Chapter 9 #2
They never told me in detail. Then again, doctor confidentiality makes it habit not to discuss patients and trials unprompted.
I shut the notebook, slide it back into the drawer, and look at the two men sitting in the middle of my kitchen like they belong nowhere near peace or order.
“I need more information,” I say. “There’s clearly a lot I don’t know about it.”
Talon spreads his hands. “Then call ’em up and ask.”
“I can’t. Asking questions out of nowhere would be too suspicious.”
Cassian absorbs that with a silent nod.
“How long do you need?” he asks.
“The rest of the day. There’s someone at the hospital who used to work there. She should have what we need.”
Talon squints. “That won’t be suspicious?”
“No,” I reply. “I have a way around people.”
They stare at me like they think I’m lying. I’m not. They just haven’t seen the other version of me yet.
“I still don’t trust you,” Cassian says. He gestures at the files. “Give me those for safekeeping.”
Another leap of faith testing my conviction. How many leaps can a man make before he breaks his neck on the concrete?
“Fine,” I say. “But if that’s the case, I’m locking you in this apartment.”
Cassian looks satisfied with that. Talon shrugs like he’s willing to go along with it simply because he has nothing better to do.
I realize both of them most likely know how to break locks.
I lock them in anyway.
Regret finds me for the third time as I walk through the hospital doors, badge clipped to my coat, expression carefully neutral, every muscle in my face arranged into something presentable.
Inside is a different story. Inside, there is nothing but a quiet, steady reminder that there is no going back now.
No going back at all.
My badge chirps as I pass through the side entrance. I move down the familiar corridor toward the break room, timing it perfectly, and spot Dr. Marisa Havel immediately.
Marisa is hunched over a plastic cup of burnt coffee, sprinkling powdered creamer into it with the resigned focus of someone who knows this might be the only thing standing between her and total collapse.
She is chronically tired. The kind that settles into bone and carves dark circles so deep into a person’s face they start to look permanent.
“Rough day?” I ask, stepping beside her to take a cup of my own.
She jolts hard enough to slosh coffee onto her hand, then groans when she sees me. “Jesus, Nathaniel. You walk quieter than a corpse.”
Mentally preparing oneself to commit murder and then seeing it done will do that to a person, I suppose.
I almost smile at that. Almost.
“Sorry.” I flash her an apologetic look instead. “Been wanting to disappear lately. All those stares have me feeling weird.”
It’s not particularly a lie, but it’s not particularly true either.
A perfect in-between. The kind of half-confession that raises the probability of her taking pity on me, softening her guard, making her more keen to offer up the information I want to fish out of her.
Manipulation dressed as vulnerability. My specialty, if I’m being honest.
Marisa puts her hands on the counter. Her shoulders drop.
“You should take some time off, you know?” she says. “Get a breather.”
“Nah.” I pour the hot water into my cup without meeting her eyes, watching the steam curl instead and letting the silence sit for exactly the right amount of time. “Wouldn’t even know what to do with myself. Here there’s at least always something to do.”
“Understatement of the year,” she mutters.
I take the opportunity to ask about her shift.
To my pleasant surprise, she follows along.
She tells me about a few urgent cases that came in while I was gone, her voice loosening the way it always does when she’s talking medicine instead of feelings.
She doesn’t ask how I am. She doesn’t mention my mother’s death.
There is discomfort in her, though. I can see it in the way she holds her cup a little too tightly, in the pauses she fills with sips instead of words.
She is trying so hard to be kind without being intrusive.
Eventually, when she starts drinking her coffee in earnest, I decide to land the hook.
“I need this, I think.” I gesture in a circle with my finger, pointing around us. “Keeps me going.”
“Yeah? Not thinking about changing professions? I know I do.”
“Professions?” I echo. “Never. Hospitals? Maybe.”
She lifts her brows but doesn’t push.
That’s Marisa. She has this quality about her, a kind of deliberate gentleness, where she never steps on anyone’s toes, never asks questions that corner a person into answering unless it’s a patient on her table and she needs the truth to do her job.
Her discretion about my mother’s death comes from the same place.
She heard, she acknowledged it, and she sealed it away behind that careful, polished courtesy of hers.
It would be endearing if it didn’t make my plan a little too difficult.
“I’ve been thinking about taking an offer I got once for a private clinic,” I say.
Only now she’s willing to bite.
“Where?”
“Westbridge Private Clinic.”
She puts the coffee onto the table and stares at me. Not a casual look. A stare.
“That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while,” she says.
“I was offered a position there a few months ago,” I say. “I didn’t take it, but... who knows? Maybe it’s exactly what I need.”
“I mean...” she blows a raspberry. “With your credentials, they’d be lucky to have you, but...”
She hesitates.
“But?”
Marisa licks her lips and looks at her coffee.
Then a slow wince crawls onto her face like it’s something dragged unwillingly to the surface, and I know this is the moment.
Push now or lose it. Whatever feeling’s got her acting like this will pass, overtaken by her politeness, swallowed by that instinct she has to smooth things over and keep the peace, and I won’t get another opening.
“What? You heard something about them?” I ask.
Of course, I know she worked there. She told me when she moved here. But that was years ago, a throwaway detail offered over coffee in her first week, and a regular colleague would have forgotten it by now. So I play the part.
She leans forward, lowering her voice as though the walls themselves might be listening. “It’s, um... You do not want to work there.”
“Why?” I ask, making sure my tone sounds lightly curious instead of intensely invested. “They offer better pay.”
“Yeah, well... The pay is not worth a dirty conscience,” she says.
I lean back a fraction. There it is again.
That feeling. The same one I got when I listened in on Cassian’s and Talon’s conversation.
A tingle in my chest. A quickened beating of my heart.
The quiet, almost electric certainty that I’m pulling at a thread connected to something vast and ugly and right.
“What do you mean?”
Her eyes meet mine. I do my best to loosen my shoulders and let them drop.
Like I’m disappointed and need to know because this seemed to be the only light at the end of the tunnel.
Like I’m broken enough, desperate enough, reckless enough that if she doesn’t convince me, I’ll go anyway.
I’ll walk into Westbridge and ask questions and take the position just because I need a change. Any change.
To my relief, it works.
I seem pathetic enough that she breaks through whatever wall she’s built around this, and something in her composure cracks.
“When I first started there,” she says, “everything seemed legitimate. The research wing was small but well-funded. The equipment was good. A strange level of privacy, sure, but I assumed it was just wealthy investors protecting their intellectual property.”
She takes a slow sip of her coffee.
“But after a few months, I started noticing... inconsistencies. Consent forms that didn’t match procedures. Trial participants whose names never appeared on the logs. Protocols that changed overnight with no explanation.”
She glances toward the hallway as if expecting someone to appear there. Her voice drops further.
“The gaps always happened at night.”
A tight, cold line traces down my spine. I hold my expression steady, keep my breathing even. But inside, something locks into place. A click.
“Could it have been simple sloppiness?” I ask. “Mismanagement? Poor filing?”
Marisa shakes her head.
“No. Sloppy is forgetting a signature. These were intentional omissions. Hidden procedures. Altered patient records.” Her fingers clench around the mug, knuckles whitening, and her voice goes tight and thin. “Every time I asked questions, they lied.”
I study her face. Conflict. Guilt. Anxiety. Something deeper underneath all of it, something that looks like shame but moves like fear.
“What exactly did they do?” I ask quietly.
“I don’t know,” she whispers. “That’s what scares me most. I never got a clear look.
But one night, I walked into an operating room that was supposed to be dark.
There was a man on the table. He was sedated and prepped for a procedure that wasn’t listed on any of the charts. When I questioned it, they fired me.”
“Did you report it?” I ask.
“To whom, exactly? The board that funds them?” She lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh but carries nothing funny in it. “Admin would’ve buried the complaint before it left my inbox. If I had pushed harder, I would’ve been blacklisted from every clinical program in the state.”
“That’s... disturbing.”
I feel my gaze trail off into the distance. Disturbing is too small a word. Unacceptable would be closer to the truth. My mind starts to whir with the possibilities of illegal, monstrous procedures one might perform in a clinical environment.
How come that ginger man, Talon, realized something was off straight off the bat and I didn’t?
“Did...” I look back at her. “Did anyone die there that you know of?”
She sucks in her breath and just stares at me. One second. Another.
“I don’t know,” she says at last.
But the way she does leaves no room for doubt.
Without another word, I get up and leave the break room, walking back into the hallway with my coat unbuttoned and my heart beating so hard it feels like it might give out.