Chapter 29 - The phantom hospital
The temperature inside the cryo-stabilization chamber plunged to minus twenty degrees Celsius. Sophie lay enclosed within the reinforced glass cylinder, breathing through a pressurized oxygen mask. Frost bloomed along the edges of the viewing port, but beneath the ice, the violent golden luminescence under her skin began to calm, settling into a steady, rhythmic pulse.
"Her vitals are holding," Dr. Marcello reported, his breath turning to white vapor in the refrigerated air. "The hypothermia has slowed the metabolic surge. But we have twelve hours at most before tissue frostbite sets in. We need the original chemical neutralizer Jonathan Clark formulated."
Lorenzo buckled an assault harness across his chest, sliding two ceramic-plated sidearms into their holsters. "Where is Jonathan’s base of operations?"
Luca brought up a 3D topographic scan of the city's abandoned industrial zone on the tactical console. "Before he surfaced at your estate, Jonathan was spotted entering the old Saint Jude Sanitarium on Blackwood Hill. It was shuttered fifteen years ago after a scandal involving unauthorized human trials. Vance bought the land through five shell corporations."
"How many men do they have?" Lorenzo asked, checking the slide on his customized combat shotgun with a crisp, terrifying click.
"At least forty private contractors," Luca replied. "Ex-special forces. They’ve turned the top three floors of the sanitarium into an off-grid research compound. If we go in with a small team, it's suicide."
Lorenzo looked at the glass chamber. Through the frost, Sophie’s eyes were open. She was conscious, looking directly at him through the glass. Her lips moved silently against the mask: *Be careful.*
Lorenzo placed his gloved palm against the ice-covered glass, right over her hand. "You stayed beside my mother when champagne soaked your dress and guns were drawn in that ballroom," he said, his voice quiet, filled with an unshakeable promise. "You bled for my family. Now the entire city will watch what happens when someone touches mine."
He turned on his heel, his black coat billowing behind him. "Luca, gather the inner circle. We don't use the streets. We use the old smuggling tunnels under the railway yards. We hit Saint Jude from beneath the foundations."
Thirty minutes later, the iron sewer grating beneath the Sanitarium’s boiler room groaned and snapped. Lorenzo stepped into the damp, dark basement like an apparition of death.
Two guards in tactical gear, carrying suppressed submachine guns, turned around at the sound. Before their flashlights could focus, Lorenzo closed the distance in silence. Two muffled double-taps echoed through the concrete corridors. The guards collapsed without a cry.
Lorenzo kicked open the heavy security door leading to the central elevator shaft. But as he looked up into the darkness of the high-rise sanitarium, an elevator was already descending.
The floor indicator pinged. The steel doors slid open.
Inside was not a squad of mercenaries. It was a single man in a tailored charcoal suit, sitting in a wheelchair with an oxygen cannula under his nose.
It was Victor Vance—the eighty-year-old billionaire chairman of the Vance Consortium.
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"Lorenzo Rossi," Victor Vance wheezed, his frail hands resting on a silver-tipped cane. "I knew Jonathan wouldn't kill you. Jonathan was always a fool who prioritized sentiment over efficiency. So I came to negotiate myself."
👉 What horrifying offer is the billionaire patriarch about to make to save his own dying body?
