Chapter 4 - The Betrayal WithinThe heavy steel door of the medical suite was ajar.
My breath caught in my throat. I kicked the door wide open, raising my weapon.
Inside, the room was eerily quiet. The heart monitors beeped with a steady, rhythmic green line. Jonah and Blythe were still asleep in the shared oversized bed, their small hands clasped together. But standing beside their IV drips was a figure I never expected to see holding a syringe.
Prescott Hale.
His clothes were spotless. The gash on his forehead was gone—a clever stage-whisper trick to get me to lower my guard during the initial chaos. He held a syringe filled with a thick, amber-colored fluid, hovering directly over Blythe's central line.
"Prescott," I whispered, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. "Put the needle down."
Prescott didn't look startled. He slowly turned around, a calm, chilling smile playing on his lips as he lowered the syringe.
"I'm sorry, Lawson," Prescott said softly, his voice lacking any trace of the loyal subordinate he had pretended to be for over a decade. "The Mercer empire was built on blood, sweat, and ruthless execution. But empires fall when the kings get soft. You started looking backward when you should have been looking forward."
"You killed Genevieve," I said, the realization hitting me with the force of a freight train. "You were Vane's inside man all along."
"Genevieve was brilliant, I'll give her that," Prescott sighed, shaking his head. "She figured out that the pharmaceutical trials we were running in the slums were testing synthetic pathogens. But she was too naive to realize that the board—and Vane—owned the entire medical infrastructure. We had to silence her."
"And now you're finishing the job with my children," I stepped forward, my finger tightening on the trigger.
"They were never meant to survive the trial, Lawson," Prescott said, raising the syringe toward Jonah's line instead. "And neither are—"
Bang.
The deafening crack of a gunshot echoed inside the sterile room.
Prescott froze mid-sentence. His eyes widened in absolute shock as a small, neat hole appeared dead-center in his forehead. The syringe slipped from his nerveless fingers, shattering against the tile floor as he collapsed hard onto his back, lifeless before he hit the ground.
I slowly lowered my pistol, my head snapping toward the doorway.
May you like
Elena stood there, the barrel of her submachine gun still smoking slightly. She didn't look at Prescott's body. She walked straight past me, knelt beside the children's IV bags, and immediately began disconnecting the contaminated lines, replacing them with a small vial she pulled from her coat.
"He talks too much," Elena muttered coldly. "And time was up anyway."
