Chapter 3 - THE SECRET WARD OF ST. CATHERINE'SBreaking into the ArchivesThe second letter provided the key that unlocked the darkest secret of St. Catherine’s Medical Center. Margaret Bennett hadn’t just been a nurse; she had been the head supervisor of Ward 4B—a sealed, off-the-books maternity wing funded entirely by anonymous shell corporations tied to Charles Ashford’s pharmaceutical empire.
At 4:15 AM, Claire and Adrian bypassed the electronic security of the hospital using a master key fob provided by an insider who had fled the city hours earlier.
The corridors of Ward 4B were freezing, smelling faintly of industrial bleach and old dust.
"Look at this," Claire said, running her flashlight along a row of archived file cabinets in a locked records room. She pulled out a faded ledger labeled December 1999 – November 2024.
She flipped the pages rapidly, her eyes scanning the handwritten admissions. "Adrian... look at the birth dates. And look at the mortality rates."
Adrian stepped behind her, his chest brushing her shoulder as he leaned in. The scent of rain and cedar washed over her, a strange, grounding anchor in the middle of a nightmare.
"They weren't just medical records," Adrian murmured, reading the margin notes. "They were trafficking logs. Ashford’s foundation was using St. Catherine’s to harvest stem cells and biological markers from high-profile infants born to compromised mothers, trading them on a black-market exchange that reached all the way to Geneva."
"And Caroline stumbled onto it," Claire realized, a cold shiver running down her spine. "When she gave birth to Sophie, she didn't just have a routine complication. She saw something she wasn't supposed to see. She realized her baby was scheduled to be swapped or manipulated."
Suddenly, the red emergency lights overhead flickered to life. A piercing alarm shrieked through the quiet halls.
May you like
CLANK.
The heavy steel fire doors at both ends of the hallway dropped simultaneously, sealing them inside the archive room.
