Chapter 1

The treadmill went from a slow walk to a sprint in three seconds. Two security guards grabbed me by the arms and pinned me down against the handrails. The spots on my chest where they'd just ripped off the monitoring pads still burned.

"Turn it up," Mandy Sutherland said.

She stood outside the glass wall, her arms crossed as she watched us.

A nurse was beside her. Her face went pale, and she said, "Ms. Sutherland, she can't do intense exercise—"

"The Ziegler family spends nine figures a year to keep that heart beating. I want to see how precious it really is," Mandy said nonchalantly.

The speed jumped to ten. My knees smashed against the edge of the belt, and my vision went black around the edges.

The alarms blared. [Abnormal heart rate detected. Primary frequency unstable. Remote sync risk rising.]

I grabbed hold of the handrails so tightly that my knuckles turned white. My words came out in chopped bursts between ragged breaths.

"Don't… don't shut down… the sync line…"

Mandy walked in and bent down so we were face to face. "Still acting, huh?"

She slapped a thick stack of annual invoices onto my face. Climate-controlled chamber maintenance, medical team salaries, imported medication, a dedicated server farm… Every number on the page was big enough to kill.

She picked one up and read, "130 million dollars a year. What value have you ever created for the Ziegler family? Nothing. All you do is lie there and breathe."

Cold sweat ran down my temples, and my heart felt like it was being squeezed tighter by the second.

There was nothing wrong with my heart. The real problem here was that the second my heart rate spiraled out of control, that artificial heart 12 time zones away in Aiden Ziegler's chest would go with it.

I rasped, "Ms. Sutherland… it's not too late… for you to stop this now…"

Mandy's hand cracked across my face. My mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood.

The nurse, Noelle Tate, rushed forward, grabbing spare monitoring pads. "Ms. Lane can't run anymore!"

With one look from Mandy, the security guards yanked Noelle back. The monitoring pads went straight into the trash.

"You're suspended. One more word, and you can forget about working in medicine ever again," Mandy said briskly.

Noelle froze where she stood, too scared to move.

By the time the treadmill finally stopped, my legs gave out, and I dropped to my knees. A heavy ache kept slamming through my chest, harder each time, but the shrieking alarms cut off in an instant.

Mandy had killed the display. The world went quiet. All that was left was my uneven breathing.

She glanced up in the direction of the top floor where I lived, then suddenly smiled. "Search her monitoring suite. I want to see what exactly the Ziegler family's money has been keeping alive."

Two lawyers and the security guards headed upstairs. By the time I was dragged back to the top floor, my room looked like a crime scene. The climate-controlled pod was cracked open, and backup medication was scattered all over the floor. Even the small safe by my bed had been pried open.

A lawyer walked over to Mandy with a few documents. "Ms. Sutherland, we found these."

She took the papers, skimmed them, and slowly smiled. "Rebate agreement with an equipment supplier."

She flipped to a few more pages. "Offshore transfer records."

She looked back at me, her eyes shining with triumphant satisfaction. "Anything you want to say for yourself, Geraldine?"

I stared at the documents. For a moment, I really wanted to laugh. None of those things were mine, but I could barely even stand up straight now, let alone defend myself.

Mandy was already announcing the verdict. "You colluded with medical equipment vendors to siphon off Ziegler Group's medical resources, and you faked your condition to steal special funding."

She slapped the papers against my face. "Effective immediately, Geraldine Lane is stripped of top-floor intensive monitoring privileges. Transfer her to a standard observation room."

I jerked my head up. "You can't do that."

The top-tier sync environment couldn't be broken. The climate control, the soundproofing, the dedicated servers, and the monitoring pads—every single piece mattered.

Mandy just assumed she'd finally found my weak spot.

"What's wrong? Can't live without your penthouse suite?" She leaned down and gripped my chin. "Then you can just drop dead."

I was being dragged out of the room when the rehab center's main control wall suddenly exploded in red alerts.

[Primary frequency lost. Remote artificial heart sync failure. Emergency contact: Aiden Ziegler.]

Mandy glanced at the wall. Then, without even batting an eye, she reached out and shut down the entire display with a quick flip of a switch.

At the same time, Aiden was bent over a table in a conference room in Iropa, signing a merger agreement. The tip of his fountain pen had just touched the paper when it slashed hard across the page.

A second later, the artificial heart in his chest let out a piercing alarm.