Rowan woke to cold sheets and silence.
The warmth of the night before had already vanished, replaced by a quiet so complete it rang in his ears. The bed was empty. Nora was gone. Not just absent, but erased—as if her presence had been a dream that never belonged here. The indentation where her body had rested was no longer visible, like she had never existed in this space at all.
He sat up slowly, pressing the heels of his palms to his face. The sharp sting of fatigue, of confusion, of regret, pulsed behind his eyes. The room was still dim, washed in pale grey light leaking through the blinds. The silence wasn't peaceful. It was hollow. Echoing. Like something sacred had cracked and no one had bothered to clean up the shards.
She hadn't left a note. No text. No explanation.
And yet, somehow, he wasn't surprised.
The night before had been too much and not enough. A breaking point disguised as surrender. A fall that felt like flying until the morning arrived and brought gravity back with it. What they'd shared wasn't just physical. He knew that. It had felt like something deeper, rawer. She had let him in not just into her body, but into the fracture lines of her silence. Into the rooms she kept locked behind clinical smiles and distant eyes.
And now she was gone. Building her walls again.
Rowan got dressed with the stiffness of someone navigating emotional bruises. Every movement was slow, mechanical. As if hurrying might break the fragile thread still connecting him to what had happened between them. He wasn't sure what he had expected to find that morning maybe her sitting on the windowsill, maybe the start of a conversation they'd both been avoiding.
But this? This emptiness?
It tasted like truth.
And the truth was this: whatever they were, it had changed something between them. Permanently.
Across the city, long before the corridors of Westbridge Hospital had filled with footsteps and beeping monitors, Arthur Brenner was already at war with shadows, with doubt, with the quiet hum of his instincts.
His office, lined with glass and secrets, pulsed with the cold blue light of his monitor. He hadn't touched the coffee beside him. The files were already open. The search had begun hours ago, sparked by a detail he couldn't ignore. And now it was spiraling into something deeper. Something dangerous.
He wasn't a man prone to speculation. He didn't accuse. He assembled. He built truths the way others built cathedrals patiently, stone by stone, until there was nowhere left for lies to hide.
And all his paths now led to one name.
Dr. Nora Keane.
Her file was pristine. Too pristine. The kind of clean that begged to be questioned. Her letters of recommendation read like templates impressive, polished, and oddly vague. One hospital listed as a previous employer had shuttered years ago. Another had no HR records under her name, despite the dates aligning.
Then came the glitch.
A flicker on his screen. A forgotten backup.
And there it was.
A metadata tag buried in the archive, not scrubbed carefully enough.
Not Nora Keane.
Nora Avery Keane.
Arthur's eyes narrowed. The name stirred something at the back of his mind. A news clipping? A court document? A whisper from a decade past? He couldn't place it—not yet. But the feeling in his gut was undeniable.
She had not stumbled into Westbridge.
She had infiltrated it.
He bypassed the access restrictions manually one of the few luxuries of being feared more than questioned. The archived personnel logs, long buried, responded sluggishly, as if reluctant to reveal what they had hidden. When they did, the screen lit up with record changes. Revisions. Notes deleted. Cross-references broken.
Her file had been altered. Silently. Repeatedly.
And not just by her.
He leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled beneath his chin, gaze still fixed on the monitor. She hadn't merely hidden something she had planned something. Built a persona. Found the cracks in the system and slipped through them.
He didn't reach for the phone immediately.
Instead, he watched the screen glow in the dark like a silent threat.
Then, in a voice colder than steel, he said, "Get me IT. Full audit on every personnel file modified in the last year."
The voice on the other end paused.
"And… Dr. Keane?"
Arthur's answer was precise.
"Do not alert her. Not yet."
Elsewhere in the hospital, Nora moved through the hallways like nothing had happened.
Her coat was perfectly buttoned. Her hair tied back. Her posture straight. But the cracks weren't gone they had just shifted places. Beneath the surface, the ground was already trembling. She saw it in the way nurses glanced away when she passed. In the receptionist's forced smile. In the way people left slightly more space between themselves and her than usual.
And then there was Elias.
Leaning against the counter outside Cardiology, arms crossed, legs casually crossed at the ankles. He didn't speak at first. He just watched.
Always watching.
"Rough night?" he asked finally, tone light, eyes sharp.
Nora didn't stop walking.
"You know," he said, voice trailing after her like smoke, "for someone who's made hiding an art form… you're starting to get sloppy."
She halted.
Just for a moment.
Just long enough for the weight of his words to land.
Her voice was clipped. Controlled. "I hope you're not following me."
Elias smirked. "Following? No. I just happen to notice the obvious. And right now? You're leaving footprints everywhere."
She turned to face him, her eyes flat but hard. "Why warn me?"
He tilted his head, his voice dropping low. "Who said I'm warning you?"
A pause.
Then: "Maybe I'm just curious to see how far you'll go before you fall."
There was something else beneath the words. A flicker of something human, buried beneath layers of calculation. She recognized it because it was the same thing she saw in her own reflection some nights—concern, twisted and weaponized into distance.
She didn't respond.
She walked away.
But her heartbeat wasn't steady anymore.
Later that afternoon, Rowan stood in the staff lounge, scanning faces that weren't hers.
She wasn't there.
Her badge hadn't pinged into any department since early morning. No patient updates. No logged procedures. It was as if she had disappeared again only this time, it wasn't romantic. It was haunting.
He pulled up the internal logs on the staff terminal. Not something he liked to do. Not something he should be doing. But rules had started feeling like paper since last night.
Last access: Archives. Basement level.
The lowest floor. The quietest. The forgotten space where records went to die.
Rowan stared at the screen.
Was she searching? Hiding? Running?
Or was she… being hunted?
He didn't know.
All he knew was that something was unraveling.
And somewhere in this hospital beneath layers of lies and flickering lights someone else was already tugging at the same thread.