Chapter 4 - Whispering Shadows
Selene couldn't sleep.
The guest bedroom was larger than her entire apartment, featuring a king-sized bed with Egyptian cotton sheets, but it felt like a gilded prison cell. Ivy had finally cried herself to sleep in the adjoining room after Selene administered a mild sedative from the emergency medical kit Damen's guards had provided.
It was 2:15 a.m. Selene paced the room, her brain racing. The image of her clinic burning burned brightly behind her eyelids. Everything she had built to escape the phantom of her father's death was gone in an instant.
Unable to contain her restlessness, she quietly slipped out of the room. The penthouse was dimly lit by ambient blue nightlights built into the baseboards.
She walked softly down the long hallway, intending to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen, when she heard voices coming from Damen’s private study. The door was cracked open an inch, casting a warm yellow beam across the dark marble floor.
"We swept the clinic remnants, boss," a rough voice was saying—it belonged to Viktor, Damen’s chief head of security. "The fire department thinks it was a gas leak, just like we wanted. But the Syndicate's hit squad isn't stupid. They know Holloway is dead, and they know he didn't die in the fire."
"And the ledger?" Damen’s deep voice echoed from inside.
"Nothing in the ash. But our contacts in the Syndicate say the boss, Mikhail Rostov, is coming to Chicago personally. Rostov thinks the doctor has the ledger."
Selene froze, holding her breath against the cold wall.
"Why would Rostov think that?" Damen asked.
"Because fifteen minutes before Preston Holloway showed up at the clinic, an encrypted file transfer was initiated from Holloway's laptop to an unknown IP address registered under a medical server at Mercy Street Clinic."
Selene gasped softly, clapping a hand over her mouth.
The billing paperwork.
Right before the knocking started on her clinic door, Selene had been trying to access her clinic's patient database, but the system had kept lagging, displaying odd line codes she had ignored as network errors. Holloway hadn't just followed Ivy to the clinic—he had used the clinic’s open Wi-Fi network to transfer the stolen ledger to cover his tracks!
A sudden creak of the floorboards behind her made Selene whip around.
Damen was standing right behind her in the dark hallway. He had shed his tie, his top shirt buttons were undone, and his dark hair was slightly messy. He looked devastatingly handsome—and utterly deadly.
"Eavesdropping is a dangerous habit, Dr. Mercer," he whispered, stepping close enough that her back pressed against the cold hallway wall.
"Is it true?" Selene whispered back, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. "Did Preston upload those files to my clinic's server?"
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Damen reached out, his thumb lightly touching the side of her jaw. The touch sent a violent, unexpected shiver straight down her spine.
"Yes," Damen murmured, his eyes locking onto hers in the shadowy gloom. "Which means, Dr. Selene Mercer... you aren't just an innocent bystander anymore. You are holding the key to a billion-dollar war."
