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CHAPTER 39
The shift was long, the ward busy in the particular relentless way that usually swallowed his attention whole, and yet he found his mind drifting, again and again. Throughout the entire shift—while he checked vitals, while he presented cases to the attending, while he charted in the corner of the busy ward—the memory of that smile kept surfacing. It all felt odd to him. He tried to dismiss it as the usual campus posturing. Wealthy students arrived every semester with bigger names and bigger egos. Most of them faded into the background once they realized the medical program did not care about last names. By the time he made it back to the apartment, exhaustion had settled into his shoulders, the kind that came less from physical effort and more from an entire day of holding his guard up in one form or another. He hadn't even set his keys down when Charlie came barreling in behind him, energy radiating off him like static. "Bro. Bro, have you he
CHAPTER 38
The lab's confession still rang in Darius's ears long after he'd hung up the phone, but for once, being one step ahead had worked in his favor. "Thank God for paranoia," Charlie said, watching Darius pull a small sealed vial from the back of the medicine cabinet, tucked behind a row of ordinary supplements where no one would think to look twice. "You really made a duplicate of everything?" "You think I'd just blindly trust what's going on in this city," Darius confirmed, turning the vial over in his fingers, studying the label he'd written himself in a hand no one else would recognize. "I wasn't about to hand over the only copy of evidence to a courier I'd never met, going to a lab I barely visit, based on a referral I couldn't verify. Call it instinct." "Call it terrifying," Charlie muttered. "So what now? How are you going to get these samples tested." "I have a plan." Darius was already pulling up flight logistics on his laptop, jaw set with the particula
CHAPTER 37
Three days blurred into one continuous vigil. Darius had lost count of how many times he'd dozed off in the chair beside his grandfather's bed only to jerk awake at the faintest change in the monitor's rhythm, certain the worst had happened before his eyes even focused on the screen. Each time, the same steady green line greeted him, and each time, some small, exhausted part of him allowed itself to believe it might actually hold. It was on the morning of the fourth day that Dr. Whitfield came to find him in the cubicle he dozed off in overnight, and for the first time since the estate had turned into a hive of hushed footsteps and clinical murmuring, the man was smiling. "His numbers are improving," Whitfield said, holding out a printed chart as though it were evidence in a trial. "Heart rhythm's stabilized overnight. Oxygen saturation is back within normal range. And this morning, he asked for tea." Darius stared at him, his eyes diliating in
CHAPTER 36
"This drug." Darius dropped the page onto the bedside table, hard enough that the monitor beside it rattled. "The one added 2 years ago. Why was it introduced." Whitfield exchanged a glance with his colleagues before answering, his tone careful, rehearsed in the way of someone who had explained this before. "That was recommended by Dr. Kane, one of the most respected clinical pharmacists in the region. He consulted on your grandmaster's case after the fatigue and tremors became more pronounced. The medication was meant to stabilize his energy levels and reduce strain on the heart during periods of exertion." "And it's been effective," the second physician added, quicker than Darius expected, almost eager to reassure him. "Mr. Argent's own reports supported it. He told us himself, more than once, that he felt sharper, steadier. He specifically asked that we continue it when we raised the possibility of adjusting the dosage last spring." "He appreciated the change," Whitfield said.
CHAPTER 35
The road blurred beneath the tires, streetlights smearing into gold streaks against the frame as he leaned low over the handlebars. Darius gripped them so tightly his knuckles ached. All of what just happened at the dining had shrunk into something distant and irrelevant beside the single sentence looping through his skull. 'It's your grandfather.' He didn't remember most of the ride. He only remembered arriving — the bike skidding hard against the gravel of the Argent estate's private drive, tires kicking up stone as he wrenched it to a stop and let it clatter to the ground behind him, staff scattering out of his way as he sprinted up the marble steps two at a time. The estate, usually so still and composed at this hour, was alive with a controlled chaos that made his stomach drop the moment he crossed the threshold. Nurses moved briskly through the halls. A gurney sat pushed against the wall outside his grandfather's private wing, abandoned mid-use. And Holt stood outside
CHAPTER 34
With Mars Bentley finally behind bars, and the shadow of his threats lifted for good, even though Cameron Bentley wouldn't stop until he got his son out, even thought that would be very difficult, Darius allowed himself, to breathe properly without having to think of what plot someone is orchestrating to bring him down next. But the relief was hollow. Every time he exhaled, it caught somewhere in his chest, tangled with the memory of Rhea's face the night everything fell apart. The disgust in her eyes and the silence that followed him all the way home, which still wrapped around him till today. He sat sprawled across the couch, staring blankly at his phone, thumb hovering uselessly over her contact photo. "You've been staring at that screen for twenty minutes," Charlie said, dropping into the armchair across from him with a bag of chips. "You gonna call her, or are we just gonna admire her contact picture together?" Darius exhaled sharply, tossin
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