
Subject experienced seizures following Enhancement Protocol Seven. Sedatives administered. Testing resumed after seventy two hour observation.
Subject displayed severe psychological distress during Extraction Attempt Twelve. Physical restraints required. Memory suppression partially effective.
Torture. They'd been torturing her for twenty years. Systematically.
My jaw locked. I made it relax. Tension created observational bias.
I scrolled further back. Found the acquisition report.
Subject obtained through cooperative agreement with Blackwood University founding families. Exchange terms: Research funding, fifteen million annually, plus technology developments for psychic enhancement and suppression applications.
The words looked wrong. I read them again. Then once more to be sure my photographic memory wasn't glitching.
Cooperative agreement.
Our families. Mine. Blake's. Cole's. Kai's.
We sold her.
My hands went completely still on the keyboard. The room felt smaller suddenly. Air pressure wrong.
Everything they told us. Evelyn betrayed sacred trust. Stole society secrets. Died fleeing consequences. Carefully constructed lies, all of it.
She didn't betray anyone. We betrayed her. Sold her like equipment.
Financial records next. I needed scope. My father's accounts came up first. I knew his passwords. Quarterly deposits from a shell corporation. Fifteen million divided four ways. Every single year for twenty years.
One point five billion dollars total.
I sat back. The chair creaked too loud. My room looked identical to always. Medical texts stacked precise on my desk. Anatomy charts on walls. Everything ordered and logical and completely meaningless.
My family's medical empire. Built on blood money. Actual blood from a woman they imprisoned.
And I never questioned it. Never asked where funding came from or why our research stayed ten years ahead of everyone else's.
The bond stirred. Blake reaching through our connection. He'd felt my spike of emotion.
I closed him out. Couldn't handle them yet. Not until I understood everything.
More files. I opened them all. Contracts. Research proposals. Quarterly progress reports sent to the four families.
Project Ascension Primary Goal: Develop replicable psychic enhancement. Military applications include intelligence gathering, psychological warfare, enemy identification, threat prediction capability.
Weapons. We were building supernatural weapons for government use.
Video files appeared. I hesitated. Watching felt wrong, invasive. But Emma was in that facility now, probably experiencing identical procedures.
I clicked play.
Evelyn strapped to a table. Younger, early thirties maybe. A man in military uniform stood over her. Colonel Vance, according to file tags.
"This will be significantly easier if you cooperate," he said. Voice flat.
"Go straight to hell." Evelyn's voice came out strong despite the restraints.
"Eventually." He injected something. Clear liquid into her arm. Her body went rigid. Convulsed hard. Monitors beside her spiked red.
Vance took notes on his tablet. Never looked at her face. Just data.
The video ended. Fifty more files like it sat waiting.
I couldn't watch more. Not now.
Founding families' communications instead. Emails. Internal memos. Board minutes.
One email from my father to the other three, dated six months ago.
New conduit identified. Emma Stone, granddaughter to original subject. Genetic testing confirms matching markers. Recommend immediate acquisition. Current subject displaying accelerated degradation signs.
My father knew. He knew exactly who Emma was before she arrived on campus. Before the ritual. Before any of it.
We didn't bind her for tradition or honor.
We bound her to deliver her to Project Ascension. Fresh replacement when her grandmother wore out.
Blake's father's response email.
Standard acquisition too risky given Stone's scholarship status and public profile. Suggest manipulation through traditional Midnight Society ritual. Subject will comply willingly if convinced she's fulfilling family obligation.
They choreographed everything. The book falling in the library. The invitation. Jess's collapse, probably induced. All orchestrated to make Emma think she had no choice but compliance.
And we performed it. We bound her. We made her trust us.
My stomach turned over.
The bond pulled again. Cole this time, protective instincts flaring. He felt my distress even through shields.
I let him sense I was physically fine. Nothing more.
This changed everything fundamental. Our families weren't guardians of anything. They were war profiteers. Criminals. They took sacred responsibility and built a business model from suffering.
How many others before Evelyn? Files went back two centuries. I pulled up the oldest entries.
Subject classifications ran in sequence. Zero through Forty Three. Forty four people used as test subjects for psychic enhancement. Only Evelyn survived past ten years.
Now they wanted Emma as replacement stock.
I was clenching my jaw again. Didn't bother stopping it.
I copied everything. Every file, video, email. Routed copies through encrypted servers with automatic releases. If something happened to me, this scattered across the internet permanently.
Then I went deeper. Technology developments section. Weapons built using Evelyn's research data.
Psychic suppression collars. Probably what they put on Emma to block our bond.
Neural disruptors. Devices inducing seizures, memory loss, catatonic states on command.
Precognition enhancers. Drugs forcing prophetic visions while destroying brain tissue with repeated use.
All tested on Evelyn first. Then failed subjects. Refined through systematic torture.
My family's wealth paid for this. Our comfortable existence. My medical school tuition. The research wing with our name on it. All built on blood we pretended not to notice.
A new file. Recent upload. Yesterday.
Transfer Protocol. Final Phase.
I opened it fast. My medical training made the technical sections clear enough.
They planned to surgically extract Emma's abilities and transplant them into Vera Kane. Experimental procedure. Ninety percent fatality rate for donors.
Emma would die. Kane would absorb her power. The families would get their next controllable research subject.
Founder's Day. Three weeks out. The ritual we'd been planning together. That was their scheduled extraction date.
We were walking Emma to her execution.
The bond flared hot. Anger bleeding through. Not just mine. Blake and Cole feeling it as my control slipped.
My phone buzzed. Blake calling. I ignored it.
Another file. Contingency protocols. Procedures if founding families' involvement got discovered.
Eliminate all witnesses. Destroy physical evidence. Blame rogue Project Ascension elements. My father's signature at bottom. Blake's father. Cole's. Kai's.
They'd kill us too. Their own children. Acceptable losses.
Everything I believed about family legacy. Honor. Responsibility. Built on corpses and lies.
My hands shook over the keyboard. First time I could remember that happening. The tremor looked strange, like someone else's malfunction.
I had proof. Evidence to destroy all four families and expose Project Ascension completely.
But Emma was still in their facility. Moving too fast, triggering wrong alarms, they'd kill her before I reached her.
My door burst open. Blake stood there breathing hard. Cole right behind. Kai shoved past them both.
"What did you find?" Blake's voice came sharp. He could read my face without psychic help. Saw something there that scared him.
I turned the laptop. Let them see. Evelyn's file. Financial records. Their fathers' emails.
They read silent. I watched understanding hit them like physical impacts.
Cole spoke first, voice rough. "They sold her."
"Both of them," I said. "Evelyn first. Emma was always the replacement plan."
Kai's hand crushed his sketchpad. Paper crumpled loud. "We helped. We bound her and delivered her straight to them."
Blake's face had gone pale. His mask dropped completely. "Our fathers planned this."
"For decades." I pulled up the timeline. "This is how they've always operated. This is what we are."
The bond between us pulled tight. Horror shared. Guilt shared. Rage building collective.
"We get her out," Cole said flat.
"If we move wrong, they kill her." I showed them contingency files. "We're loose ends now too. All of us expendable."
Blake's eyes went sharp despite the pallor. "Then we don't move wrong."
The bond solidified into single purpose. One target.
Kai pulled out his phone, started texting fast. "I know people. We'll need weapons. Real ones."
"Transportation," Cole added. "Untraceable."
Blake studied the files. "Exact location inside that facility. Layout. Guard rotations. Security protocols."
I was already typing, diving back into their systems. Deeper. "Give me an hour."
"We don't have an hour." Cole's voice carried that edge. Violence close to surface. "Every minute she's there..."
"I know." The bond whispered her pain even through suppression. Faint and distant but there. "Going in blind gets us killed. Then she's alone permanently."
They hated it. I felt their frustration spike. But they backed off, gave me space.
We worked. Each using our specific skills. Blake coordinating through his information network. Cole mapping routes and contingencies. Kai gathering equipment through underground contacts.
Me pulling every scrap of data from Project Ascension's systems.
Then I found something that stopped my heart.
Transfer Protocol file. Updated two hours ago.
Timeline accelerated. Procedure scheduled for dawn. Six hours from now.
They weren't waiting for Founder's Day.
They were doing it today.
I looked up. They felt it through the bond. Pure terror spiking.
"She's out of time," I said. My voice came out strange. "We move now or we lose her forever."