Chapter 7 - The Blackout
The darkness lasted forty-three seconds.
It was enough.
When emergency lights finally flickered on, Dr. Voss was gone.
The security officer outside Emily’s room lay unconscious near the stairwell. His weapon remained holstered, but his access card had been taken. A nurse discovered an empty wheelchair beside the service elevator and drops of blood leading toward the parking structure.
Daniel stayed with Emily while the hospital locked down every exit. Detective Vega organized the search. Dr. Reed checked the incision and adjusted Emily’s medication, but she refused sedation.
“I need to remember the rest of the rhyme,” she said.
“You need to heal,” Daniel replied.
“If Voss was taken because of what he knows, healing will not matter.”
Olivia arrived under police protection. She had changed out of her wedding dress and wore borrowed clothes. Without the costume of celebration, she seemed stripped of certainty.
She handed Daniel a small jewelry box.
“I found this in Mother’s hotel suite.”
Inside was Thomas’s old watch. The back had been removed, revealing a thin strip of paper folded into the casing.
The paper contained a list of initials and dates. One set appeared repeatedly: L.M., M.V., A.P., and E.C.
Linda Mercer. Malcolm Voss. Aaron Pike. Evelyn Cross.
Beside the final entry, Thomas had written: One of them changed sides. One of them never had a side.
Emily studied the dates. “These are not payments. They are hospital admissions.”
Dr. Reed confirmed that several matched nights when unidentified patients were treated at St. Catherine’s under restricted records.
The final date was tonight.
At 11:30 p.m., an ambulance arrived at the emergency entrance carrying a man found unconscious near the river. He had no identification. The triage system assigned him a temporary number, and his record was immediately sealed by an administrative override.
The override came from Dr. Voss’s account.
Vega ordered officers to the emergency department. The patient was not Voss.
It was Aaron Pike.
He had been beaten and injected with a sedative. When he regained consciousness, he asked for protection. He admitted entering Emily’s first surgery under instructions from Linda.
Daniel felt the words like a physical blow.
Pike claimed Linda contacted him three days before the wedding. She believed Emily would search the study and wanted Pike prepared in case Emily found the records. His task was to alter her medication after surgery so that any memory of the break-in would appear confused.
“Did she order you to kill her?” Vega asked.
“No. She said make her unreliable.”
“What was in the syringe?”
“A drug that can cause disorientation and temporary amnesia.”
“Who attacked you?”
Pike closed his eyes. “Evelyn.”
He said Evelyn confronted him in the hospital parking garage after the first surgery. She demanded to know who hired him. When he refused, another person struck him from behind. He never saw the attacker.
Vega asked about Voss.
Pike began shaking. “Voss is not Emily’s father.”
Emily stared through the glass partition.
“Then who is?”
Pike looked toward the ceiling camera as though someone might be watching.
“Thomas Mercer.”
Pike’s confession contained details only someone inside the operation could know. He described Linda’s private number, the code phrase she used, and the exact medication cabinet where he placed the syringe. Yet he also seemed eager to direct suspicion toward Voss and Evelyn in equal measure. Vega warned that frightened conspirators often mixed truth with useful lies.
Olivia asked whether her mother had truly wanted Emily dead. Pike insisted the original instruction was memory impairment, not murder. That distinction mattered legally, but to Emily it felt morally thin. Linda had decided she was entitled to invade another person’s mind. The absence of an explicit death order did not make the act merciful.
Daniel told Olivia not to search for a version of Linda’s behavior that would permit them to return to normal.
“There is no normal to return to,” he said.
May you like
Olivia answered, “Then what are we?”
He looked through the glass at Emily. “People who decide what comes next.”
