Chapter 5 - The Glass Wall
The room plunged into instant, blinding chaos. Bright overhead emergency lights flickered on, washing the sterile white walls in an unforgiving glare. Nurses rushed through the doorway with a crash cart, shouting medical jargon while the heart monitor continued its terrifying, unbroken tone.
"Code blue! Clear the bed!" a doctor yelled, shoving past Dominic with a pair of defibrillator paddles.
Dominic was violently yanked backward by the security detail as they swarmed the room. He fought against them with raw, animal fury, his hands gripping the doorframe as he watched nurses slam their weight against Claire’s chest in desperate compressions.
"Claire!" Dominic roared, his voice echoing down the hallway. "Claire!"
Her eyes fluttered open for a fraction of a second, locking onto his through the frantic blur of medical staff before her head rolled back and the flatline tone droned on without interruption.
"Sir, you have to get out of the way! We're losing her vitals!" the doctor screamed over the alarms.
Before Dominic could break free from the guards holding him, a heavy glass partition—triggered by the emergency lockdown protocols of the hospital’s secure wing—slid down from the ceiling with a loud, mechanical thud, sealing Claire and the medical team behind a solid wall of soundproof glass.
Dominic slammed his fists against the thick glass, the sound muffled and useless against the chaos inside. Through the transparent barrier, he watched the defibrillator paddles charge, flash, and press against her chest.
Behind him down the hallway, the sound of heavy boots echoed up the corridor. Lorenzo appeared around the corner, out of breath, clutching a burning-hot secure tablet.
"Dominic! Get away from the glass!" Lorenzo shouted, grabbing his arm. "The federal marshals outside just received a priority dispatch from the Department of Justice. It’s not about the corporate fraud anymore."
Dominic turned, his face pale with horror, his fists still pressed against the glass where Claire’s life was slipping away. "What are you talking about?"
"It wasn't Sabrina who executed the original override code three days ago," Lorenzo panted, thrusting the tablet into Dominic’s line of sight. "Look at the decryption signature on the master network log. The terminal that authorized the destruction of your entire empire... wasn't in your boardroom. And it wasn't in Sabrina's office."
Dominic stared down at the screen, his blood turning to ice.
The originating IP address belonged to a secure, offline terminal located deep inside a private, high-security medical vault registered under a name Dominic hadn't heard in twenty years—belonging to the man the syndicate had supposedly executed a decade ago for treason: Dominic’s own uncle, who had faked his death to inherit the harbor.
And beneath the digital signature, a single new message blinked on the screen, timestamped two minutes ago:
May you like
“Check the second heartbeat, Dominic. The child isn't yours.”
Inside the isolation room behind the glass, the heart monitor suddenly snapped back to life with a slow, steady beep, and the doctor turned slowly toward the window, staring directly at Dominic with a look of absolute, chilling dread.
