The air in the corporate safe house was sterile, tasting of recycled oxygen and cold metal. It was a place scrubbed of identity, a fitting tomb for the man Caspian Hawthorne used to be.
He slid the encrypted flash drive into the laptop’s port. His hands, usually so steady, carried a faint tremor. A few keystrokes, a bypassed protocol Hawthorne security had designed to be unbreakable, and a file bloomed on the screen.
Multi-angle security feed. Corridor. St. Jude’s Medical Center.
He watched in absolute silence. There was Isolde, her face a mask of calm concentration. She was speaking to the man, her associate, gesturing toward the wall. Directing him. The man nodded, a prop taking his marks. She adjusted her position, glancing at her reflection in the darkened glass of a donor plaque.
This was not a woman in fear of an attack. This was a director rehearsing a scene.
Caspian’s breath hitched. He saw the man tense, saw Isolde give a small, sharp nod. The man lunged. The shove was clumsy, theatrical. Isolde crumpled to the floor with a practiced grace, her handbag spilling its contents across the polished linoleum.
She lay there, a portrait of victimhood, waiting for the footsteps of hospital staff to rush to her aid.
And then it happened.
The moment that would be burned behind Caspian’s eyes for the rest of his life. Isolde, believing herself unobserved in the chaos, shifted her head just slightly. Her eyes found the domed security camera in the ceiling, the very one feeding this image to him now.
A faint, triumphant smile curled the corner of her lips.
It was there for only a second. A flicker of pure, venomous victory. Then it was gone, replaced by a mask of exquisite pain as the first nurse rounded the corner.
The video played on, but Caspian saw nothing else. The savior complex that had driven him for years, the noble narrative he had built around himself, did not just crack. It was incinerated.
He hadn’t just been a fool. He had been a weapon. An instrument of pathological cruelty, wielded by a monster who smiled at her own reflection in the wreckage of other people’s lives.
He was an accomplice. And the sickness in his stomach was the poison of that truth, finally taking root.
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