MEDICAL EXAMINATION
PART ONE: THE WAITING ROOM
10:47 AM — Private Medical Clinic, Manhattan
The waiting room was expensive in the way that only money could buy not ostentatious, but functionally perfect. Soft lighting calibrated to reduce anxiety. Chairs that actually supported the body. Art on walls by artists whose names mattered. Dr. Elena Reeves had built her practice for people who could afford discretion, who needed medical privacy that law enforcement couldn’t breach, who had secrets that had to stay buried.
Aria sat between Dante and Lucia, though “between” wasn’t quite right. Lucia was on Dante’s other side his mother, who’d raised him, who’d kept him human despite the empire he’d inherited. And Aria was beside her husband, but also somehow outside the circle of their blood re
