[TWO WEEKS LATER]

Two weeks passed like fog.

No one at the hospital breathed Lukas's name. Not once. The records we'd worked so hard to scrub stayed clean, every trace of him carefully wiped from the system. The empty chair in the conference room had been swapped out for a new one; it blended right in, and nobody so much as glanced twice at where the old one used to sit.

When anyone asked about the Berger heir, all they got was a vague shrug and "something with the family business." The fear that had been coiled tight in my chest for months finally loosened its grip. I wasn't just...