The Cole Estate secrets

Chapter 2: Someone Else's Hands

The name badge said Alex Reed.

I read it three times like the third time was going to change something.

It didn't.

I was standing in a small staff room that smelled like old coffee and disinfectant, wearing scrubs that weren't mine, with hands that weren't mine, looking at a face in the mirror that I had never seen before in my life — and somewhere two floors above me, my actual body was lying in a coma while my sister made sure nobody disturbed it.

I'd survived a bullet.

I just hadn't survived it as myself.

The mirror didn't lie. Wrong face. Wrong build. Younger than me, tired in a way that lived in the skin, a small scar across one knuckle I had no memory of getting. I raised my hand slowly. The reflection did the same. I waited for something to correct itself.

Nothing did.

I sat on the edge of the narrow bed and tried to think like the man I used to be — the one who built a billion dollar company before thirty, the one who never walked into a room without already knowing how to walk out of it. That man didn't panic. That man assessed.

So I assessed.

I was alive. Different body, but alive. My mind was intact — I remembered everything. The gala. Daniel's face. The sound the gun made. Elena in the doorway.

My real body was two floors up, which meant I was still in the same hospital.

My family thought I was unconscious and dying.

That meant they thought they'd won.

A knock at the door snapped me upright.

A nurse leaned in without waiting — middle aged, tired, moving with the particular efficiency of someone three hours into a twelve hour shift.

"You're up early, Alex. Shift doesn't start for another hour."

Alex. She said it like it was obvious. Like I'd been Alex my whole life.

"Bad night," I said. My voice came out lower than I expected. Rougher. Alex Reed's voice.

She looked at me for a second longer than felt comfortable. "You alright? You look pale."

"I'm fine."

She accepted that the way busy people accept things that aren't their problem. "Room 308 needs chart checks before handover. Don't be late today, yeah? Supervisor's already watching you."

She left before I could ask what that meant.

I sat with it for a moment. Already watching you. So Alex Reed had problems I'd just inherited. Wonderful.

I found his locker down the hall. His fingers knew the combination before I did — four digits, right then left then right, muscle memory that lived in the hands and not the head. Inside: a jacket, a phone, a worn wallet. I checked the wallet first. Two bills, a transit card, a photo folded small.

I unfolded it.

A woman, maybe sixty, sitting up in a hospital bed with tubes in her arm and a smile that cost her something. Written on the back in careful handwriting — Mom. Still fighting.

I folded it back and put it away.

So Alex Reed had a mother. A sick one. I filed that away and kept moving.

The phone unlocked with a passcode his thumb knew automatically. Seventeen missed calls. Three from someone saved as landlord. The rest from a number with no name that had also sent eleven texts, each one shorter and angrier than the last, the final one reading simply: I know what you took.

I stared at that for a long moment.

What did you take, Alex.

I pocketed the phone and moved.

Finding my own body was easier than it should have been.

T5VIP wing, east corridor, private room at the end of the hall with a guard outside who wasn't hospital staff. Dark suit. Earpiece. Hands folded in front of him like he was guarding something more important than a man in a coma.

Daniel's people.

I kept my head down and pushed a linen cart past the door, slow enough to see through the small window without stopping.

There I was.

Pale. Still. Machines breathing for me with mechanical patience while monitors tracked a heartbeat that apparently refused to quit. There were flowers on the side table that nobody had bought for comfort. They were the kind of flowers you bought for appearances.

Elena was inside.

She stood beside the bed with her back to the window, one hand resting on the bedrail, not holding it for comfort — holding it the way you hold something you're about to make a decision about. She was speaking to someone I couldn't see, low and careful, and even through the glass and the distance I recognized the tone.

That was her business voice.

She used it in board meetings and contract negotiations and apparently also when she was standing over my unconscious body deciding my future.

I kept moving before the guard could register me.

At the end of the corridor I stopped and stood very still and understood several things at once.

My family was not grieving.

They were managing.

And whatever they were protecting — whatever had been worth shooting me over, whatever Daniel meant when he said you were never supposed to find out — it wasn't finished yet. They were still working. Still planning. The bullet was step one, not the end.

Which meant I had time.

Not much. But some.

I looked down at Alex Reed's hands. Scarred knuckle. Bitten nail on the left thumb. The hands of a man who worked hard and struggled quietly and apparently stole something from someone who was now very unhappy about it.

I didn't know his life yet.

But I was going to have to learn it fast.

Because Adrian Cole was dead to everyone in this hospital.

And right now, Alex Reed was the only person who could find out why.