Chapter 9 - SARAH
Sarah met Ryan under federal supervision.
The reunion was not tender.
Ryan asked, “Did you see him fall?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know they were near us?”
“I suspected.”
“You let us go to the lake.”
“I tried to stop the party through Linda.”
Linda had received an anonymous warning and ignored it because she thought the message came from a scammer.
Every hidden route failed.
Sarah explained the task force needed Marcus to expose the main archive.
They believed surveillance teams could intervene before harm.
They miscalculated.
Colton nearly died.
The officials responsible faced review.
No righteous mission erased that.
Sarah knelt beside Colton.
He would not hug her.
“You died.”
“I know.”
“Dead moms don’t watch.”
The sentence broke her.
She accepted his anger.
Their relationship would rebuild slowly, if he chose.
Then Sarah revealed she had worked with Emma.
The sisters-in-law had communicated secretly.
Emma planned to surrender after exposing Marcus.
But the timeline accelerated when Evelyn learned Sarah survived.
The lake event became an emergency extraction.
Then Evelyn Vale disappeared from hospital custody.
A guard opened her cell using Malcolm Hayes’s credentials.
Malcolm was under federal observation.
Another double.
Or his private investigation still hid people.
Lena Hayes confronted her father.
He admitted training a former military medic named Thomas Reed to impersonate him during Vale operations.
Thomas had not returned from the last mission.
He might now work for Evelyn.
The network did not only copy faces.
It inherited substitutes.
Evelyn sent a live message.
She stood inside Saint Catherine’s trauma room.
The same room where Colton was treated.
Behind her, a child lay under a white sheet.
She said it was Subject Morgan Four.
Another child from our family line.
Linda remembered one more secret.
My father donated genetic material to Vale after Emma’s disappearance, hoping they would return her.
Vale created embryos.
One had been implanted into a surrogate.
A boy named Julian Morgan.
Age ten.
Raised inside Saint Catherine as a long-term patient under another name.
The child on Evelyn’s bed could be my half brother.
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She demanded Emma’s return in exchange.
Again, a person treated as currency.
