THE ACADEMIC ANOMALY
The air inside the main rotunda of the Eternity Biomedical Institute didn’t just smell like antiseptic.
It tasted like a deliberate corporate lie.
It was that hyper-sterile, high-rent vapor that expensive labs used to mask the scent of burning money and sketchy ethics.
Vane adjusted the strap of her leather messenger bag.
Her thumb brushed the hidden release catch on the bottom seam.
Beneath the decoy iPad and the stack of forged postgraduate transcripts lay a custom-milled micro-taser.
No bigger than a sharpie.
But packing enough voltage to short-circuit a silverback gorilla.
Her credentials said she was Vane Sterling, a bright-eyed, slightly desperate PhD candidate transferring from Johns Hopkins to finish her dissertation on telomere degradation.
Her handler’s encrypted brief said something else entirely:
Infiltrate private sector four.
Extract the Sovereign Gene.
The Sovereign Gene wasn’t just a research project.
It was the holy grail of genetics—a synthetic, self-repairing cellular sequence that could theoretically pause human biological aging entirely. In the wrong hands, it was an immortal bioweapon.
In Elias’s hands, it was a multi-trillion-dollar monopoly on life itself.
And don’t get caught by the monster running the floor.
Right now, the monster was late.
“He doesn’t do meet-and-greets, sweetie,” the receptionist said.
She didn’t look up from her dual-monitor setup.
She was rocking a pair of matte-black scrubs that probably cost more than Vane’s entire fake background setup.
“Dr. Liam’s lab is a black box. People go in with full fellowships and leave three weeks later with a severe case of burnout and a therapist on speed dial.”
“I survived Hopkins,” Vane offered.
She put on her best I-have-six-figure-student-debt-and-no-social-life smile.
“I can handle a grumpy PI.”
The receptionist finally looked up.
Her gaze shifted from Vane’s fresh white lab coat down to her scuffed Doc Martens.
A slow, pitying smile crept onto her lips.
“Hopkins is a cakewalk. Dr. Liam isn’t just grumpy.
He’s the guy who told the NIH board their latest funding proposal looked like it was written by a committee of concussed golden retrievers. Good luck.”
Ten minutes later, Vane was standing in Private Lab 404.
The dry, freezing air of the climate-controlled facility was already doing a number on her nerves.
The room was massive.
Structured with brutalist concrete pillars and rows of custom-built liquid nitrogen storage tanks that hissed like metallic snakes.
Then the heavy pressure-sealed door behind her clicked open.
Vane didn’t hear his footsteps.
She felt the atmospheric pressure in the room shift.
When she turned, she had to adjust her line of sight upward.
Way upward.
The dossier hadn’t done justice to Dr. Liam’s sheer physical absurdity.
The man was built like a heavyweight rower who had accidentally stumbled into a genomics lab.
He was easily six-foot-four.
With broad, intimidating shoulders that stretched the fabric of his dark gray lab coat to its absolute limit.
His hair was a chaotic, ink-black mess that looked like it hadn’t seen a comb since the last fiscal year.
His jawline was sharp enough to slice agar plates.
But it was his eyes that froze her.
A pair of bottomless, slate-gray depths that looked completely devoid of human warmth.
He didn’t look like a scientist.
He looked like the apex predator of the academic food chain.
Liam didn’t say hello.
He walked right past her.
Tossing a heavy, leather-bound notebook onto the central island with a loud thud.
He didn’t even glance her way as he snapped a pair of black nitrile gloves onto his massive hands with a sharp, echoing crack.
“Who authorized this?”
His voice was a low, gravelly baritone that vibrated right through Vane’s chest.
It was a voice that belonged in a dark alley, not an ISO-7 cleanroom.
“I explicitly stated on the department portal: zero rotators this quarter.
And I definitely don’t take female assistants. They waste time on emotional variance and ask for ‘work-life balance’ like this is a corporate desk gig.”
Vane felt her jaw tighten.
A textbook academic gatekeeper.
She knew the type—brilliant, arrogant, and entirely insulated by his own tenure.
But she wasn’t a real grad student.
She was a hunter.
“Dr. Liam,” Vane said, stepping forward.
Her voice dropped into a smooth, unbothered cadence that caught him slightly off guard.
“First of all, the department chair authorized it because your publication output in peer-reviewed journals is currently three months behind schedule,
and your grant funding requires a diversity-inclusive staff ratio.”
She leaned slightly against the metal counter, crossing her arms.
“Second, my ‘emotional variance’ is currently locked at zero, but my proficiency in CRISPR-Cas9 sequence design is higher than anyone else in this building.
If you want to gatekeep your little kingdom, do it because of my Western blot results, not my chromosome makeup.”
Liam froze.
His hand paused over a rack of microcentrifuge tubes.
Slow as a glacier, his massive frame turned toward her.
He took a deliberate step forward, completely closing the distance between them.
The sensory onslaught hit Vane instantly.
He was huge. His shadow completely swallowed her under the harsh fluorescent light.
He stood so close that the crisp, clean scent of crushed peppermint and sterile antiseptic on his coat invaded her lungs.
But beneath that cold, medical exterior, she could feel the literal heat radiating from his massive chest—a stark, dizzying contrast to the freezing 4°C temperature of the lab.
Every single one of her five senses screamed danger.
“You think you’re witty, Sterling?” he murmured.
His voice was so low it felt like a physical vibration against her collarbone.
He tilted his head slightly, his gaze scanning her face with a terrifying, clinical precision.
“You think because you ran some basic assays at Hopkins, you’re qualified to touch my HeLa cultures?
This isn’t undergrad bio. We don’t do cookie-cutter protocols here. One micro-liter mistake on these cell lines, and three million dollars of synthetic tissue becomes expensive trash.”
Vane forced her breath to remain steady, refusing to step back despite his suffocating physical proximity.
“Then don’t let me make a mistake,” she shot back, her eyes locked onto his slate-gray depths.
“Give me the raw data for the Telomere project.
Let me run the alignment algorithms.
If I mess up the base pairs by even one single nucleotide, I’ll pack my bag and leave before the morning shift.”
A tense, suffocating silence settled over the lab.
The only sound was the rhythmic, low hum of the ultra-low temperature freezers.
Liam stared at her, his eyes narrowing as if he were reading her underlying physiological markers rather than her face.
“The server directory is ‘Alpha-Zero’,” Liam said coldly, finally drawing back just enough for her to breathe.
“The script is in Python. If your code isn’t compiling by 0200, don’t bother showing up tomorrow. And Sterling?”
He glanced back over his shoulder.
“Keep your distance from my personal bench. I don’t like people breathing in my clean zone.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Professor,” Vane smiled sweetly.
She walked over to the secondary terminal, her heart hammering against her ribs, though her face remained an absolute mask of academic confidence.
Her fingers flew across the mechanical keyboard, navigating through layers of encrypted directories.
The clock on the corner of the monitor ticked forward.
01:55 AM.
01:58 AM.
Vane’s eyes widened slightly as she successfully bypassed the final firewall.
Deep within the root files of the Alpha-Zero server, hidden underneath gigabytes of genomic sequence data, she found a restricted, heavily encrypted directory.
It wasn’t a gene sequence.
The filename read: [PROJECT_EVE_STERLING_V]
Vane’s breath hitched in her throat. Her blood ran ice-cold.
He already knows my real name.
Before she could even hit a key to close the window, the digital clock on the screen flashed.
02:00 AM.
The low hum of the lab HVAC system suddenly changed frequency.
Vane didn’t hear him cross the room.
But suddenly, the heat of his massive body materialized directly behind her chair, completely trapping her between his frame and the desk.
His large, leather-scented hand came down flat on the metal surface right next to her keyboard, his forearm brushing against her shoulder.
“Time’s up, my little detective,”
Liam’s gravelly voice whispered directly against the bare skin of her neck, his hot breath sending a violent shiver down her spine.
“Did you find the data you were looking for... or did you just find yourself?”
CONFIDENTIAL FILE: THE LAB NOTEBOOK
From the Desk of Dr. Liam (Private Log #001):
“Subject: Vane Sterling. Transferred today. Her file is flawless.
Too flawless. The cortisol levels in her sweat profile—detected via the HVAC intake sensors—are completely flat despite her elevated heart rate.
A normal student would be terrified of me.
She is performing fear, but her pupils are dilated with high-level adrenaline.
She is a fascinating little liar. I will not reject her application. I want to see how far she crawls into my trap before she realizes I’ve already locked the door.”
00:15 AM.
Vane enters Private Lab 404. Temperature drops. Liam establishes absolute physical dominance.
2.The Academic Confrontation:02:00 AM.
Vane uncovers a hidden file containing her real identity. Liam traps her at the terminal as the deadline hits.
INKITT POPULAR HIGHLIGHT FROM THIS CHAPTER:
“Time’s up, my little detective,” Liam’s gravelly voice whispered directly against the bare skin of her neck. “Did you find the data you were looking for... or did you just find yourself?”
