Chapter 3 - The King’s Wrath
Priya didn't take the elevator back up. She took the stairs, running up seven flights, two steps at a time, her heart pounding in her ears like a war drum.
She burst through the heavy fire doors of the seventh floor, her lab coat fluttering behind her.
The hallway outside the NICU was entirely silent. The two guards at the door immediately stepped into her path, their faces hard, but Priya pushed past them with a fury that took them by surprise.
"Mr. Kade!" she yelled, shoving open the glass doors of the pod.
Weston was standing beside the incubator, holding a small silver rattle his late wife had bought before the explosion. He turned instantly, his dark eyes narrowing as he saw the breathless, frantic look on Priya’s face.
"Out," Weston commanded his men with a sharp flick of his wrist. The guards immediately backed out of the room, closing the heavy doors behind them.
Priya walked right up to Weston, pulling the printed spectrometry readout out of her coat pocket and slamming it onto the small bedside table beside Owen’s monitor.
"You were right," she panted, her chest heaving. "God help us, Weston... you were right."
Weston didn't look at the paper right away. He looked at Priya’s trembling hands, then reached out, gripping her shoulders with firm, grounding strength. "Tell me."
"It's not malabsorption," Priya said, her eyes filling with fierce, hot tears. "Someone is tampering with his TPN bags. They’re replacing the nutrient lipids with saline and a metabolic inhibitor that keeps his body from processing even the tiny amounts of food he gets. It’s designed to look like a natural failure to thrive. It’s designed so that when he dies, the doctors blame his premature birth."
Weston didn't scream. He didn't smash the glass. He didn't break down.
Instead, a terrifying, absolute stillness settled over him. His grip on Priya’s shoulders loosened, his hands dropping to his sides. The blood seemed to drain from his face, leaving behind a pale, icy mask of pure, murderous rage.
He slowly looked down at the spectrometry sheet, reading the chemical breakdown line by line.
"Who?" he asked. The word was so quiet, so devoid of human warmth, that it sounded like a ghost speaking from an open grave.
"I don't know," Priya said. "The bags are mixed in the basement central pharmacy at three o'clock every afternoon. They are delivered to the seventh-floor holding fridge at five o'clock. At least six people have access to that fridge between five and six before the bag is hung."
Weston pulled out his satellite phone again. He didn't call Dominic this time. He tapped a four-digit code into the screen.
"Marcus," Weston said into the phone. "Lock down the hospital servers. I want every security camera feed from the basement pharmacy to the seventh floor for the past fourteen days wiped onto an encrypted drive and sent to my private terminal. If the hospital IT department tries to stop you, buy the server company."
He hung up, then turned his dark, intense gaze back onto Priya.
"Priya," he murmured, stepping closer, his hand reaching out to touch the side of her face with unexpected tenderness, his thumb wiping away a single tear from her cheek. "You saved my son's life today."
"He’s not safe yet, Weston," Priya whispered, leaning into his touch for a fraction of a second before catching herself. "The moment they realize we’ve figured it out, they’ll switch tactics. They might try something faster. Something worse."
"They won't get the chance," Weston growled, his jaw tightening. "From this exact second, no one touches my son except you. Not Dr. Voss, not Nurse Marcus, not the Chief of Medicine. You will prepare his food yourself from raw materials. You will hang his lines. And my men will guard you with their lives every second you are in this building."
"Weston, the hospital administration will never allow a single staff nurse to bypass standard pharmaceutical protocols—"
"I own thirty-four percent of the voting stock in this hospital's parent corporation, Priya," Weston interrupted coldly. "By four o'clock today, I will own fifty-one percent. I don't care about their protocols. I care about my son."
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He turned back to the glass incubator, reaching inside through the port door to softly stroke Owen’s tiny forehead.
"Whoever is doing this thought they could kill my family in the dark," Weston whispered to the sleeping baby. "Now I'm going to bring the sun down on their heads."
