Chapter 3 - The Midnight Transfer to Pavilion Four
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At 1:30 AM, while Christian Prescott was sleeping in a five-star penthouse suite in Chicago, an unlisted private ambulance backed into the subterranean service bay of St. Jude Medical Center.
Gabriel had manipulated the hospital’s electronic visitor logs, registering a false transfer slip that claimed "Patient Genevieve Vance" was being transported to an isolated palliative hospice in Northern Michigan under strict sedative quarantine.
Dr. Julian Bennett met the transport vehicle at the private hangar outside Columbus.
At thirty-six, Julian was a towering, sharp-eyed reconstructive surgeon who had pioneered advanced biological scaffolding for military combat veterans. When he peeled back the emergency gauze inside the pressurized transport aircraft, his jaw set into hard, rigid granite.
“Sulfuric acid at seventy percent concentration,” Julian dictated to his surgical nurse, examining the epidermal layer under specialized ultraviolet diagnostic lighting. “The attacker aimed for her right eye and cheekbone. But look here, Gabriel.”
Gabriel leaned over the gurney. “What is it?”
“The winter wool scarf Genevieve was wearing absorbed eighty percent of the initial chemical splash,” Julian explained, his hands moving with surgical precision. “The acid caused deep partial-thickness burns along the zygomatic arch and mandible, but the deep dermis and facial nerve bundles are completely intact. The hospital doctors were bribed by Lawson to apply low-grade drying ointments to accelerate hypertrophic scar tissue formation!”
My breath caught. “Lawson wanted my face to turn into a permanent mask of keloid scars.”
“Not on my watch, Genevieve,” Julian said, resting a warm, gloved hand over my forehead. “We are using our patented autologous stem-cell spray graft combined with hyperbaric cellular regeneration. In five days, we will restore every single layer of your skin. But when you step out of my operating theatre, the world must still believe you are broken.”
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“Let them believe whatever Christian feeds them,” I whispered, staring into the dark sky beyond the airplane window. “The higher he builds his pedestal, the harder his bones will break when he falls.”
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