The air inside the room was chilled to a sharp, clinical sixty-two degrees, smelling of fresh laser-printed toner, aged mahogany, and dark Cuban espresso.
I sat in the leather armchair with both hands resting over my four-month-pregnant belly. Beneath my linen dress, the flutter of life was unmistakable—a steady, rhythmic pulse that felt less like fragility and more like an anchored heartbeat inside a fortress.
Across the conference table, Special Agent Marcus Vance slid three thick, red-bordered titanium forensic folders across the polished wood.
Beside him, Dr. Salinas adjusted her glasses, her laptop screen displaying a high-resolution, three-dimensional reconstruction of the micro-implant she had discovered during my ultrasound two hours earlier.
“Look at the molecular lattice, Laura,” Dr. Salinas said, her voice dropping into a register of profound, reverent awe.
She tapped the touchscreen. The digital model zoomed in twenty-thousand times, revealing the microscopic architecture of the synthetic pellet that had been encapsulated within my uterine wall.
