SUPREME WAR GOD The Despised Son-in-Law Returns

Chapter 4: The Name on the Traitor's File

Damon didn't sit down. He opened the red folder and read it standing, page after page, while Shaw waited silently by the vault door.

"Supreme Commander Damon Vale, known as the Asura, has been found guilty of high treason. He sold the defense plans of Frostgate Pass to the Kingdom of Korvath, and he died while fleeing justice."

At the bottom of the order was a thick, proud signature: Grand Marshal Victor Draven.

On the next page were four names under the words Partners in Treason. General Tobias Rook, General Bruno Mace, General Ryker Stone and General Samuel Adeyemi had all been sentenced to life in the Iron Coffin.

The last page was about the Legion. Ten million soldiers had been broken into small units and sent to every corner of the nation, and every unit was ordered to attend "re-education" meetings once a week.

Damon closed the folder carefully, the way a man closes a coffin.

"My brothers are alive?"

"As far as anyone knows, sir. But nobody has ever walked out of the Iron Coffin."

"And the soldiers? Did they believe it?"

"Some believed it, and some didn't." Shaw looked at the floor. "The ones who didn't stopped saying so after a while. A few of them simply disappeared."

The Asura Core gave one hard beat in Damon's belly, hot and hungry, as if it wanted to tear its way out of him and fly straight to the capital. He breathed slowly until it settled.

Anger was a weapon, and he would choose when to use it.

"Where is Draven now?" he asked.

"He's Minister of War as well as Grand Marshal, sir, and he controls the whole capital army." Shaw hesitated. "People in Ironcrest whisper that he wants to be President one day."

"People whisper a lot of things," Damon said. "Let them."

"Listen carefully, Leonard. As of today, the Asura is still dead. Nobody learns about this visit, not your staff, not your board and not your wife."

"I understand, sir."

"I'll need a bank card that can't be traced back to this account. And I want everything you can find on the Grant Group; who they owe, who they borrow from and how deep they're sinking."

Shaw raised his eyebrows. "The Grants? That's easy, sir. They're drowning in debt, and most of it belongs to the Kane family."

Damon filed the name away in his mind. "Find out exactly how much."

Shaw took a plain black card from his inside pocket and pressed it into Damon's hand. "This one has no name on it, sir, and no link to the Legion. It has no limit either."

An hour later, Damon sat on a bench across the street from Saint Moore Hospital with a small paper bag on his knee. He had bought it on the old herb street on his way, using his new card for the first time: a pack of silver acupuncture needles and nothing else.

Saint Moore was the largest hospital in Eastbay and Whitmore Pharmaceuticals' biggest buyer. If anyone could save the company, it was the people inside that glass building.

Vivian's white car turned into the hospital parking lot. She stepped out holding a thick blue folder and walked straight in through the front doors.

Damon crossed the street and followed her in, and he stood behind a marble pillar in the main lobby.

A thin man with a hospital badge met her beside the front desk. His name tag read Pell, Purchasing Director.

"Ms. Whitmore, I already told you on the phone," he said, without bothering to smile. "We've moved our supply contract to Kane Pharmaceuticals."

"Mr. Pell, my family has supplied this hospital for twenty years." Vivian held out the folder. "I've cut our prices by fifteen percent. Please, just look at the numbers, that's all I'm asking."

"Kane cut theirs by thirty."

"That's impossible. Nobody can grow real herbs at that price... unless they aren't real."

Pell shrugged. "That isn't my problem. Your problem is that your company is finished, and everyone in this city knows it." He leaned closer and lowered his voice. "Is it true your husband pushed Lucas Grant into a birthday cake? People are calling the Whitmores a circus."

Vivian's face didn't move, but her fingers tightened on the folder until the cover bent. She turned and walked out without another word, her heels clicking fast on the marble.

Damon watched her straight back. For five years she had treated him like furniture, but he had also seen her light under the study door at two in the morning, every night, while the rest of the family slept. She wasn't lazy; she was alone.

Behind the front desk, Pell took out his phone and smiled into it. "She just left, Mr. Kane. Yes, she was begging. It won't be long now."

Damon remembered that name too. He was about to follow Vivian outside when a cry rose near the lifts.

"Help! Somebody help!"

An old man in a grey suit had collapsed onto the floor. His face was white, his lips had turned black, and two nurses were already kneeling beside him, calling his name.

"It's the Chairman!" a receptionist shouted. "Dr. Moore has fallen!"

Doctors came running from every hallway. A young woman pushed her way through the crowd; she had long dark hair pinned in a neat bun, gold-rimmed glasses and a white coat over an expensive black dress.

"Grandpa!" She dropped to her knees beside the old man. "Grandpa, can you hear me? Grandpa!"

"Dr. Elena, his pulse is very weak," said a grey-haired doctor, pressing two fingers to the old man's throat. "It's his heart, a massive heart attack. We need to get him to the ICU right now."

Damon stepped closer, and the smell reached him first.

Under the hospital soap and floor cleaner was something bitter and grey, like burning paper. He had smelled it twice before, both times on battlefields, both times on dead men.

It was Seven-Day Ash, a poison from the hidden martial world. It was given in tiny doses over seven days, and no machine in any modern hospital could find it. On the seventh day, it stopped the heart. Whoever did this knew the martial world, and they had been close enough to the old man to feed him poison every day for a week.

"It isn't his heart," Damon said, and the lobby went quiet.

Every head turned toward the man in torn work clothes with dried blood on his temple.

"Who let you in here?" the grey-haired doctor snapped. "Security! Get this beggar out of my hospital!"

"He's been poisoned," Damon said, "slowly, over seven days. If you put him in that lift, he'll be dead before the doors open again."

Elena stood up. Her eyes were sharp and angry behind her gold glasses. "Poisoned? Every test we've run on him this month was clean. Do you know how you sound right now? Like a fortune teller in a night market."

"Your tests can't find this poison."

"Then it doesn't exist." She pointed at the doors. "I believe in science, not stories, and I don't have time for a madman. Security!"

Two guards grabbed Damon's arms from behind and began to drag him backward. He could have broken both of their arms before they took another step, but a fight here would only waste the seconds the old man had left.

"Dr. Moore has seconds left," Damon said, not fighting them. "Not minutes. Seconds."

Elena turned her back on him without another glance and knelt beside her grandfather again.

Then the monitor on the nurse's cart let out one long, flat scream, and the green line on its screen went perfectly straight.

Dr. Henry Moore's heart had completely stopped beating.