MY SUGAR MUMMY IS A BEAUTIFUL VAMPIRE

Chapter 68: Impossible!! Rose’s centuries old charade

The aroma of sizzling garlic and onions wafted through Tessa's apartment as she stood over the stovetop, sautéing the aromatics in a puddle of olive oil. She hummed absentmindedly to herself, occasionally glancing over her shoulder at Josh who was sprawled on the couch, idly tapping away at his laptop.

"Hey, remember when you used to leave flowers on my car every morning?" she called out teasingly.

Josh looked up, an amused smirk playing across his lips. "You mean back when I was trying desperately to get you to notice me? Those were the days."

"More like when you were a lovesick puppy following me around campus," Tessa countered with a laugh, tossing in some diced tomatoes to the simmering pan. "I thought you'd never take the hint that I was out of your league."

Josh feigned a wounded expression, placing a hand over his heart. "Ouch, you wound me! And after all the effort I put into those flower arrangements too."

They both chuckled at the memories, a comfortable camaraderie settling between them. Their shared history as undergrads studying investigative journalism had formed an unbreakable bond over the years, one that transcended the romantic overtures Josh had once pursued.

Josh specialized more with cybersecurity and all the tech stuff. But his lack of subordination and straight up disregard for protocol had his career turn out not so great.

Nonetheless, he managed to stay the same all through the years Tessa knew him.

As Tessa focused on preparing their lunch, Josh seemed to drift into contemplative silence, brow furrowed as he stared intently at something on his laptop screen. She could practically see the gears turning in his mind.

"You know..." he began slowly, eyes not leaving the display. "I've been thinking more about this whole Rose Shelly sun allergy thing."

Tessa arched an eyebrow, curiosity piqued. "What about it?"

"Well, what if it's not really a disease at all?" Josh posed, finally glancing up at her. "Like, what if her sensitivity to sunlight isn't caused by some medical condition?"

He began pulling up articles and webpage results, angling the laptop for Tessa to see as well.

"Check this out - I've been looking into all sorts of legends and lore about humanoid creatures that are photosensitive. Just normal stuff like werewolves, zombies, you name it. But I'm not saying she's any of those,"

Tessa gave him an incredulous look as she crossed the room, using a wooden spoon to gesture pointedly at his screen. "Are you seriously suggesting Rose Shelly is some kind of...what, mythical monster?"

But as Josh began rapidly clicking through the reference material he'd accumulated, pointing out highlighted passages and excerpts, Tessa felt her breath catch in her throat.

"Wait...you're not implying...a vampire?"

The word seemed to hang in the air, suddenly making her hypersensitive to how the late afternoon sunbeams slanting through her kitchen windows didn't quite reach all the way into the apartment's interior.

Josh's expression took on an impishly serious look. "I'm just saying, it Would explain a hell of a lot. The photosensitivity, her aversion to daylight, the fact that no one can seem to find any actual medical records or history about this supposed condition of hers..."

Tessa worried her lower lip, feeling an icy trickle of trepidation. As ludicrous as his theory sounded, she couldn't deny the pieces were starting to fall into place in a resonantly disturbing way.

"That's...that's just insane, Josh," she protested, struggling to make her voice sound convinced. "There's no way Rose could actually be--"

"A century-old vampire?" Josh finished for her, holding her gaze with unsettling calm. "I thought it was crazy too, I really did. Until I started looking into her background more closely..."

With a few deft keystrokes, he pulled up a series of documents, both of Shelly Techs' own personnel records and international travel manifests, identification records, and government archives from all over the world.

"See these?" He waved a hand over the scattered reports and dossiers, revealing subtle but substantive discrepancies across each one.

"Check out the birth dates...birthplaces...even the bio pics and descriptions barely match. And guess what, the woman has touched almost every continent in the world and has a grave in them. Death certificates are spammed across countries! The details keep shifting over an impossibly long period of time."

Tessa leaned over the laptop, hands braced on the couch as she read with furrowed brow. Josh was right - there were glaring omissions and flat-out contradictions about Rose's background spanning decades...possibly even centuries if you truly followed the convoluted paper trail to its fullest extent.

"I...I don't understand," she breathed, feeling the gnarled tentacles of something ancient and sinister begin wrapping around her perception of the Shelly Corp reality she thought they'd uncovered. "What the hell are we even looking at here?"

Josh pointed at one file in particular, a tattered document that appeared to be a British colonial navy ledger dating back to the 1800s.

"That's 'Rosemarie Shelly' listed there as a passenger headed to Bombay in 1864," he stated, tone low and weighty. "Skip ahead a hundred years or so, and here she is with a new identity registering as a Portuguese national in Macau in the early 1970s."

He stabbed his finger at another mugshot-style photo amidst a cluster of redacted CIA documents that looked vintage Cold War era. Then his hand moved to the Shelly Corp personnel file front and center, Rose's smooth, ageless face Despite the grainy inconsistent image quality, it was unmistakably the same woman across every single chronological and geographic datapoint.

"These records make it seem like Rose Shelly's been reincarnating herself with new identities and roots across multiple centuries, always covering her tracks with whatever story is most plausible for that era," Josh said heatedly, slapping his palm against the coffee table in emphasis.

"But when you really drill down, it's like she just...winds her way across the world over decades and decades, over and over again without ever aging. Almost like she's--"

"Immortal," Tessa whispered, the bizarre realization sending a chill down her spine. This stunning possibility seemed to shatter every remaining illusion of grounded reality surrounding their ongoing crusade against Rose's agenda.

Josh leaned back with a look of grave contemplation etched across his features.

"The pieces fit, Tess. I mean, think about it - with that kind of persistence and ability to endlessly reinvent herself without constraint, Rose would be perfectly positioned to amass the kind of power, wealth and global resources that make a monolithic megacorp like Shelly Tech possible."

His expression hardened, eyes flashing with determination.

"We're not just dealing with another corrupt CEO here - we're talking about something far older, more insidious and deeply rooted than we could've imagined. Some kind of...undying, shape-shifting entity playing the long game on a worldwide scale over multiple lifetimes."

"Just so we are on the same page. What do vampires feed on?" Josh asked Tessa.

"Blood?" Tessa answered, not quite sure why he asked.

"The video… I mean the cd in the envelope you found at your dad's study, what were they experimenting on?" Josh asked again.

"Blood?" She answered but this time things were starting to become very clear to her.

Tessa felt her heart pounding an unsteady cadence against her rib cage as she struggled to wrap her mind around the immensity of what Josh was proposing. She looked over at the simmering pan of sauce she'd abandoned on the stovetop, suddenly feeling like her entire existence had become unmoored.

"So...let me get this straight," she finally said in a quavering tone. "Are you saying we've stumbled onto something far bigger and more paradigm-shifting than just a human rights atrocity committed by Shelly Tech? That we might actually be facing down...an immortal vampire masquerading as the CEO of a multinational corporation?"

Josh met her gaze steadily, mouth set in a grim line. He gave a slow, solemn nod.

"Either that....or we're completely off the deep end and in way over our heads. But something tells me we're onto the real deal this time - the truth that's been hiding in plain sight for generations, maybe forever."

He snapped the laptop closed with a decisive thud, leaning forward with the intensity of a captain bracing their crew ahead of a coming maelstrom.

"The real question now is - what are you and I going to do about it?"

The uneasy silence that followed was broken only by the harsh sizzle and pop of Tessa's abandoned lunch burning unattended on the stovetop. She stared at the tendrils of smoke wafting from the pan, stomach clenched into a noxious knot, and knew without a shadow of a doubt...

There was no turning back now from the terrifying path their quest for truth had set them on.

"There's something I didn't tell you before because I wasn't really sure of it. But now with what we have on ground, I know the truth now,"

"What did you not tell me?" Josh asked.

"My dad and most of the co-workers on the day of the accident that claimed their lives, they all died because they seemingly bled out,"

"All 50 of them,"