Chapter 3 - Shadows in the ClinicThe heavy steel doors of the Crosswell Clinic locked with a definitive thud, echoing through the sterile white corridors.
It was 3:00 AM.
The emergency wing was dead quiet, save for the rhythmic, mechanical beep of an automated drip in room four, where Leo—stabilized, drugged, and heavily chained to a reinforced medical bed—was sleeping off his blood loss. Outside, Damian’s private guards patrolled the perimeter. I should have felt safe.
Instead, every nerve ending in my body was screaming.
I sat at the nursing station, a cup of cold black coffee growing condensation beside my chart tablet. My mind kept looping back to the ballroom. To the way Damian had looked at me. To the raw, unchecked power radiating off a man who treated human lives like chess pieces.
Click.
It wasn't a loud sound. Just a faint, metallic click coming from the secure decontamination chamber down the hall.
I froze.
I glanced up at the monitor array above the desk. Camera four, covering the rear service alley, was flickering with static.
Static. Not a glitch. A signal jammer.
My hand dropped slowly below the counter, my fingers wrapping around the cold steel handle of a heavy trauma scissors I had pocketed earlier. I stood up, moving with absolute silence, hugging the shadows of the pharmaceutical supply hallway.
A shadow shifted against the frosted glass of the double doors leading into the trauma bay.
Not one shadow. Three.
They moved with tactical precision, clearing corners like military operators, completely bypassing the clinic's main security grid. They weren't police. They weren't even regular mob foot soldiers.
They were professionals. Mercer's clean-up crew.
They were here to silence Leo before he woke up and talked to Damian.
My heart hammered against my ribs. If I ran, they would hear me. If I stayed at the desk, I was a sitting duck. I slipped backward into supply closet B, pulling the heavy door until it clicked shut with a fraction-inch gap to peer through.
Through the narrow slit, I watched them enter the hallway.
The leader—a tall man with a jagged scar running down his throat and cold, dead eyes—raised a silenced pistol. He gestured to the two men behind him.
"Check the rooms. If the nurse is here, eliminate her. No witnesses. Grab the target."
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My breath hitched. My fingers tightened on the trauma scissors until my knuckles turned white.
They were hunting me too.
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