Page 21 of Twisted Empire

“Do you know who it was who cut you?” he asked abruptly.

I shook my head, puzzled. “Like I said, I didn’t even notice it’d happened until just now.”

Dexter’s voice roughened. “I wish I knew. If I find out, I’ll do so much worse to them.”

The vehemence in his voice, full of so much dark promise, sent a shiver over my skin. It wasn’t entirely unappealing, but it startled me.

“That doesn’t sound like you,” I couldn’t help saying.

Dexter lifted his head. This time he let his gaze linger on mine, even though I suspected the eye contact wasn’t entirely comfortable for him.

“I can’t help feeling that way,” he said. “Like I’d tear apart anyone who even tries to hurt you. I—Iloveyou, and the idea of losing you… I’d rather face a million unsolvable puzzles than ever face that possibility again.”

A lump rose in my throat. I turned to him and pulled him into a hug, squeezing him hard. He returned the embrace as if he never planned to let go of me. His warmth wrapped around me, making the emotion that’d already filled my chest expand through my whole body.

“I love you too,” I said, hoping he could hear how much I meant that. “And I plan on staying right here with you no matter what those assholes try to do.”

I just hoped we could figure out the puzzle we were in the middle of before anyone else got hurt.

CHAPTERNINE

Madelyn

You wouldn’t think watching a guy type on a laptop keyboard could be all that thrilling, but something about the intensity in Logan’s expression and the urgency with which his fingers flew over the keys sent a tingle through me as I watched.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that I also considered him to be one of the most gorgeous men on the planet.

My other favorite men were gathered around me in Beckett’s usual white van: Beckett in the driver’s seat up front, Slade sitting on one of the benches in the back next to me with a reassuring hand on my thigh, and Dexter perched on the opposite bench beside Logan, his eyes glued to a tablet.

Voices carried through the wall of the van from outside. We’d parked near one of the city’s hospitals, as close as we dared to the building. The emergency ward wasn’t far away, and cars and taxis were constantly roaring by, dropping off people who hustled or limped through the doors.

At the wail of an ambulance, I tensed. But just as the siren cut out, Logan’s head jerked up. “I’ve got it! All the records they have digitized. We can get out of here.”

He’d hacked into the hospital’s database with the help of a few tips from Beckett’s tech crew, meaning to download every file he could get his hands on. This was our second stop so far, but we weren’t finished yet.

Beckett glanced back at me. “Where do you think we should go next, soon-to-be-Dr. Silver?”

I couldn’t help smiling at the title despite the tension filling the van. “There’s St. Joseph’s out in the suburbs. That’s the next closest hospital.”

He nodded and put the van into drive.

As it pulled away from the curb, Logan kept tapping away at his computer. “I’m transferring a bunch more transplant patient files over to you,” he told Dexter. “I think I was able to separate out most of them right away, but I’m going to do a more thorough scan to make sure I didn’t miss anything.”

Dexter nodded without looking up from the tablet. He’d been studying the records Logan had dug up, piecing together potential patterns that might indicate which ones had been falsified to cover up an illegal transplant.

He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Here’s another one. This is the fifth file I’ve found with a red blood cell count of 4.47 million per microliter. Other than that, I haven’t seen the exact same number in any of the records.”

I frowned. “So they could be using data from previous legit records, an example of what they know things should look like to make their fake ones look correct.”

He nodded. “There are a couple of other markers, like kidney function, where I’m seeing some repetition, although not all in the same files. They were being cautious, using a few different examples to mix and match, I think. But once you start noticing the pattern, it’s obvious.”

Slade stretched out his prosthetic leg with a soft thump on the thinly carpeted floor. “And you said they all make it look like the actual transplant happened at some other hospital, right?”

Dexter nodded. “All the files I’ve collected with at least one repeated number were transfer patients. It makes sense—they wouldn’t want to pretend the transplant happened at the same hospital where they received after care, which the staff could easily realize wasn’t true.”

Excitement jittered through my chest. We were getting so close, catching the key details of evidence that could expose Doom’s Seed’s illegal operations.

“It makes sense that the staff wouldn’t have noticed the discrepancy like this,” I said. “How many years were those patients spread across?”

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