Chapter 44
Seraphina
You learn a lot about someone by what they won’t say.
Emerson nodded from the corner of the surveillance van, the glow of his tablet making the hard lines of his face look even more severe. He’d been quiet for the past ten minutes, lips pressed into a thin line, tapping through secure channels like a surgeon threading a needle.
“This is the one,” he said finally, voice low. “Name’s Rylan Thorne. Mid-tier broker for Crest. Not high enough to be insulated. Not low enough to be disposable.”
I peered through the grainy surveillance feed. Rylan was pacing inside a warehouse near the docks, more nervous than someone who had nothing to hide. That was always a good sign.
Callum leaned against the van’s open door, arms crossed, silent. Watching me. Waiting for me to give the go-ahead. When I didn’t, he tilted his head. "You sure he’s the one we wanna bleed first?"
“Yes,” I said, already slipping on the comms earpiece. "He’s the crack in the wall. We widen it. We force it open."
We found Rylan that night.
Emerson rerouted a fake tip through an encrypted chat app Rylan used for arranging clinic "transfers." A fabricated risk report—custom-coded to look like it came from Blackdawn’s internal security—landed in his inbox. It suggested someone had flipped on him.
Paranoia did the rest.
He ran straight to the private meet point Emerson planted. A shuttered pharmacy on the outskirts, long abandoned, with more rats than streetlights. I was already waiting.
He spotted me too late.
“Jesus—what—” he choked, turning to run, but Callum was already behind him. One shove into the wall and he folded like wet paper. I kept my steps measured. Clinical. Rylan had made a fortune selling people like they were lab equipment. I wouldn’t give him the dignity of rage.
“We know about the clinics,” I said.
“I don’t—”
Callum’s fist hit the metal panel next to his head. Not a strike—just a warning. Loud enough to make Rylan flinch. “Don’t insult her intelligence, mate.”
I pulled a folder from my bag and dropped it on the floor in front of him. Photos spilled out. Names. Data. Patient IDs.
His eyes widened. “How the hell did you get these?”
“That’s not the question,” I replied. “The question is how many more like these are buried under your name. And whether you want your own face on every whistleblower forum tomorrow.”
“I didn’t run the clinics,” he said quickly. “I was just the middleman.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Which means you know where the bodies are buried. We don’t need your hands—we need your maps.”
It took less than an hour. One compromised laptop, two burner phones, and a password Emerson cracked like it was child’s play.
What we found wasn’t a direct line to Crest. It was worse.
Encrypted medical records. Not stored. Hidden. Flagged as "expunged." Dates that lined up with the disappearances we’d been tracking for weeks.
I stared at the screen, bile climbing up my throat. Children. Teens. Case numbers tagged with failed transfers, terminated treatments, incomplete status reports.
Subjects. That’s what they were called in the files.
Rylan had stopped talking by then. He knew.
“Leave him,” I said to Callum, backing out of the building. “He’s already dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
We burned the warehouse. Not with fire—too messy—but with light. Emerson dumped every one of those records into an anonymous whistleblower leak hub and tagged it with a warning: More to come.
Not even an hour later, the file was trending.
#GhostClinic. #SubjectsNotPatients. #Blackdawn.
Small win. But not hollow. Not anymore .
I stood across the street from the pharmacy-turned-interrogation site, watching the faint blue glow of a security camera perched on a streetlamp. The light blinked, faint. Once. Then twice.
Then it stopped.
"Emerson," I said quietly, pressing the comms. "Were there any active city cams nearby?"
A pause.
"No. That area's been dark for weeks. Why?"
But I didn’t answer.
Someone was watching us. Not the press. Not the public.
Someone else.
I tucked the thought away, sharp as a knife in my mind. We’d drawn blood.
Now we’d see who bled back.