Limits
Valeria
The nausea hits me without warning.
I pushed myself too hard again.
Louane couldn’t join me today, and I completely lost track of time.
12:30.
Dante must already be having lunch with Henri.
I head toward the break room, lower the blinds, and lie down.
When I open my eyes again, it’s already two o’clock.
And Dante is there, sitting across from me, concern written all over his face.
“Migraine?”
“No. Just tired.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Officially? Keeping an eye on you. Unofficially… keeping an eye on you.”
Did he really just make a joke?
He carefully places a bag on the coffee table.
“What’s that?”
“Lunch.”
I look at him in surprise.
“But didn’t you have lunch with Henri?”
“I did. This is for you.”
I should tell him to leave. We could get caught, and it could get back to Bianca, but I don’t have the strength for that.
For once, I don’t want to be reasonable.
I open my lunch with gratitude. As I dig into my Paris-Brest as an appetizer, he watches me with a smile.
“I’ve never seen anyone love desserts this much.”
“Mmh… it’s so good,” I tell him in a deliberately teasing tone. “I love it.”
His gaze lingers on my mouth a little too long before he looks away.
I laugh inwardly.
Dante. Cute.
He clears his throat and tells me about his lunch with Henri.
“He agreed to help us. He’s going to talk to his father. Honestly, the idea of trapping Wald seems to excite him. Apparently they know each other well, and he’s dealt with him many times before. And do you want to know the best part?”
“Tell me.”
He pulls out his phone and shows me a picture of himself having lunch with Henri.
Then the headline of the article:
Aurenza Biotech and the Pharmaceutical Giant: A Strategic Partnership in the Works?
A rush of adrenaline shoots through me.
The trap is falling into place.
My hand reaches for my glass of water.
It’s barely trembling. Almost imperceptibly. And yet Dante notices immediately.
That sudden stillness.
The way his gaze lingers a fraction of a second too long.
He says nothing. Asks no questions.
But when he gets up to leave, he murmurs against my lips:
“Go home early today.”
“Is that a question?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
One of his eyebrows rises.
“Okay?”
“Yes. That was the plan.”
He studies me, searching for the hidden meaning behind my words.
Then I see the moment he understands.
He nods in agreement, though the concern on his face is still impossible to miss.
I can’t afford to get this wrong.
At 2:15 p.m., shortly after he leaves, I pack up my things and stop by Louane’s office.
The hardest part isn’t lying.
It’s making everyone believe that everything is normal.
She looks up from her computer.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yeah. I’m not feeling very well. I’m going to head home. Can I ask you a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Could you take care of the experiments that are still running?”
“No problem. I’m almost done with my presentation for tomorrow anyway. Go home and get some rest.”
I leave Aurenza and meet up with Stephen.
As soon as I get back to the manor, I lie down on the couch and fall asleep.
The best lies are the ones that contain a grain of truth.
*
I’ve been home for over two hours when my phone rings.
I sit up from the couch to grab it from the coffee table before answering.
“It’s done,” Louane announces. “She just left your office.”
Her words instantly wipe away my drowsiness.
“As planned,” she continues, “Bianca came to see me about thirty minutes after you left.”
Every trace of fatigue disappears at once. For a second, I can’t form a single coherent thought.
“Hello? Are you there?” Louane asks, suddenly concerned.
“Yes… yes, I’m here.”
“I told her you’d had to leave unexpectedly and that you’d asked me to clean the lab. She followed me. Just like you wanted, I left her alone in your office while I cleaned equipment in the bathroom.”
My heart kicks into overdrive.
“Thank you for warning me.”
I hang up immediately and dial Andrea’s number.
“Bianca just came out of my office,” I tell him the moment he answers.
“I’ll call you back.”
Ten minutes later, he gives me a full report.
“According to the lab recordings, the second Louane disappeared into the bathroom, Bianca immediately took the opportunity to copy the entire NRX-889 file.”
I close my eyes for a few seconds.
That’s it.
There’s no turning back now.
“Perfect. Send me the video.”
A silence follows.
“I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“You’re not the only one.”
Despite the confidence in my voice, a chill runs through me.
“You and Dante are completely insane.”
I smile despite myself.
“If it makes you feel any better, he was against this idea at first. But it was the only way to make them believe they’d won.”
I think back to our endless discussions.
The hours spent considering every possible scenario.
The careful planning required to trap Wald, Bianca, and Peltier without raising suspicion.
Then we built our trap.
And waited for them to walk straight into it.
The hardest part was convincing Dante to let the formula leak.
To him—as to most non-scientists—possessing the formula meant possessing the treatment.
But research doesn’t work like a recipe copied onto a sheet of paper.
A molecule can appear perfect on paper and still become unusable if a single parameter changes during the process. Temperature, chemical stability, reaction time, the exact order of each manipulation… everything matters.
And above all, producing a few milligrams in a laboratory has nothing to do with industrial-scale manufacturing capable of supplying thousands of patients.
That’s where the real difficulty lies.
The file Bianca stole is authentic.
Or almost.
Every scientific detail is accurate except for one thing: the parameters required for industrial production were subtly altered.
A researcher in a hurry will only see a credible, coherent file.
And by the time they discover the problem, they’ll already have invested millions… and left behind enough evidence for the police to bury them for good.
They don’t know it yet, but the trap is already beginning to close around them.