Strong For Too Long Trilogy ✔️

33. Fencing Me In

CHAPTER 33: Fencing Me In

The motivational aspects behind fear and adrenaline is stronger than love. Or so they say. I turn to face her, whomever she is, whatever candidate number she holds on her wrist and perhaps claims in whatever colour eyes she hides, "...and the milkshake?" I ask, looking towards her, smiling as she gives me a deadpanned look and hands both over to me. I turn back to the laptop, opening my algorithm and running an alert instead of a firewall. I remove all firewalls on the Phoenix Movement, and trace the lines of the grid, splitting the building up into sections and running a heat signature diagnostic all in one.

Before hearing the barrel of a gun against the back of my head, "What do you think you're doing?" She asks me, slowly.

"Celeste and I weren't that close, Candidate." I mutter, facing her slowly. Before watching in silence while she purses her lips, staring at me, she nudges the gun and watches as I stand, before the door unlocks and opens, revealing the woman I wish I didn't have to know. Cassandra nudges her head to the Candidate and steps in, the door closes while she leans on the silver desk and studies me.

"Just what is stopping me from slitting your throat?" I ask her.

She raises an eyebrow, "Follow me and you'll find out." She murmurs. Stepping out in her red long coat. I move slowly into the doorway and scrutinise her. Just her voice in my ear, making me wonder if she ever held me as a child and just stared at me, swaying me softly to sleep, loving me like I believe all mothers should, their children.

She turns to me, "Did you hold me?" I ask her.

Her honey-blonde curls at shoulder length, tucked behind each ear, I only now just look at her. I earn no source of emotion, like watching a blank canvas drip with red, whether it be blood or red wine lying on the white material laughing at me with its malicious teeth, or it's black with the shadows she casts aside, "I gave birth to you, I held you for one day, before you became a subject necessary to change mankind as we know, it is why Daniel and I bred you. I was a teenager with idiotic fantasies when it came to Aster, and our son." She murmurs.

I shake my head at her, "You're a coward."

"I'm a woman of many things, don't be surprised if a woman of all to hate is on that list, but a coward would have taken the subject she bred away from a discovery to our society. You will never understand my reasoning, I don't expect you to. You are still young, you still do not know everything and how vital such experiments are. They may be unethical, but you would not be here if it weren't for me and Danny." She points at me.

My heart thumped in my ears, like drums lining the walls and all I could hear was the banging of it, "You think you can excuse what you've done? You experimented on your own daughter to make a discovery, to have a status, a title in history? You transformed your children into rats in a lab, most rats are put down-when will our time be that with one injection and the light I see is gone? When I've given birth, huh?" I spit at her, stepping forward, she gestures to the candidates lining the doors, stopping them from doing something like tasering me.

Her eyes dash between mine, I was a carbon copy of her in every word but blood. My blood wasn't a venom that stung with no fangs, my blood wasn't blessed with the ability not to feel, or to set it all aside, she looks at me, "You'll die if you give birth here and Aaron loses his wife and his child. The child will be returned to him the second he or she is born, but you will not survive it and neither will Lillian."