CHAPTER 179
SKYLAR'S POV
The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning, delivered through channels so secure that only a handful of people in the world knew how to access them. I was feeding two-year-old Elena her breakfast when Lucas brought me an envelope bearing a seal I recognized but hadn't seen in over a decade.
"This came through the old emergency contact system," he said, his expression serious. "The one your mother set up before she died."
My hands trembling slightly, I opened the envelope to find a handwritten note:
*"Skylar - I have information about your children that you need to hear. Meet me at the place where your mother used to take you for ice cream. Tomorrow, 3 PM. Come alone. - C"*
Claire. My old classmate who'd betrayed us to my father years ago, who'd disappeared after Henry's destruction and had been presumed dead.
"You're not seriously considering this," Harry said when I showed him the letter.
"Claire has been underground for three years. Why surface now with information about our children?"
"She betrayed us. Multiple times."
"She was a frightened teenager being manipulated by adults who specialized in psychological warfare. Just like I was."
Through the window, I could see Addison and Liam in the garden with Jax, practicing what looked like a nature lesson but which I knew was actually camouflage and concealment training. At eight and five, they moved through the environment with the unconscious tactical awareness that Dr. Morrison had identified as concerning.
"What if Claire's right?" I asked quietly. "What if there's something about our children that we're not seeing clearly?"
"What if this is a trap designed to separate you from your protection?" Lucas countered.
"Then you'll track me, coordinate extraction, and eliminate any threats. Like always."
That afternoon, I sat alone in the small ice cream parlor where my mother had taken me during the brief periods when my father was traveling. It was one of the few purely happy memories from my childhood, untainted by violence.
Claire arrived exactly on time, but the young woman who slid into the booth across from me looked nothing like the teenager I remembered. She was thin, pale, with hypervigilance in her eyes that suggested years of running from powerful enemies.
"Thank you for coming," she said quietly, scanning the parlor for potential threats in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of my own children.
"What information do you have about my children?"
"Information about what they're becoming. What we all become when we're raised in families like ours."
"Families like ours?"
"Families where love and violence are so intertwined that children can't tell the difference. Where normal social relationships become impossible because no one else understands the moral compromises you've learned to live with."
Claire ordered coffee with hands that shook slightly. "I've been watching your family for three years. Monitoring your children's development, trying to understand what happens to kids like us when they grow up in environments where violence is normalized."
"You've been spying on us?"
"I've been trying to save them from becoming what I became. What you're becoming."
"Which is what?"
"Functional sociopaths. People who can love deeply but only within very narrow parameters. People who see violence as a reasonable solution to complex problems."
"That's not what we are."
"Isn't it? Skylar, you eliminated thirty-seven people at the Academy Awards while holding a baby. Your children practice combat techniques disguised as games."
"We protect innocent people."
"So did your father, in his twisted way. So does every person who's ever justified violence in the name of protecting someone they love."
The comparison to my father hit like a physical blow. "I'm nothing like Jack Mitchell."
"You're exactly like him, except your targets are people you consider evil. But the fundamental psychology is the same - you believe that love justifies violence, that protecting your family gives you the right to eliminate threats."
Claire pulled out a tablet and showed me video footage that made my blood run cold. Security camera recordings of our children over the past months, compiled from various public locations.
"Watch how Addison evaluates strangers. See how Liam positions himself near exits. Notice how Elena stops crying when she hears certain voice patterns that indicate adult alertness."
The footage was exactly what Dr. Morrison had shown us, but seeing it compiled by an outside observer made the patterns more obvious and disturbing.
"They're not having childhoods," Claire continued. "They're having training programs disguised as family life."
"They're learning to protect themselves in a dangerous world."
"They're learning to see the world as inherently dangerous, which means they'll never be able to relax their guard enough to experience normal human connection."
"What are you proposing?"
Claire was quiet for a moment, then reached across the table to touch my hand. "I'm proposing that you love your children enough to give them the chance to be normal. That you step away from the work that's turning them into weapons."
"And let trafficking networks operate unchallenged?"
"Let other people fight that battle while you focus on not repeating the cycle that created us."
As I sat in that ice cream parlor, looking at a young woman who'd survived our shared history but bore the psychological scars of growing up in criminal families, I realized she was asking me to make the hardest choice of my life.
Choose between saving other people's children and potentially damaging my own.
Choose between the mission that had defined my adult life and the family that had redeemed it.
"I need time to think," I said.
"You don't have time. Every day you delay, your children become more like us and less like normal kids. At some point, the damage becomes irreversible."
As I left the ice cream parlor and walked toward the extraction point where I knew Harry, Jax, and Lucas were waiting, I couldn't shake the feeling that Claire might be right.
That in saving the world, we might be destroying the people we loved most.
And that the choice between mission and family might finally have become impossible to avoid.
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