Chapter 2: The Neon Ward
The transition from the grand foyer to Saint Jude's Memorial Hospital felt like passing through an airlock into another dimension. Gone were the polished marbles and gilt moldings, replaced by the sterile hum of fluorescent tubes, the steady, rhythmic beep of a bedside monitor, and the sharp tang of antiseptic. When I opened my eyes this time, the ceiling was a flat, dull off-white, and my left arm was tethered to an IV drip that felt like cold glass sliding through my veins.
My red curls had been gathered into a loose braid resting over my right shoulder. The light blue cardigan was gone, replaced by a coarse hospital gown that felt entirely too thin against my skin.
A nurse with silver-rimmed glasses and a quiet, efficient gait stepped into my peripheral vision, adjusting the flow rate of the saline drip with practiced fingers. Without looking up from the plastic tubing, she reached into the deep pocket of her scrubs and laid a small, dark object on the small metal tray beside my bed.
It was a standard USB thumb drive, matte black and unbranded.
"A man dropped this off at the nurses' station about ten minutes ago," she murmured, her voice barely above a whisper. "Said he's with internal affairs, and that it fell out of a visitor's coat pocket in the waiting room. He specifically asked that it be placed where you could reach it once you woke up."
My fingers, still clumsy from the lingering effects of the mild sedative, brushed against the textured plastic of the drive. Detective Rice had wasted no time. While the doctors had been wheeling me into surgery to stabilize my vital signs and ensure the baby was safe from the shock of the fall, Rice had been pulling data packets from the mansion's cloud-synced security hub.
"Is my phone here?" I asked, my voice dry and raspy from the oxygen mask I'd worn during transport.
"Property locker down the hall," the nurse replied kindly, checking the chart at the foot of my bed. "The police logged it as primary evidence. But whatever is on that little drive... you might want to look at it before your husband gets here."
"Julian is coming?" The name felt bitter on my tongue.
"His assistant called twenty minutes ago. Said Mr. Vance was detained at a board meeting in Chicago, but he's chartered a private jet and should be at your bedside by midnight." The nurse gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "Get some rest, Mrs. Vance. Or... whatever name you prefer to go by now."
She slipped out of the room, leaving the door cracked an inch to let in the pale corridor light. I stared at the thumb drive. Julian wasn't in Chicago. He never went to Chicago on Tuesdays. That was his standing afternoon slot with Elena's legal team, where they reviewed the corporate asset transfers designed to strip the Vance Foundation bare before our baby was born. They thought my fall down the stairs would solve two problems at once: eliminate an inconvenient witness to their embezzlement and trigger a sympathetic public narrative about family tragedy.
Instead, it had blown the doors off the vault.
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I reached out, unplugged the telemetry monitor's secondary lead just enough to silence its high-pitched warning tone, and swung my legs over the edge of the narrow hospital bed. The room tilted for a terrifying second, my head spinning as the anesthetics tried to pull me back under. I caught myself on the metal IV pole, gripping the cold steel until my knuckles turned white.
I wasn't staying here to wait for Julian's performance. The evidence was in my hand, Rice was already moving, and the clock on the wall was ticking down to zero.
