Chapter 7 - The Desperate Strike
It was past midnight when I finally staggered out of the operating room, my scrubs soaked in sterile saline and sweat, my muscles aching from a grueling six-hour vascular repair. The trauma had been severe—a multi-car pileup on the interstate that tested every ounce of my surgical endurance.
As I walked down the quiet, dimly lit corridor toward the doctors' locker room to change into my street clothes, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
It was an unknown number.
I swiped and pressed it to my ear. "Dr. Miller speaking."
"Samantha."
The voice was ragged, slurred, and dripping with manic desperation. Andrew.
"How did you get this number?" I demanded, stopping dead in my tracks near the nurses' station. "Andrew, if you’re calling about the lawsuit, talk to my attorneys or the federal marshals."
"Forget the lawyers, Samantha! Just listen to me!" Andrew shouted over the sound of blaring car horns and rushing wind. "You ruined me! They froze my accounts, my partners locked me out of the office, and Gemma packed her bags and left the moment the police showed up at the apartment! You did this to me!"
"You did this to yourself, Andrew," I replied coldly, pushing open the heavy metal door to the locker room. "You stole my money, you committed fraud, and you thought you could humiliate me on our wedding day. You deserve every consequence coming your way."
"You think you’re so untouchable now, don't you?" Andrew laughed hysterically, a chilling, unhinged sound. "You think Zachary Howard is your knight in shining armor? Let me tell you something about your billionaire savior, Samantha. He’s not the saint you think he is."
I froze, my hand hovering over my locker combination lock. "What are you talking about?"
"Look at your tablet," Andrew snarled. "Check your encrypted email right now. I sent you a file. Proof of what Howard Enterprises really does behind closed doors. Proof that the man whose daughter you saved is just as corrupt as the rest of us!"
The line went dead with a harsh click.
My heart hammered against my ribs. Trembling, I pulled my tablet out of my tote bag, unlocked the screen, and opened my encrypted mail app. There was a new message from a burner account. Inside was a single PDF document titled Howard Enterprises Confidential: Medical Procurement Audit.
I clicked it, scanning the densely packed financial columns and legal memos. My breath hitched.
The document detailed a controversial pharmaceutical supply chain dispute from three years ago, involving a subsidiary of Howard Enterprises and a disputed medical trial at St. Luke Memorial Hospital—the exact hospital where I worked. According to the internal memos, Zachary’s corporation had allegedly pushed through an expedited trial approval for a specialized medical device before full safety clearance was established, resulting in a severe administrative cover-up.
And at the center of the oversight committee that approved the trial?
My own departmental chief of surgery, Dr. Harrison Vance.
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My mind spun. Was Zachary playing me? Had he sought me out because of my position at the hospital? Was the whirlwind romance, the protection, the sudden justice just an elaborate manipulation designed to silence an internal medical audit?
Panic and betrayal warred inside my chest. Without changing out of my scrubs, I grabbed my car keys, bolted out of the hospital doors, and drove straight toward Zachary’s estate in the hills overlooking San Antonio.
