The bathroom door clicked open, and the humid fog of a hot shower rolled into the hallway, smelling faintly of Ethan’s cedarwood body wash. He stepped out with a white towel slung low around his waist, water droplets glistening on the sharp planes of his shoulders—shoulders that had felt like home for four years, but now looked like foreign territory. / Chapter 5 / 20

Chapter 5 - The Midnight AuditThe digital clock on the nightstand read 1:15 AM.

Outside our bedroom window, the city lights flickered through the rain-streaked glass, casting long, fractured shadows across the hardwood floor. Down the hall, I could hear the muffled sound of Ethan pacing—back and forth, back and forth, like a caged animal testing the iron bars of its enclosure. Every few minutes, his phone buzzed violently against the kitchen island countertop, followed by frantic whispering. Likely his department chair, or perhaps Sophia, panicking as the digital audit trail unraveled across the institutional network.

I sat cross-legged on the edge of the mattress, my laptop glowing in the darkened room.

My fingers flew across the keyboard. Marcus Vance, my attorney, had already sent over the preliminary asset freeze order, but there was more work to be done. A clinical trial of this magnitude didn't just run on algorithms and peptides; it ran on paper trails, funding grants, and corporate sponsorships. And West End Biotech—the gleaming, glass-fronted facility where Ethan and Sophia spent their late nights—was heavily backed by a venture capital firm known as Meridian Health Ventures.

A firm whose managing director was a man named Arthur Vance.

Marcus’s uncle.

I pulled up the corporate directory for Meridian Health Ventures, my eyes scanning the board of directors. There, nestled right beneath Arthur Vance’s name, was a familiar face: Dr. Harrison Thorne.

My former mentor. The man who had trained me during my residency at Johns Hopkins, and who had warned me three years ago, over a cup of bitter cafeteria coffee, that Ethan Sterling possessed a brilliant mind and a thoroughly bankrupt moral compass.

“He’s ambitious, Claire,” Harrison had said back then, swirling his coffee. “The kind of ambition that doesn't just climb the ladder—he pulls out the rungs so no one else can follow.”

I had defended Ethan back then. I had laughed it off as academic rivalry.

Now, looking at the corporate filings showing that West End Biotech was positioning to secure a twelve-million-dollar acquisition deal tied directly to the stolen peptide sequence, I realized Harrison had understated it. Ethan wasn't just climbing; he was liquidating my life's work to fund his exit strategy with Sophia.

My phone lit up on the nightstand. An incoming call from an unknown number.

I let it ring out to voicemail. A second later, a text popped up on the screen.

Unknown: Claire, please pick up. We need to talk before tomorrow morning. If you lock the lab accounts, the whole project goes under. We can fix this.

It was Ethan. Using a burner number or a borrowed phone because I had already blocked his primary cell.