The following day, Ethan and Marcus left the city early in the morning. The drive took just over two hours, passing through quieter roads and smaller towns until the buildings thinned out and the landscape became open and still. Marcus had traced Dr. Renato Ferrara's address through property records and public filings. The house was registered under the doctor's name in a small, unremarkable town far from the noise of the city.They found the house at the end of a narrow street lined with old trees. It was a modest place, well kept but plain, with a small garden and a low stone wall around the front. There was nothing about it that suggested the man living inside had once been a respected obstetrician at one of the city's largest hospitals. It looked like the home of someone who wanted to be forgotten.Ethan sat in his wheelchair at the front gate while Marcus knocked on the door. There was a long pause before it opened. The man who appeared was in his late sixties, thin and slightly

The drive back to the city was long and silent. Marcus kept his eyes on the road, and Ethan sat in the passenger seat with the folded document resting on his lap. Neither of them spoke for the first thirty minutes. The weight of what they had heard from Dr. Ferrara was still settling, and neither of them was ready to say out loud what they were both thinking.When they finally returned to the office, Ethan placed the document on his desk and stared at it for a long time. The partial surname and the name of the private family medical foundation sat on that yellowed page like two puzzle pieces that did not yet have a frame around them. They could mean everything, or they could mean nothing. But Ethan's instincts told him they meant everything.He handed the document to Marcus and told him to start researching the foundation. Marcus took it carefully, read the name twice, and nodded without asking any questions. He understood what was at stake.Over the next two days, Marcus worked throu

Ethan did not react to her outburst the way Clara had expected. Instead of becoming angry, instead of shouting back, he became quieter. His eyes narrowed, and a slow, careful expression settled across his face. Clara's words had not frightened him. They had made him more suspicious."You just said something very interesting," Ethan said calmly. "You said you know exactly who they are and what they are capable of."Clara blinked. The color shifted slightly in her face as she realized what she had revealed."How do you know powerful people are involved?" Ethan asked, his voice steady and precise. "I never told you what I found. I never told you about the sealed records. I never mentioned a foundation or a family or anyone connected to any of this." He paused and let the silence press against her. "So how are you so certain that powerful people are behind it? And how do you know they would come after me?"Clara's jaw tightened. Her eyes moved away from his face for just a second, long en

Among the pages Dr. Ferrara had given him, folded inside the same yellowed document, Ethan had found a small photograph. He had almost missed it the first time, tucked flat against the paper like an afterthought. It showed a man standing near the hospital's maternity entrance, his face partially turned away from the camera, his hand resting near his side in a way that seemed almost deliberate.The photograph stayed on Ethan's desk for two full days. He kept returning to it, picking it up, studying the faded edges and the small timestamp printed in the corner, then setting it down again. He compared its date against every record he had already collected. The birth certificate. The maternity admission form. The handwritten notes from the sealed file. He laid them all out side by side, and no matter how many times he checked, the timeline was impossible to ignore.Clara had given him one story about the birth, a story he had believed for years without question. But the hospital records t

Meanwhile, Gale's situation had become desperate. Dream Tech was hemorrhaging clients at a pace that even Gale's mistress could not spin into good news. Two more contracts had fallen through in the past week alone, and the projects that remained were failing under her mismanagement. She had never been trained to handle the technical complexity that Ethan had once managed effortlessly, and every attempt to patch the gaps only revealed more problems underneath.The final blow came when Jushan Tech quietly informed Dream Tech that they would no longer be receiving priority status. It was not a formal termination, but everyone in the industry understood what it meant. Dream Tech had fallen from being one of Jushan's most trusted partners to just another company on a long list of vendors.Gale sat alone in his office late one evening, staring at reports that showed his company's revenue collapsing week after week. His pride, the same pride that had once made him fire Ethan in front of the