There was a kind of person who kept Rivergate General Hospital alive, and Elena Marsh had decided, somewhere between her second year of nursing and her fourth, that she would simply be that kind of person whether the institution acknowledged it or not

The knock was followed immediately by the door opening to reveal Marcus, Dante’s chief of security, his face pale and tight under the dim corridor light.

"Boss," Marcus said, stepping inside and closing the heavy door behind him. "We have a problem."

Dante’s relaxed posture vanished instantly, replaced by the coiled, lethal tension of a predator. "Speak."

"The men we intercepted on the north ridge... they weren't an independent hit squad," Marcus said, his eyes darting briefly toward Elena before returning to Dante. "We pulled encrypted comms from their vehicle. They belong to the Vanguard Syndicate out of Chicago. And they didn't track us through the hospital records."

Dante’s jaw tightened. "Explain."

"They had an inside man at Rivergate General," Marcus said grimly. "Someone high up in the administrative chain. Someone who had access to the master server logs and knew every movement Elena and the medical team made over the past forty-eight hours."

Elena felt the blood drain from her face. "Administrative chain... Wexler."

"Wexler's a coward, not a criminal," Dante growled, pacing toward the desk. "He wouldn't have the stomach to sell information to Chicago."

"It wasn't Wexler," Marcus corrected, handing a printed tablet to Dante. "It was the chief financial officer, Arthur Vance—no relation to you, boss. He's been embezzling from the hospital's discretionary charity funds for three years. The Chicago syndicate found out, bought his debt, and used him to monitor Lily's mother when she was admitted under an alias two weeks ago. When she fled, he tipped them off."

The silence in the library was lethal. Dante looked down at the tablet screen, reading the financial transfer records, the datestamps, the exact minute-by-minute logs of Lily's admission notes being beamed to an offshore server.

"Where is Arthur Vance right now?" Dante asked. His voice was no longer loud; it was barely above a whisper, but it carried the weight of an executioner's axe.

"He's still in the city," Marcus replied. "Scheduled to board a private flight to the Cayman Islands at noon tomorrow using funds wired by Chicago as his final payout."

Dante looked up from the tablet, turning his gaze slowly toward Elena. "He sold my daughter's location. He put a target on a six-year-old child's back for pocket change."

Elena’s hands clenched into fists at her sides. All the patience, all the quiet grace that had kept her going through years of hospital bureaucracy, dissolved into a cold, hard fury.

"Don't kill him," Elena said.

Dante blinked, surprised. "He traded my daughter's life. Why shouldn't I kill him?"

"Because bullets are too easy," Elena said, her eyes flashing with a light that made even Marcus take a half-step back. "If you kill him, he becomes a martyr for his own corruption, and the board will cover up the whole scandal to protect the hospital's reputation. He'll keep his pension, and nobody will ever know what he did."