Rise of Cassian Vale: The Forbidden Healer

The gate of Skyline Correctional groaned shut behind him.

Cassian Vale stood in the open lot outside, rain hammering down on his shoulders, soaking through the thin prison-issue jacket in seconds. He didn't move. Didn't flinch.

Seven years.

He tilted his face up and let the rain hit it.

Seven years, and it ends like this. No apology. No cameras. Just rain.

Somewhere behind his ribs, something old and cold settled into place. Not relief. Not joy. Just quiet, patient calculation.

The memories came anyway. They always did.

Four years chasing a formula that could save more lives than anything on the market. Nexara. He remembered the night the final trial data came back clean, he remembered actually smiling, actually believing something good was about to happen to him.

Then the second dataset. The interaction. A patient on a common blood thinner combined with Nexara didn't heal. They died, slow and ugly, over eleven days, and Cassian was the only one in the building willing to say the word *recall* out loud.

Victor Harrow the owner of Biomed whose pharmaceutical company made Nexara and who Cassian worked for hadn't liked that word.

Neither had Julian Harrow, the son and Cassian's direct boss and suddenly, a body appeared and Cassian was arrested and charged for the murder of the research victim.

He remembered the exact way his wife Lucia Rowan had looked at him that night in the cell when she told him she didn't love him anymore. She didn't look angry or even guilty of discarding Cassian when he needed her most.

Cassian had thought it was because he was facing murder charges that was why she was leaving him now, until she dropped the bombshell as she gave him the divorce papers to sign

The Rowan family never accepted Cassian as Lucia's husband.

They had always mocked his background, his clothes, his career, and his inability to provide their daughter with a wealthy lifestyle.

So Cassian was surprised when they abandoned him immediately he was arrested.

"Julian and I are seeing each other and I don't want you getting in the way." She had said coldly.

He remembered the courtroom. The doctored logs. The security footage that had been "corrupted." The prosecutor reading his own research back to him like an indictment.

He remembered Lucia in the gallery, Julian's hand resting on the small of her back, both of them watching him get sentenced like it was theater.

"Seven years for telling the truth." He said to himself.

The rain didn't wash any of it away. It never will, but it did something else. It reminded him he was still breathing, still standing, still here to do something about it.

While in prison, Cassian had met Dr. Elias Voss, the legendary doctor who thought him forgotten medical arts, healing strategies, marital arts and since then, Cassian had not remained the same.

A black car eased to a stop at the curb. No sound from the engine that Cassian could place. The car was a Rolls-Royce phantom worth nearly ten million dollars.

A man in a plain dark coat stepped out with an umbrella he didn't bother opening for himself, only for Cassian, who ignored it and let the rain keep falling on him anyway.

“Master.” He said bowing.

Cassian recognized the car logo. Vicman group, the richest company in Skyline City. Cassian and Dr. Elias Voss had built Vicman Group from the ground up, turning it into a business empire worth tens of billions.

The man inclined his head, still bowing. "Dr. Voss sent me."

Cassian studied him. Calm eyes. No fear, no curiosity, just the look of someone used to serving people far more dangerous than he appeared.

"What did he tell you to give me." Cassian asked.

“He instructed me to hand over the chairman position to you when you got out. I'm here to assist you with whatever you need.”

Cassian nodded. There would be time to unpack what Elias Voss had actually handed him but tonight wasn't about that.

“We'll talk about that later. Take me home.”

The car cut through the city in silence, wipers beating a slow rhythm against the glass. Cassian watched the streets slide by. The same streets he used to walk to work at Helix, streets that used to mean something before they became the last thing he saw before four gray walls.

His mother had come to see him four times in seven years. Each time smaller than the last, like grief was eating her a little every visit. Maya his sister had come once, in the first year, and never again. He hadn't blamed her. He still didn't.

"I did this to them. Not Julian. Not Lucia. Me. I let it happen." He told himself.

He had always blamed himself for allowing the Harrows and Rowans to use him. He had almost neglected his mother and sister so he could please Lucia and her family but it turned out it was all for nothing.

The thought sat in his chest like a stone he had carried throughout his sentence and had never once managed to put down.

The car turned into the old side of the city. Narrow streets, sagging buildings, laundry lines strung between windows. His mother's building.

Cassian was out of the car before it fully stopped and then he heard it.

The sound of glass breaking. A man's voice, ugly and amused. His mother, screaming.

"Please! She can't even run, just leave her alone!"

Something in Cassian's chest went white-hot and perfectly, terrifyingly still. He was up the stairwell before he'd decided to move.

The apartment door hung open on one hinge. Inside, his mother was on the floor, one hand pressed to a bleeding lip, the other stretched out toward the wheelchair across the room — toward Maya, who was pinned against the wall by a man twice her size, his hand fisted in the front of her shirt.

"Little cripple's got some fire in her," the man said, laughing over his shoulder to the three others fanned out behind him. "Boss said we could have some fun once the message got delivered. I think this counts as fun."

Maya's voice cracked as she screamed for help, one fist swinging uselessly at a wrist she couldn't move.

Cassian didn't remember crossing the room.

He only remembered the sound the door made when it slammed off the wall behind him and four heads turning at once toward the man standing in the frame, rain still running off him onto the floor, eyes gone flat and black with something none of them had a name for.

The one holding Maya let go of her just long enough to grin.

"Well, well. Look who finally showed up."