FORGOTTEN BY THE BILLIONAIRE

Episode 13: Project Lantern

Damien wouldn't let her use any of the devices in the penthouse.

"Everything here is connected," he said, already pulling on his coat. "My phone, the wifi, the laptops. If he has someone watching the network, he'll see the file the moment it opens."

"Then where?"

"Somewhere with no signal and no cameras." He glanced at the clock. It was nearly two in the morning. "I know one place."

The place turned out to be a locksmith's workshop in the old district, a narrow room wedged between a pawn shop and a shuttered bakery. Its owner was an elderly man named Mr. Osei, who opened the back door in his slippers and took one look at Damien's face.

"Same as before?" he asked.

"Same as before."

"Hm." He stepped aside. "Tea is on the shelf. Don't touch the red cabinet."

Aria followed Damien into a cramped room that smelled of oil and metal shavings. A dented laptop sat on a workbench, unplugged from the wall, a thick strip of tape across its camera.

"You come here often?" she asked.

"When I need to think without being heard." He pulled out a stool for her. "Mr. Osei is the only man in this city my grandfather never bought. He once fixed my father's lock for free and refused a favor in return."

"Your father."

A pause. "Another story."

"You have a lot of those."

"I do." He almost smiled. "I'll tell you all of them. I promise."

He slotted the tiny black card into a reader, and the screen flickered to life.

There were three files.

The first was a scan, the page of a letter, the same rushed slanting hand. The second was a spreadsheet with a cryptic name: LANTERN_Q3. The third was an audio file, and its name made Aria's stomach turn over.

FOR ARIA.

"Start with the letter," Damien said softly.

She nodded. Her mouth was dry. She leaned in and read the lines that had been torn away from her.

...you must remember that the boy in the garden is not your enemy.

Damien Cross was ten years old when they began, and he never understood what was being done in that building. He is the only person in that family who ever tried to stop it. Do not let the name frighten you. He held your hand when no one else would, and I believe he will hold it again.

What I found in the hospital's accounts is in the spreadsheet. Marcus calls it Project Lantern. I will not write what it is here. I do not trust paper anymore. Listen to the recording. Then decide what kind of person you want to be.

Your mother knows more than she has told you. Forgive her. She was afraid, and she was right to be.

I love you, my small brave Aria. Whatever they tell you about me, I loved you more than anything in the world.

Papa.

The screen blurred.

She hadn't realized she was crying until Damien's hand came down, very lightly, over hers on the workbench. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

The spreadsheet was endless columns of numbers, dates, and initials. Most of it meant nothing to her. But Damien scrolled down slowly, his eyes moving across the rows, and she watched his face turn to stone.

"These are payments," he said. "Disbursements to a research firm in Zurich. Every quarter, for eleven years. Millions." He pointed to a column. "These codes are patient admissions. Pediatric wing, long-stay. Children who came in for treatment and never went home."

"Never went home," Aria repeated. "You mean they died."

"Some did." His voice was low and dead. "Some, like me, survived. And some..." He closed his eyes. "I don't know. I was a child. I knew only that my grandfather had found a way to keep me alive when the doctors had given up. I was grateful. For years, I was grateful."

"What did he do?"

"I think," Damien said slowly, "that he treated us with something that hadn't been approved. Something that hadn't been tested. And when it worked on me, he kept using it, on other children, in the same ward, under the same lights." His jaw worked. "A hospital full of sick kids is the best laboratory a man could ask for. And nobody asks questions when a sick child dies."

Aria felt cold all the way down to her bones.

"My father found this."

"Yes."

"And he told Marcus, expecting him to be horrified."

"Yes."

She thought of her father with his ink-stained fingers and quiet laugh, walking into the office of a monster with a spreadsheet in his hand and hope in his heart.

"Play the recording," she said.

His voice filled the little room.

It was older than she remembered, thinner, scratched with static. But it was him, warm and tired and achingly familiar, and Aria pressed both hands over her mouth to keep from sobbing.

"Aria, if you're hearing this, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you're hearing this at all.

"I recorded this on a Tuesday night in the hospital's basement, because it's the only place Marcus's cameras don't reach. I have copied the books. I have the names. I'm going to take them to someone I trust, a journalist, and then everything will change.

"But I'm not a brave man, sweetheart. If I'm wrong, if they find me first, I want you to know how it started.

"Eleven years ago, Marcus Cross came to me and asked me to help him hide a loss. A child had died in his hospital, a boy of six, and the death was not the first. He told me it was an accident. A rare reaction. He asked me to move some money and forget what I'd seen. And God forgive me, I did. I was in debt. Your mother was ill. I told myself it was one mistake."

A long, wavering breath on the tape.

"It was never one mistake."

Aria's tears fell onto the workbench.

"I kept the books for six more years. I saw other names. I told myself the children were already dying, that the treatment might save them, that maybe I was part of something good. And then I saw a name I recognized."

A pause. Shuffling paper.

"Yours."

The air left her lungs.

"You were seven. You had a fever that wouldn't break, and I took you to the hospital because I was frightened, and Marcus himself came to meet us. He was so kind, Aria. He held your hand. He told us you would be fine." The voice cracked. "And you were. You were fine. You got well so quickly. And I never asked why."

Damien stood very still beside her, his face unreadable.

"Years later, I opened your file by accident. And I found out that what cured you was not a medicine. It was the first stage of Lantern. They had used you, my love. They had used my daughter, and I was the one who brought you through the door."

The tape hissed.

"You were never sick, Aria. Not the way they said. Not the way I believed. You were chosen, because of something in your blood. Something Marcus has been trying to find in other children for eleven years. Something he found in you, and in one other, and nowhere else."

"One other. And I think you know who."

Aria turned her head.

Damien was already looking at her. His face was ashen, and in his eyes was a terrible, naked fear, the look of a man who had spent six years waiting for a door to open.

"It's you," she whispered. "The blood. It's you and me."

He didn't deny it.

"There's more. There's one last thing I need to tell you, and it's the most important. Aria, the reason Marcus has kept you close, the reason he"

The audio stopped.

A burst of static. A thin, grinding whine.

Then silence.

Damien lunged for the keyboard, but the file was already dead, the progress bar frozen two seconds from the end.

"No," he breathed. "No, no, no."

"What was he going to say?"

"I don't know." He was scrolling frantically, clicking through the card's folders. "The file is cut. It's corrupted. Someone damaged it before it ever reached Vivienne."

"Damien."

"There has to be another copy. There has to..."

"Damien."

He stopped.

She had stood. She was shaking, but her voice was steady, and when she spoke, it was almost calm.

"Is that why you married me?"

The room went silent.

"Not to protect me from your grandfather," she said. "Because of the blood. Because there are only two of us, and you needed to keep me close." She swallowed. "Was any of it real?"

He rose slowly from the stool. He looked at her for a long time, and in the dim lamplight he seemed suddenly very young and very tired.

"All of it," he said quietly. "Every word I've told you tonight. And every moment I haven't."

Behind them, the laptop gave a soft electronic chime.

A new window had opened on the screen, uninvited, with a single line of text.

He's lying to you, Aria. Ask him what he did to your father.