Chapter 5 : The Double Pulse.

POV: Alexander

"Wake up, Elena! Open your eyes!"

I ran down the sterile white corridor of the Premium Medical Wing, my boots skidding on the polished floor. Elena was a dead weight in my arms, her white lab coat completely soaked through with blood.

"Get the crash cart into Operating Room Three!" I roared at the nurses freezing in the hallway. "Dr. Harrison, if you don't stop that bleeding in the next sixty seconds, I will personally shut down this entire hospital!"

Dr. Harrison came sprinting out of the scrub room, his gloved hands raised. "Put her on the gurney, Chairman! Move back!"

I slammed her body down onto the cold leather table. My hands were covered in her blood, the dark crimson fluid dripping onto my white cuffs. I tried to hold onto her hand, but a nurse forcefully shoved me toward the sliding glass doors.

"You can't be in here, sir! It is a contaminated field!"

"That is my wife and my child!" I screamed, my voice cracking, echoing off the metallic walls of the surgical suite.

"Sir, she is in hypovolemic shock," Dr. Harrison shouted over the high-pitched beep of the heart monitor. "If you don't let us work, you lose both of them! Get him out of here!"

Mark grabbed my shoulders from behind, physically dragging me backward out into the hallway. The heavy double doors swung shut, locking me out. I stood there, staring through the small glass portal. They were cutting her clothes away, hooking up tubes of clear fluid, pushing needles directly into her neck.

"Chairman," Mark said, his breath ragged. "We have a bigger problem. The local police station just called. Vivian didn't make it to the federal holding cells."

I didn't turn my head away from the glass. "What do you mean she didn't make it?"

"The transport van was ambushed two blocks from the precinct," Mark whispered, checking his security phone. "A blacked-out transport vehicle rammed them. They didn't just break Vivian out, sir. They shot the drivers. And the traffic cameras captured the license plate before it vanished into the underground tunnel."

I finally turned around, my fists clenching so hard the skin across my knuckles tore open, mixing my blood with Elena's on my hands. "Whose plate was it?"

"It belongs to the sovereign scientific ministry of Astoria," Mark said, his voice trembling. "Sir... Vivian's mother isn't working alone. The Astorian council just issued a red-notice flag on Dr. Elena Lin. They are claiming she stole the stem-cell sequencing blueprints from their royal vault five years ago. They want her extradited by midnight tonight."

---

POV: Elena

The world didn't smell like jasmine anymore. It smelled like burning copper and cold metal.

My eyes fluttered open. The ceiling above me was moving, giant round surgical lights passing over my vision like metallic moons.

"She's awake," a doctor's voice said from somewhere above my left ear. "Increase the local anesthesia. We need to perform the emergency uterine curettage before the toxin causes systemic organ failure."

"No!" I choked out, trying to lift my torso off the operating table. The movement sent a bolt of pure, white-hot agony straight through my lower abdomen. "Stop! Don't touch me!"

"Dr. Lin, you are hemorrhaging," Dr. Harrison's face appeared above me, covered by a blue surgical mask. His eyes were wide with panic. "The poison Vivian injected into your neck is a synthetic abortifacient. It is designed to detach the gestational sac from the uterine wall. If we don't clear the tissue, you will go into septic shock."

"Check the fetal heartbeat," I wheezed, my fingers weakly grasping the sleeve of his surgical gown. "Harrison, look at the ultrasound monitor. Don't look at the blood. Look at the screen."

"Doctor, her blood pressure is dropping to sixty over forty," a nurse called out. "We need to sedate her now."

"Look at the screen!" I screamed with the last bit of oxygen in my lungs.

Dr. Harrison hesitated, then swung the heavy articulating arm of the ultrasound machine over my abdomen. He pressed the cold plastic transducer against my blood-stained skin.

A loud, chaotic static noise filled the operating room. Shhh-shhh-shhh.

Then, beneath the static, a sharp, rhythmic sound broke through.

Thump-thump-thump-thump.

The entire room went dead silent. The nurse who was holding the sedation syringe froze in mid-air.

"That's... that's a regular fetal pulse," Dr. Harrison whispered, his eyes widening behind his plastic shield. He adjusted the frequency dial on the machine, moving the transducer an inch to the left.

Another sound joined the first one. A slightly faster, lighter echo.

Thump-thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump-thump.

"Two," the nurse gasped, dropping the syringe onto the metal tray with a loud clatter. "Doctor, there are two distinct embryonic sacs. The hemorrhage is only coming from the left uterine artery. The gestational sacs are still intact."

"Twins," I whispered, a single tear cutting through the dried sweat on my cheek as my head fell back against the pillow. "They're still there, Harrison. Don't cut them out. Flush the toxin with the synthetic blood I synthesized for Leo. It has a competitive inhibitor for the receptor site. Use my formula."

"Dr. Lin, that formula hasn't been human-tested for maternal usage," Harrison warned, his hands shaking. "If it reacts poorly with your blood type, your heart will stop."

"Do it," I breathed, my vision beginning to cloud over with dark spots. "Or I will die on this table anyway."

---

POV: Alexander

The double doors of the operating suite burst open. Dr. Harrison walked out, his blue gown covered in dark stains, his mask hanging off one ear.

I grabbed him by the front of his scrubs before he could even step into the hallway. "Is she alive?"

"She is stable, Chairman," Harrison said, wiping sweat from his forehead with his forearm. "She is conscious. But you need to go inside right now. She refused the full sedation because she needed to tell you something herself."

I didn't wait for him to finish. I pushed past the medical staff, my shoes sloshing through the red-stained water on the floor.

Elena was lying on the table, her face entirely devoid of color, hooked up to four separate IV lines that were pumping a strange, glowing blue fluid into her veins. Her eyes were wide, staring at the ceiling, but the moment she heard my footsteps, she turned her head.

"Alex," she whispered, her voice barely a breath.

I dropped to my knees beside the operating table, my hands instantly wrapping around her cold fingers. I didn't care about the doctors watching us. I pressed my forehead against her knuckles, my shoulders shaking. "I'm here. I'm right here. The babies?"

"Twins," she said, a tiny, fragile smile touching her lips. "They survived the flush. The heartbeat is stable."

Two heartbeats. Ours. The words echoed in my head as relief, hot and crushing, flooded my chest. But before I could even speak, Elena's grip on my hand tightened with surprising force. Her eyes were deadly serious, filled with a sudden, dark panic.

"You need to take Leo," she whispered, leaning her head closer to mine. "You need to take him out of this hospital right now, Alexander."

"He is safe in the adjoining room, Elena," I said, brushing a damp strand of hair behind her ear. "The security guard is at the door."

"No, he isn't safe!" she choked out, her breathing spiking on the heart monitor. "The Astorian council... they didn't just send Vivian's mother to fake the DNA test. The original research I used to cure Leo's anemia five years ago... I didn't invent it, Alex."

I frowned, my chest tightening. "What are you talking about?"

"My father didn't take a bullet for your grandfather because of a shipping yard robbery," Elena said, her voice trembling violently. "He took a bullet because they were both running from the Astorian royal guard. My biological mother... she is the current Grand Matriarch of the Astorian Ministry. Leo isn't just a Vance heir, Alexander. His genetic code contains the sovereign key to their entire national biotech monopoly. That's why his DNA profile matched your grandfather instead of you. Your grandfather engineered my birth with my mother before they fell out."

The doors behind us exploded inward.

Mark didn't walk in. He was thrown through the glass pane, his body sliding across the bloody floor, his chest covered in tasered burn marks.

Three men wearing gray tactical armor and helmets with the gold crest of the Astorian Ministry stepped into the operating room, their high-caliber kinetic rifles raised.

Standing behind them was Vivian, her white dress now covered by a black tactical jacket, a silver submachine gun resting in her right hand.

"Step away from the table, Alex," Vivian said, her voice echoing coldly off the surgical tiles. "The sovereign council has reclaimed their property. The woman, the boy, and the unborn bloodline belong to the Ministry now."

I stood up slowly, my body shielding Elena completely from their line of fire. My hand crept down toward the waistband of my trousers, my fingers locking around the cold steel handle of my hidden weapon.

"You should have stayed in the tunnel, Vivian," I said, my voice dropping into a register that made the nearest tactical guard take a half-step back.

"Don't do it, Alex," Vivian smiled, pointing her gun directly at my chest. "Your security grid is fully jammed. And if you pull that trigger... my man in the next room puts a bullet through Leo's head before your gun even clears your belt."

From the adjoining room through the shared glass observation panel, the dark shadow of a fourth guard appeared, holding a weapon directly against the small, shivering frame of my four-year-old son. Leo was looking through the glass at me, his glasses gone, his dark eyes wide with absolute terror.

"Mom!" Leo's muffled scream cut through the glass.