The mood shifted like a window being opened in a stuffy room.Wine flowed. Food arrived. Real food, not the performative kind that comes with tension and enemies at the next table.Rachel, who had been wound tight as a loaded spring all evening, finally relaxed enough to pick up a fork and eat. She even smiled once, though she immediately pretended she hadn't.Vivienne leaned back in her chair, loosened by the wine and the adrenaline still fading from her system, and turned her gaze on Ethan with the sharp curiosity of a woman who had been holding a question back all night and was done waiting."I need to ask you something, and I want an honest answer." Her voice was warm but direct, the way only someone who had just declared you family could speak. "I've seen what you can do tonight, Ethan. You caught bullets out of the air. You killed a Tier 9 enforcer with a coffee mug. You walked into a room full of armed men and walked out without a scratch on you. So why are you living as a desp

Vivienne stepped forward and addressed the room with the practiced ease of a woman who had spent her entire life walking into rooms full of powerful people and making them listen."Mayor Hartwell, Mrs. Hartwell, thank you for seeing us on such short notice. This is Ethan Morrison. He has extraordinary medical knowledge that I believe could be of genuine help to Mrs. Hartwell's condition."James Hartwell rose from his chair beside the wheelchair and extended his hand. His grip was firm, his smile measured, the handshake of a man who had shaken ten thousand hands and learned to read people in the first three seconds of contact. His eyes moved across Ethan's face, his plain clothes, his young features, and something flickered behind his polite expression. Not dismissal, exactly. Caution."Thank you for coming, Mr. Morrison. Any friend of Vivienne's is welcome in this house."Dean Bradshaw did not share the mayor's diplomacy. He sat in his chair with his legs crossed and his glasses pushe

Dr. Whitfield's face darkened. His jaw tightened, and his hands curled slowly against his thighs. The words hit him like stones thrown at a wall he had spent his entire life building. He wanted to respond.Ethan could see it in the old man's eyes, the fire, the indignation, the decades of knowledge and dedication being dismissed like dust swept off a table.But his own failure to diagnose Eleanor had taken the ground out from under him. He couldn't defend what he couldn't deliver.Ethan stepped forward.He didn't ask for permission. He didn't raise his hand. He didn't clear his throat or wait for a polite opening. He just stepped into the center of the room, and something about the way he moved made every head turn toward him.He looked at Bradshaw first. His voice was calm. Cold. Each word placed with the precision of a nail being driven into wood."You are a disgrace. You sit in a chair your forefathers built. You eat food grown from knowledge they spent centuries developing. You br

"This is an absolute disgrace!" He was on his feet so fast his chair scraped back three inches across the hardwood. His face had gone from pink to purple in the space of a breath, and a vein in his forehead throbbed like it was trying to escape."A fraud! A quack! A con artist preying on a vulnerable family with fairy tales and superstition! Parasitic worms in the heart? What is this, a horror movie? Security should drag this boy out by his collar before he does any more damage!"George uncrossed his legs and turned to the mayor with the slow, satisfied smile of a man watching his opponent step on every landmine he had laid out."Mr. Mayor, this is exactly why traditional medicine cannot be taken seriously. Real doctors use imaging. Bloodwork. Peer reviewed diagnostics."He gestured at Ethan without looking at him, like pointing at something unpleasant on the bottom of a shoe. "They don't invent fairy tale monsters to explain what they can't understand.""Oh, I like this one," the Spi

The Heart Devourer ripped through Eleanor's chest like a black worm tearing out of wet soil.It was the size of a thumb, slick with blood, thrashing and coiling as the flames drove it out of the wound it had been feeding from for months.The room erupted. George stumbled backward so hard he knocked his chair over and nearly fell on top of it.Bradshaw made a noise somewhere between a scream and a whimper, the kind of sound a man makes when his brain tries to reject what his eyes are seeing and his mouth picks whatever comes out first.Vivienne pressed one hand to her mouth. Rachel stepped forward on instinct, her fingers twitching toward her belt before she realized there was nothing to fight.Mayor Hartwell grabbed the edge of the table. His face had gone the color of wet cement.Ethan did not flinch.He snatched a single silver needle from the case and hurled it across the room in one smooth motion.The needle punched through the parasite and pinned it to the wall like a butterfly i