Chapter 194

Chapter 194

Charlotte stood there for three seconds, then dialed Felix's number.

"Keep eyes on the Bowers Villa. All vehicles and people going in and out, twenty-four-seven surveillance. The refrigerated truck's license plate, route, and arrival time—record everything."

"Copy that."

"One more thing. Keep monitoring Rebecca's last beacon frequency. Even if the signal comes back for just a tenth of a second, I need to know."

"Understood!"

After hanging up, Charlotte changed her jacket and headed out to her car. The drive from the villa to the Edward Group private hospital was twenty-eight minutes. Charlotte made it in nineteen.

The eighth-floor hallway was empty, lit by cold white lights. Two plainclothes bodyguards stood by the elevator and nodded slightly when they saw her. The hospital room door was slightly ajar. Charlotte pushed it open.

Michael was curled up in the corner of the hospital bed. He'd pulled the blanket into a ball and wrapped it around himself. His knees pressed against his chest. He was completely balled up. He was shaking.

A nurse stood by the door with a helpless expression on her face.

"Get out!" Charlotte said.

The nurse left quickly. The door closed behind her. Charlotte walked to the bedside. She didn't sit down, standing half a step away from the bed.

"Michael."

Michael's head was buried in his knees. He was trembling more violently than that time in Emberfall City.

"I'm here."

Michael lifted his head. His face was covered in tear stains, his eyes red and swollen, his lips cracked and bleeding from not drinking water for so long. He stared at Charlotte for two seconds, then said something in a voice so thin it was barely audible.

"Just now there was a nurse... she had a claw tattoo on her wrist."

Charlotte's blood froze.

Her right hand was already on the room's interior lock. From hearing those words to locking the door took less than two seconds—her body reacted before her brain, a conditioned reflex from ten years of Barrott training embedded in her muscles.

Claw tattoo. Barrott's mark.

"When did this happen?"

Michael shrank into the corner, startled by her sudden movement. Charlotte realized her tone was too harsh. She lowered her voice and crouched by the bed.

"Take your time. When did that nurse come in?"

Michael's fingers gripped the edge of the blanket, his knuckles white.

"After you... left," his voice came in fragments. "When it got dark. She came in saying she needed to change the IV bag."

"Did she touch you?"

Michael shook his head.

"What did she touch?"

"That..." Michael raised his hand, pointing at the IV stand by the bed. "That bag."

Charlotte stood up. The IV bag hung on the stand, the transparent liquid showing nothing unusual under the lights. She took the bag down and turned it over. At the bottom was a needle mark, no more than a millimeter in diameter. The location was next to the bag's folded seam—nearly impossible to spot with the naked eye unless you were deliberately looking for it.

Someone had injected an unknown substance.

Charlotte yanked out the IV catheter from Michael's hand. Her movements were quick, but her other hand steadily pressed down on the removal site. She grabbed a cotton swab from the bedside table and applied pressure to stop the bleeding.

"Does it hurt?"

Michael shook his head. His eyes were fixed on Charlotte's face. The way he stared wasn't to read her expression—it was to confirm she was still there.

Charlotte put the IV bag into a sealed medical waste bag—evidence. She called Marcus.

"Lock down the entire eighth floor. Now. All exits, shut down the elevators."

Marcus didn't ask why. "Give me thirty seconds."

Charlotte hung up and pulled up the surveillance footage from outside the room. Marcus had given her remote access when upgrading the security system.

The playback showed: timestamp forty-two minutes ago, a woman in a white nurse's uniform entered the room. About five-foot-two, ponytail, mask covering most of her face. She pushed a standard medication cart and stopped by Michael's IV stand for seven seconds.

Seven seconds. Enough time to complete an injection. Her right hand picked up something from the cart—the angle wasn't good, couldn't see what it was—her hand reached toward the bottom of the IV bag. Then she turned and left. The whole process was smooth and natural, with no extra movements. Someone who'd been trained.

Charlotte switched to the hallway surveillance. After leaving the room, the woman turned right toward the elevators. Steady pace, no acceleration, no looking back. The live feed now—the hallway was empty, but the elevators had been shut down.

Charlotte stood up.

"Michael, lock the door. Don't open it for anyone. Only recognize my voice."

Michael's hand grabbed the corner of her clothes. "You're leaving?"

"I'll only be gone two minutes." Charlotte pried his fingers loose. Not roughly—one by one. Each time she loosened one, she pressed her thumb on the back of his finger. "I'll be back in two minutes."

She pulled out a butterfly knife from her waist and slipped out the door sideways.

End of the right corridor. The elevator doors were closed. The emergency stairwell door next to it was half-open, with movement in the gap.

Charlotte kicked open the stairwell door.

The woman stood at the landing between floors, her mask already pulled off. A young face, twenty-five or twenty-six, short chin, high cheekbones.

Charlotte dove down from the upper steps, converting gravitational acceleration into speed advantage. The woman pulled a short knife from her abdomen and slashed horizontally, aiming for Charlotte's stomach. Charlotte's right foot stepped on the stair railing, using it to leap up, her whole body vaulting over the woman's head. The moment she landed, her left elbow smashed into the back of the woman's neck.

The woman stumbled two steps but didn't fall. Her neck muscles tensed—she'd been trained to take hits. She spun around for a counter-stab, the blade pointing at Charlotte's throat. Charlotte tilted her head, the blade grazing past her ear. A strand of hair was cut, falling onto the steps.

Charlotte's butterfly knife came up from below, slicing across the woman's knife-wielding wrist, precisely cutting the wrist extensor tendon. The short knife fell to the ground. The woman's fingers spasmed open. She reached for the knife with her left hand. Charlotte stepped on the blade, her butterfly knife's spine pressed against the carotid artery on the woman's neck.

The whole thing took less than five seconds.

Footsteps echoed from downstairs. Two plainclothes bodyguards rushed up from the bottom floor and stopped when they saw the scene.

"Rope," Charlotte said.

The bodyguard pulled out zip ties from his waist. The woman was pressed to the ground by Charlotte, hands bound behind her back, mouth stuffed with cloth. Charlotte crouched down and rolled up the woman's left sleeve. The tattoo was identical to the one she'd seen on the fifth floor of Max's Social Club in Emberfall City.

Charlotte stood up. "Search her. All personal items. Check if there's anything else. Take her to the monitoring room on basement level one."

The bodyguards dragged the woman downstairs. The woman's eyes swept across Charlotte's face. No fear, no anger. Just a kind of blankness after a failed mission.

Charlotte returned to the room and knocked three times. "Michael, it's your sister."

The sound of the lock cylinder turning. The door opened a crack, Michael's half-face appearing in the gap. Charlotte went in and locked the door behind her. She sat on the edge of the bed.

"That person won't come back."

Michael said nothing. He retreated into the blanket, but this time his hand reached out on its own and grabbed Charlotte's fingers.

Charlotte picked up her phone with her other hand. The liquid injected into the IV bag needed testing, the assassin's identity needed verification, and the intelligence on Barrott's remnant forces after Logan's death needed updating. She made four calls, keeping her voice very low, none exceeding thirty seconds.

The last call was to Felix.

"I need a list of Barrott's remnant forces. Mark all nodes that have established contact with 'Chessboard.'"

"Copy that. Boss, the preliminary test results for the IV bag are in."

"Go ahead."

"High-concentration potassium chloride solution."