Chapter 7 - JASON’S PRICE
I met Jason behind jailhouse glass.
He looked clean, rested, and almost amused.
“You stopped begging,” he said.
“You noticed.”
“I knew something changed.”
I asked for the treatment password.
He wanted transfer to protective custody and reduced charges.
Rebecca Sloan offered no guarantee.
Jason leaned closer.
“Lily dies without me.”
“You are not her father.”
“I raised her for eight months.”
“You helped steal her.”
His smile disappeared.
He finally revealed the password.
EMILYBEGS.
I did not react.
The code worked.
Federal scientists accessed the formula and produced Lily’s treatment.
Margaret’s leverage weakened.
Jason had surrendered the information too easily.
Ortiz suspected a trap.
She was right.
The formula contained a hidden dosage alteration that would have been fatal.
Dr. Reed caught it before administration.
Jason laughed when confronted.
“You wanted the truth. I gave you what Mother gave me.”
He claimed Margaret had lied to him too.
The correct dosage required another code.
He refused.
Then Tyler remembered something from a recording.
Margaret instructed Samuel to use “the first daughter’s birthday.”
Which first daughter?
Sarah Grant’s stolen child was older than Lily.
Melissa’s daughter might be older still.
The program records identified the earliest surviving Miller child.
Rebecca Miller.
Jason’s sister.
He had told everyone she died at birth.
She was alive and working as a pediatric pharmacist in Oregon under another name.
Margaret had placed her there specifically to oversee treatment manufacturing without revealing the family connection.
Rebecca Miller surrendered voluntarily.
She had suspected her adoption history was false but never knew the scale.
Her birthday unlocked the correct dose.
Lily’s treatment could now be recreated safely.
Margaret no longer controlled the medicine.
Rebecca agreed to help find her.
Then she saw my medical file.
Her face went pale.
She recognized the donor code for my current pregnancy.
It belonged to her adoptive father.
Dr. Ethan Brooks.
A physician who had donated reproductive material years earlier.
May you like
My unborn child connected two branches of the network Margaret had deliberately paired.
The pregnancy was a genetic experiment.
