Chapter Twenty The Poisoned Gift
Every medication bottle, meal tray, floral arrangement, and glass of water that had entered Evelyn’s private ICU room was impounded for forensic analysis.
Damien converted a hospital executive suite into an emergency command center. Security personnel guarded every access point. Hospital staff were brought in for questioning one by one, while digital access logs covered the glass walls in endless lines of data.
Aria sat at the central table, a sharp wave of nausea twisting through her stomach. Whether it was caused by the pregnancy, raw terror for her mother, or the suffocating atmosphere of the room, she couldn’t tell.
Damien set a small packet of crackers and a bottle of mineral water beside her hands without making a scene.
“I’m not hungry,” she murmured.
“You haven’t eaten in six hours,” Damien replied, his tone quiet but firm.
“This isn’t the time.”
“Your body disagrees.” His dark eyes lingered on her pale face, searching her expressions with intense focus.
Aria unsealed the crackers simply to stop him from asking questions he wasn’t ready to hear the answers to.
At three in the afternoon, the lab results came back. The poison had been introduced through a specialized liquid nutritional supplement delivered exclusively to Evelyn. Each bottle had arrived looking factory-sealed.
“Someone drained the original contents, filled them with aconitine, and resealed the caps using industrial equipment,” Lucien reported, setting a thermal bag on the table.
“Who had physical custody during transit?” Aria asked.
“Pharmacy staff, dietary services, two ICU nurses, Dr. Patel, and security during transport.”
“Which security detail?” Damien asked, his voice chillingly cold.
Lucien met his gaze without flinching. “My personal team.”
A cybersecurity technician brought up a recovered video file on the main monitor. “We pulled deleted camera footage from the sub-basement pharmacy storage. This was logged early this morning.”
The high-definition video showed a tall figure entering the storage bay at 2:43 AM, wearing a security clearance badge and carrying a silver case matching the supplement shipment.
The man in the video moved like Lucien. Same height. Same heavy stance. Same subtle favor given to his left shoulder, held slightly lower from an old gunshot wound.
Aria looked at Lucien.
Damien did not. He kept his eyes locked on the screen. “Explain.”
Lucien’s expression remained utterly calm. “I was never in the sub-basement pharmacy.”
“The biometric log says otherwise,” the technician noted. “Your personal security key opened the vault door.”
“And the footage clearly shows your face,” Damien said, turning slowly to the man who had stood at his side for more than a decade. “You also entered Evelyn’s room the night before the wedding.”
“To replace a compromised guard,” Lucien stated.
“Without informing me.”
“You were with Aria. It was an immediate security risk.”
“That has never stopped you from reaching me before,” Damien said, his jaw tightening as a dangerous silence settled over the room.
Lucien unholstered his firearm, set it flat on the glass table, and stepped back. “I did not poison Evelyn Vale.”
Aria stared at the monitor, her mind racing. She replayed the clip. The figure certainly looked like Lucien. Same limp, same dark suit.
Timestamp: 02:43:12 AM.
Aria’s breath caught. She remembered that exact time.
“He couldn’t have been in the hospital basement,” Aria declared, her voice ringing clearly across the quiet room.
Everyone turned toward her.
“He was at the penthouse,” she said directly to Damien. “He was at your desk.”
Damien’s eyes narrowed. “Aria, travel time from the hospital to the penthouse is at least twelve minutes. The timestamp could be slightly off—”
“It isn’t off,” Aria insisted. “At 2:43 AM, I was sitting in your study, drafting the new terms. Lucien walked through the double doors at 2:44 AM carrying the revised asset schedule. I looked directly at the clock behind him. He could not have been in a basement three miles away sixty seconds earlier.”
The technician quickly ran a forensic script across the video file. “She’s right. The visible timestamp on the video feed was burned into the pixels manually. The original camera metadata shows the source file was recorded at 3:09 AM.”
“Someone manipulated the log to frame me,” Lucien said softly.
“Manipulated using whose clearance?” Aria demanded, stepping up to the technician’s terminal.
The technician hesitated, checking the digital signature twice. “The override certificate came directly from Mr. Blackthorne’s master terminal.”
Silence swallowed the room.
Damien’s private terminal required three separate authentications: his voice print, his palm scan, and the encryption chip inside his signet ring.
The ring.
Aria looked down at Damien’s hand. “Who else has access to your voice synthesizers?”
Damien raised his eyes, looking directly at the hidden security camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling. “Anyone who has been secretly recording me for the last five years.”
Before anyone could speak, Aria’s phone vibrated violently against the glass table.
An encrypted message had arrived from an unknown international number. It contained a single, low-resolution video attachment.
Aria tapped the file.
The video opened to reveal a woman sitting in a dimly lit study. She was older than the pictures Aria had seen, but unmistakably alive.
Celeste Laurent—Damien’s ex-fiancée, who had disappeared years ago.
“Aria,” Celeste said into the camera, her voice raspy. “If you are watching this, Evelyn has been poisoned, and Lucien has been set up to take the fall.”
Damien stepped beside Aria, his entire frame rigid as he stared at the screen.
Celeste continued, her expression severe. “Do not trust whoever steps forward to prove Lucien innocent. That is precisely how they intend to earn your absolute trust.”
The video cut to black.
A second text notification flashed across the screen immediately beneath the expired video file:
I HAVE THE ACONITINE ANTIDOTE. COME TO THE GRAND TERMINAL ALONE. DO NOT brING YOUR HUSBAND.