The Blood Heir

The Night Shift

Dante

She'd found the discrepancies faster than anyone I'd ever worked with, including the investigators I'd hired with my own money to dig through our financial records. Sienna Cross had a gift for seeing patterns, for spotting the places where truth got buried under bureaucracy and deliberate obfuscation. It made her valuable. It also made her a target.I sat in my office long after she'd left, reviewing the files she'd flagged, cross referencing them with my own private documentation. Every inconsistency she'd found connected to facilities my father had personally overseen, acquisitions he'd pushed through despite board concerns. The pattern was clear if you knew where to look. Money flowing in from pharmaceutical companies, experimental treatments being conducted without proper oversight, and deaths being classified as natural when they were anything but.My phone buzzed. A text from Dr. Reeve. "Need to see you tonight. Usual place."I deleted the message immediately, habit born from years of covering tracks. Marcus Reeve was my father's personal physician, the man who knew every secret the Ashford family buried. He was also my only source inside my father's inner circle, feeding me information in exchange for promises I wasn't sure I could keep.The usual place was a parking garage six blocks from the hospital, third level, northwest corner where security cameras had convenient blind spots. I arrived at midnight, pulled into the shadows, and waited. Marcus appeared ten minutes later, looking worse than I'd ever seen him. Pale, sweating, glancing over his shoulder like he expected assassins around every corner."We have a problem," he said as soon as he got in my car."We have several problems. Be specific.""Your father knows about the Cross girl." He pulled out his phone, showed me a surveillance photo of Sienna entering the building that morning. "He had facial recognition software flag her the moment she walked through security. He knows exactly who she is and why she's here."My blood went cold. "Why didn't he stop her?""Because he wants to know what you're going to do." Marcus's hands shook as he pocketed his phone. "He's testing you, Dante. Wants to see if you'll handle the threat or if you've gone soft. If you don't eliminate her soon, he'll do it himself and remove you from succession for being weak."I gripped the steering wheel hard enough to hurt. "He's bluffing.""Is he?" Marcus laughed, bitter and broken. "Last month a nurse started asking questions about patient deaths in the experimental wing. She disappeared three days later. Official story is she moved to Seattle for a new job. Unofficial story is her body is probably in the Hudson River wearing concrete shoes.""You have proof of that?""I have enough proof to get myself killed." He looked at me with desperate eyes. "I'm giving you a heads up because your mother was kind to me once, because I'd like to think some part of you is still the idealistic kid who wanted to save lives instead of bury bodies. But if you're planning something, Dante, you better do it soon. Your father is tying up loose ends, and that girl is a very loose end."He got out of my car and disappeared into the shadows, leaving me alone with information I didn't want and choices I couldn't avoid. Sienna thought she was hunting my family. She had no idea she was already prey.I drove back to the office instead of going home, used my executive clearance to access files I wasn't supposed to touch. Patient records from the experimental wing, death certificates that had been modified, consent forms with forged signatures. Everything Marcus had hinted at, everything I'd suspected for years, laid out in digital documentation that would destroy my father if it ever became public.But it would also destroy me. My name was on some of these approvals, signed before I'd known what I was authorizing. My medical license had been used to legitimize treatments I'd never personally overseen. I was complicit, even if I'd been ignorant. The law wouldn't care about intentions.I downloaded everything onto an encrypted drive, created backups, and hid them in locations my father would never think to look. Then I did something stupid. I pulled up Sienna's employment file, found her address, and realized she lived in a neighborhood where murders happened often enough that no one would question another body in an alley.My father wouldn't come for her here, in the office, where too many witnesses existed. He'd wait until she was alone, vulnerable, walking home from the subway in the dark. And it would look like random violence, another tragic casualty of urban crime.I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door. My rational brain screamed that this was insane, that I couldn't protect her twenty four hours a day, that getting involved would only make both of us bigger targets. But my rational brain had stopped being in charge the moment I'd looked into her eyes and seen the same trapped desperation I felt every time I looked in a mirror.The drive to her neighborhood took thirty minutes through empty streets, past buildings with bars on windows and people who'd learned not to see anything worth reporting. I parked down the block from her apartment, settled in to watch, and told myself I was being paranoid.Two hours later, a black sedan with tinted windows rolled past slowly, circling the block like a shark. No license plates. Professional grade vehicle. I pulled out my phone, made a call to a private security company I kept on retainer for emergencies."I need overnight protection on a location. Starting immediately."This was insane. This was crossing lines I couldn't uncross. But as I watched that black sedan make another pass, I knew with absolute certainty that my father had already made his move. And if I wanted Sienna alive long enough to help me bring him down, I needed to become something I'd spent years avoiding.I needed to become someone willing to fight back.