CHAPTER TWO — THE DEAD DOCTOR'S SECRET
By sunrise, I had already ordered my private investigators to disappear.
No company emails.
No police reports.
No digital trail.
If Audrey truly believed she had outsmarted me...
I wanted her to keep believing it.
Within forty-eight hours, the truth became stranger than murder.
The doctor everyone believed had died in a boating accident...
Never existed.
His medical license was fake.
His fingerprints matched three different identities across two countries.
Even his funeral photographs had been fabricated.
Someone had erased an entire human being.
Then my investigator uncovered another impossible fact.
Every wealthy patient who had stayed on the twelfth floor during the past five years...
Had rewritten their wills within thirty days.
Twenty-three of them died.
Natural causes.
Heart failure.
Stroke.
Respiratory complications.
Every death had been perfectly legal.
Every inheritance had quietly shifted.
Every lawyer involved worked for the same hidden trust.
My mother was patient number twenty-four.
Suddenly, Audrey wasn't just trying to kill an old woman.
She was completing a business transaction.
I pretended nothing had changed.
I even visited Audrey's luxury apartment carrying roses.
She smiled with relief.
"I knew you'd forgive me."
I kissed her forehead.
"I never stopped loving you."
She believed every word.
That night she celebrated with champagne.
She never noticed the tiny tracker inside the bouquet.
For six nights I watched her.
Not through detectives.
Through my own eyes.
She visited abandoned warehouses.
Private airports.
Luxury hotels.
Always meeting different people.
But every conversation ended with the same mysterious name.
"The Chairman."
Nobody knew who he was.
Nobody had ever photographed him.
Then everything exploded.
My mother suddenly disappeared from intensive care.
No alarms.
No witnesses.
Only one nurse remained alive long enough to whisper three words before collapsing.
"She's... underground..."
The police searched the hospital.
Nothing.
The blueprints revealed nothing.
Until I remembered one detail from construction documents I had approved years earlier after donating money for the hospital expansion.
There was an unfinished emergency bunker beneath the west wing.
Officially...
It had never been completed.
Unofficially...
It had never been sealed.
I descended with six members of my private security team.
The lights flickered.
The air smelled of bleach and old concrete.
Then we heard voices.
Dozens of them.
We followed the sound.
A giant steel door slowly opened.
Inside sat twenty elderly patients.
Each connected to expensive medical equipment.
Each officially declared too sick to move.
My mother was among them.
Still alive.
Still conscious.
Then someone clapped.
Slowly.
Confidently.
A man stepped from the shadows wearing an immaculate black suit.
Silver hair.
Perfect posture.
A smile colder than winter.
Audrey walked beside him.
She slipped her hand into his.
Then looked directly at me.
"You were never the target, Justin."
The old man smiled wider.
"We've been building empires by inheriting them."
"And now..."
May you like
He glanced toward my mother.
"...your family is next."
