Chapter 545

Chapter 545:

The staff wasted no time. They wheeled Saul through the open doors of VIP Room 1. Isolde followed close behind. The heavy ward door slid shut with a firm, decisive sound — sealing Grayson and Belle on the outside, and sealing away, along with it, every remnant of what had once existed between them.

Grayson stood in the corridor, staring at the closed door.

He had assumed he knew what Isolde was. A woman who had relied on his name, helpless without it, reduced to standing in a hallway and begging for a ward. But she had summoned the NIH. She had secured a federal medical order. She had walked through that hospital with a level of authority he could not begin to account for.

He turned her gaze over in his mind — blank, cold, and entirely without attachment. As though she had looked through him at something that wasn’t there.

His fingers tightened around his phone until his knuckles went pale. A dull, pressing ache settled in his chest and did not lift.

He thought, with a clarity that arrived slowly and then all at once, that this time he had truly and completely lost her.

After a long moment, he raised his phone, his expression dark and set.

“Look into everything,” he told his assistant, his voice low and without room for interpretation. “Every record — her whereabouts, her calls, her connections over the past five years. Find out who she has been in contact with and what she has been hiding. I want every detail. Today p>

The heavy door to Room 402 clicked shut, sealing the rhythmic, life-affirming beeping of the cardiac monitors inside.

Isolde pressed her forehead against the cool wood for a moment. Her breath fogged the varnish. Saul was safe. Dr. Stein had personally overseen the transfer, and the machines were doing their work.

She exhaled — a shuddering, full-body release of tension that rattled through her ribs.

𝖰𝗎а𝗅𝗶𝘁𝘺 𝗍𝗿𝗮𝗇𝘀lаti𝗼nѕ 𝗼ո

She turned around.

And walked straight into a different kind of tension.

The corridor of the VIP wing was usually a sanctuary of hushed voices and soft footsteps. Now it was occupied.

Belle was still there. She had not left. She was leaning against Grayson’s chest, her shoulders trembling with low, theatrical sobs.

When Grayson saw Isolde, he gently but firmly extricated himself from Belle’s grip. He straightened the lapels of his suit — the brief moment of comfort instantly replaced by the cool, impenetrable composure of a man who negotiates for a living. He took two deliberate steps forward, positioning himself in Isolde’s path.

“We need to talk p>

Isolde didn’t move toward him or away from him. She leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms over her chest in a posture of quiet, exhausted defiance.

“If this is about the room, save your breath p>

Grayson’s expression didn’t shift. He reached into his inner jacket pocket and produced a leather-bound checkbook. “I know you used your connections to secure this room,” he said, his voice stripped of all inflection. “But Hector needs absolute quiet and this specific equipment. I’ll give you two million dollars. Consider it fair compensation. You can transfer your uncle to the best private facility in the state p>

Two million. The number hung in the sterile air between them.