Chapter 13 - The Underground ArchiveI stormed out of the conference room before I lost my temper and gave security an excuse to drag me away in handcuffs.
My mind was spinning, adrenaline pumping through my veins like liquid fire. Katherine Vance had moved faster than federal prosecutors could blink. She had bought out the hospital’s remaining debt obligations overnight, exploiting a loophole in our corporate charter while the courts were still tied up in holiday recesses.
If I went through official channels, it would take weeks to block her injunction—weeks we didn't have.
I needed leverage.
Real leverage. The kind that didn't sit in a courtroom, but in the dark, forgotten corners of the hospital's infrastructure.
Ten minutes later, I found myself in the sub-basement of San Gabriel Civil Hospital—a subterranean labyrinth of steam pipes, electrical junction boxes, and disused storage rooms that hadn't seen daylight in twenty years.
According to the encrypted notes I had managed to salvage from Victor’s USB drive before it was logged into evidence, there was an auxiliary server room down here—an offline, analog data vault used by the hospital's previous administration before the Vance Foundation took over a decade ago.
Click. Whir.
My heavy steel flashlight cut through the thick, dust-laden darkness, illuminating rows of towering metal cabinets and buzzing mainframe servers covered in cobwebs.
I set my laptop down on an old metal folding table, plugged a specialized interface cable into the master terminal port, and held my breath.
If the analog vault was still hooked into the hospital's original grid, it would contain decades of unedited financial ledgers, patient intake logs, and—most importantly—the original adoption and surrogate tracking records that Mariana had spent her entire life running from.
BEEP.
The terminal screen flickered to life, bathing the dark room in a pale green glow.
Access Granted: Legacy Terminal 04.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, executing a deep query for the Morales file.
Files scrolled past in a blur: patient numbers, funding transfers, offshore accounts, and medical experiments disguised as clinical trials. But right at the bottom of the directory tree, a single encrypted file caught my eye.
It wasn't a corporate document. It was a scanned, handwritten journal entry written in Mariana’s familiar, hurried handwriting, dated just three weeks before she fled the city eight years ago.
May you like
I clicked to open it.
As the digital pages rendered on the screen, my breath caught in my throat. Mariana hadn't just run from Victor Vance because of blackmail. She had run because she discovered the true identity of the man funding the experimental pediatric clinics—and why Sofia was never supposed to be born at all.
