Chapter 2 - The Shadows of Whitmore Dynamics
Two security guards seized Miles by the arms, dragging him backward out of Room 912. Nora cried out, clinging to her father’s yellow jumpsuit as they were shoved into the dim hallway.
“Wait!” Everett’s voice echoed from the bed, surprisingly loud despite his ruined throat. “Don't... don't touch them!”
Marcus Vane smoothly stepped between the bed and the door, blocking Everett’s view. “Everett, calm down. You’ve been in a coma for three months. You’re disoriented. These people are hospital staff, nobody important.”
“He... knows,” Everett wheezed, his chest heaving under the thin blanket. “The song... Clara’s song...”
Marcus’s eyes narrowed slightly, a subtle twitch passing over his jaw. He turned to the guards at the door and gave a curt, quiet nod. “Remove them from the floor. Revoke the father’s clearance. I want them off hospital property by the end of the hour.”
Down in the security office on the ground floor, Miles was forced to turn in his badge and clear out his locker. Nora sat quietly on a bench beside him, her yellow raincoat pulled tight around her small frame.
“Daddy,” she whispered, looking up at him with tears in her big brown eyes. “Did I do something bad?”
Miles knelt down, swallowing the lump in his throat. He wrapped his arm around her, pulling her close. “No, sweetie. You did something incredible. You woke a man up who was trapped in the dark.”
“Then why are they mad at us?”
Miles didn't have an answer he could give a seven-year-old. How could he explain that five years ago, his wife Clara hadn't just died in a car crash—she had been working on a top-secret neural interface project for Whitmore Dynamics? How could he explain that the song she sang to Nora was embedded with a acoustic activation frequency, designed to stimulate deep brain tissue?
Clara hadn't just been a mother and a musician; she had been Everett Whitmore’s lead neuro-engineer.
And Marcus Vane had been the man who pushed her off the road.
Miles’s hands shook as he zipped up his jacket. He had stayed quiet for five years to protect Nora, taking a dead-end job, living like a shadow, believing that if he didn't make waves, the men who ruined his life would forget he existed. But now, Everett Whitmore was awake. And Everett held the answers to what really happened on that icy mountain road.
As Miles led Nora through the rain-soaked parking lot of Mercy Harbor, a black sedan pulled up quietly beside them. The back window rolled down, revealing a woman in a sharp gray suit.
It was Evelyn Ross, Everett Whitmore’s personal legal counsel and the only person in Whitmore Dynamics who had remained loyal to the founder.
“Get in, Miles,” Evelyn said, her tone urgent. “Or rather... should I call you Arthur Vance?”
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Miles froze in the cold Seattle rain, shielding Nora behind his coat. “How do you know who I am?”
“Everett didn't collapse from a natural stroke at Silverpine Lodge, Arthur,” Evelyn said, holding the door open. “He was poisoned. And the moment Marcus Vane figures out that your daughter just unlocked Everett’s mind, neither of you will survive the night.”
