Chapter 7 - The Final AssetThe rain began to fall just before dawn, drumming a steady, relentless rhythm against the glass panes of the estate.
Inside the federal holding facility, Reed Whitaker sat alone in his cell. The harsh fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sickly yellow glow over the concrete walls.
The heavy steel door rattled.
The slot at the bottom opened, and a single brown envelope slid across the floor.
Reed ignored it for a long minute before slowly leaning down to pick it up. He tore open the flap and pulled out a single sheet of heavy cream-colored paper bearing the Whitaker Medical Holdings letterhead.
It wasn't a legal document. It was a photograph.
It showed Maren standing upright, supported by a pair of advanced robotic exoskeleton braces developed in secret by her father’s R&D lab fifteen years ago—the exact project Reed had spent a decade trying to suppress under the guise of an 'unrecoverable medical condition.'
Across the bottom of the photograph, handwritten in bold, elegant ink, were three sentences:
You thought the paralysis was my weakness. It was my camouflage. Welcome to the end of your life, Reed.
May you like
Reed dropped the paper as if it burned his skin. He scrambled backward against the concrete wall, his breath catching in his throat as the terrifying realization finally settled into his bones.
She hadn't been helpless. She had been hunting him all along.
