Chapter 306 Everything is...Fine, Fine, Fine
Now, not only did he have to figure out how to explain to those terrifying, devil-eyed monsters why one page was suddenly missing from the sequence, but he also had an even more dangerous problem on his hands. He had to somehow get ahold of the Blackwood Beta and confess that he had been completely, fatally wrong.
He had to tell a man who could rip him in half with his bare hands that they needed to do far more extensive testing on his mate. But how could he possibly do that when he had just looked Jax in the eye and confidently promised that everything was fine?
Worse yet, how could he bring them back to this hospital knowing the High Council had just turned his office into a trap? He had been ordered, under threat of death, to alert the Council the absolute second Jax or Ginny stepped foot back in the building. Bringing them here would be handing them over to the slaughter.
His panicked mind raced, piecing together fragments of the tense conversation he'd overheard between Jax and Leela earlier. Hadn't Jax said something about his father? Something about the former Alpha and some sort of massive, unforgivable treason? It was all connected. The Council, Damon, the poison, the synthetic DNA—they were using Ginny as a biological pawn in a much, much larger war.
"FUCK!"
He didn't just whisper it this time. The word tore from his throat, a raw, desperate shout that echoed off the sterile walls of his office.
Almost instantly, the heavy door swung open. Nurse Sarah stood in the threshold, looking entirely out of sorts. Her eyes were wide, and a faint flush crept up her neck—a clear indicator that the entire nurses' station had just heard the esteemed trauma surgeon scream profanities from behind his closed door.
"Doctor Chatmory?" she asked hesitantly, her hand gripping the doorknob tight.
Chatmory violently flinched, his hand slamming down on the keyboard to minimize the classified DNA models on his screen. He waved her away with a frantic, trembling motion, his breathing shallow and erratic.
"I'm fine," he stammered, the lie tasting like ash on his tongue. "It's fine. I'm fine. Everything is... fine, fine, fine."
Sarah slowly shut the door, the metallic click echoing with an awful finality. She stood in the hallway for a long moment, completely bewildered, wondering what on earth had the normally unflappable, iron-nerved doctor acting so dangerously unlike himself.
"Who do I call first?"
The question hung in the stale, over-air-conditioned air of his office, suffocating him. Chatmory stared blindly at the blinking cursor on his monitors, then down at the heavy black receiver of his desk phone.
On one hand, he had the Blackwood Beta—a fiercely protective Lycan who would likely tear Chatmory’s head off the moment he realized the doctor had fundamentally misdiagnosed his mate and let her walk out with a mutating genetic bomb ticking in her veins.
On the other hand, he had the High Council. Cold, calculating, and already actively looking for an excuse to permanently silence him.
Thinking strictly of his own fragile neck, his primal need for self-preservation ruthlessly crushed whatever was left of his medical ethics. His shaking fingers bypassed the Blackwood pack's emergency contact number and instead dialed the encrypted burner digits the silver-eyed goons had left him.
They weren't happy.
Less than twenty agonizing minutes later, the heavy office door swung open again. Chatmory was already standing behind his desk, holding out Page 3 in front of him like a white flag of surrender.
The uglier of the two men snatched it from his trembling hand. His unnatural eyes scanned the top of the paper before shooting a lethal, predatory glare at the doctor.
"It... it slipped under the desk when I dropped the files," Chatmory stammered, his voice pitching up in pathetic fear. "I wanted to make absolutely sure you had the complete file. I swear I didn't hold it back on purpose."
The man didn't say a single word. He just folded the paper with agonizing slowness, slid it into the inner pocket of his tailored suit jacket, and stepped backward into the hallway. His cold, dead stare promised a slow, agonizing death if Chatmory ever made a "mistake" like that again.
The door clicked shut.
Chatmory collapsed back into his leather chair, the silence ringing so loudly in his ears it made him dizzy. Okay. He had survived the Council. For now.
But as the immediate spike of adrenaline began to recede, a new, massive wave of dread crashed over him. Now, he had an impossible problem to solve.
How in God's name was he going to break the news to the Blackwoods? He had to tell Jax. He had to warn the Beta that his human mate wasn't just fighting off a poison—she was being chemically and biologically rewritten into a synthetic monster by a shadowy cabal.
But how could he possibly warn them without tipping off the High Council?
If he called Jax's cell phone, there was a very real chance the Council had already tapped the Blackwood pack's communications. If he asked Jax to bring Ginny back to the hospital for "follow-up testing," he was under a direct, lethal mandate to report their arrival to the goons immediately. If he didn't report it, the Council would discover the deception and kill him. If he did report it, Jax would realize he had walked his mate into a trap, and the Beta would shred him to pieces before the Council even got the chance.
He was completely, hopelessly trapped between two apex predators, and he was nothing but a fragile piece of meat caught in the crossfire. There was no medical protocol for this. There was no surgical textbook that explained how to outmaneuver a supernatural shadow government.
Chatmory pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses and aggressively rubbed his face, a dry, hysterical sob catching against the bruised flesh of his throat.
"Why the fuck did I not listen to my wife?" he whispered to the empty room, the absolute certainty of his own impending doom settling heavy and cold in his chest.