Chapter 4 - INTO THE SHADOWS
The bright overhead fluorescent lights of the surgical corridor flashed past my eyes like steady pulses of lightning.
Flash.
Flash.
I was drifting. The physical pain was numbing out, replaced by a cold, heavy weight settling in my chest.
"Stay with me, Khloe!" Marcus’s voice echoed beside my ear. He was running alongside the gurney, clutching my hand, his face slick with sweat and tears. "Stay with me, please! I'm sorry... God, Khloe, I'm so sorry I didn't believe you three weeks ago!"
Three weeks ago.
Three weeks ago, I had found a hidden ledger in Marcus's home office—a ledger detailing millions of dollars shifted into offshore accounts under Isabella Vance’s name. When I had tried to warn Marcus that his trusted Vice President was stealing from Mercer Global, he had dismissed my concerns, attributing them to pregnancy hormones and jealousy.
Isabella had convinced him I was losing my mind. And when I had confronted her privately at the office, she had pushed me down a flight of carpeted stairs two days later, landing me in this very hospital.
Marcus had thought it was an accident. He had trusted her.
Now, he was holding the hand of a woman who might die because of his blindness.
"Anesthesia is running!" a doctor yelled as the heavy double doors of Operating Room 3 swung open.
"Sir, you have to stay outside!" an orderly said, catching Marcus by the shoulders and pulling him back from the surgical bay.
"That's my wife! That's my baby!" Marcus shouted, struggling against the nurse's grip.
"You can't be in here! Let us do our jobs!"
The doors clicked shut between us.
Inside the sterile room, the cold air hit my skin. The surgical team moved with mechanical, practiced speed, draping blue sterile sheets over my body while the mask over my face began to pump sweet, heavy gas into my lungs.
"Khloe, can you hear me?" Dr. Aris's voice sounded muffled, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a deep well. "We're going to get your baby out safely. Count down from ten for me."
"The... camera..." I murmured beneath the mask, my eyelids growing impossibly heavy.
"Don't worry about anything now. Just rest."
"Ten..." I whispered.
As the darkness swallowed me whole, my last thought wasn't of the knife or the pain. It was of the tiny red light in the corner of Room 412.
Isabella thought she had destroyed the footage when she smashed the camera body with the lamp.
She didn't know how hospital security systems worked.
She didn't know that VIP Room 412 was a specialized high-security suite installed six months ago by my eldest brother, Julian—an enterprise cloud-security architect. The camera mounted in that ceiling was merely a lens housing.
The actual recording wasn't stored on a memory card inside the plastic casing.
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It was streaming live, off-site, directly to an encrypted cloud server hosted on my brother's private network twenty miles away.
And right now, Julian was watching every single frame.
