All Chapters of Betrayed, I Become The CEO'S Contracted Bride: Chapter 201 - Chapter 210

She was at the bench by five-thirty.The notebooks were where she had left them at midnight , open to line twenty-seven, the last few calculations smaller and compressed where her hand had tired. She could still read them. She sat down with coffee she didn't taste and found her place.The stabilizer pathway had eleven density coefficient tables. She had completed eight. Table nine was the carrier angle divergence , the parameter Dr. Chen had flagged on the first reading, the point where Arthur's approach branched from her own. She had known since the first pass through his file that this was the table that mattered. Everything else in the pathway , the binding architecture, the early coefficient work, the delivery mechanism , was structure built around a decision made at this junction. If her independent rebuild was going to diverge from his figures, it would happen here.She read through what she had written the night before. Then she picked up her pen.Line one. Line two. Line three

The build sequence started at six-fifteen.Elara had the primary bench cleared by five-fifty, the parameter notebook open to the Day 1 sequence she had written the morning before. The activated resin substrate arrived at six-oh-five , Alexander had done the supply run the previous evening, everything logged and staged by the time she came in. She worked through the first three steps without stopping, the process clean and familiar from the two trial runs she had done with the carrier formulation the week prior.At seven-forty, Dr. Chen called.She picked up and kept her left hand on the substrate chamber."Morning session," he said. "I need to tell you before you see the log."She moved her hand off the chamber. "What happened.""Convulsive episode at six-ten. Resolved in under two minutes. She's lucid and stable now." A pause. "It was close."Elara set down the calibration tool and stood at the bench."Dosage," she said."The protocol was adjusted three days ago. I only saw the updat

Elara put the stabilizer case on the table before anyone sat down.It was a hard-shell carrier, foam-cut for four sealed vials and the single-use administration kit. She had packed it that morning, between synthesis steps, and she set it at the head of the table so the plan would build around the object that mattered most. Alexander came in with the liaison a minute later. Natasha was already on the screen at the far end, her credential paperwork open in a window beside her face."Thirty-six hours to the open-evening," the liaison said. He laid a floor plan across the table, the institute's east wing marked in two colors. "Public access starts at seven. Reduced staff in the residential corridor from eight. That's the window.""How wide," Elara said."Forty minutes, conservatively. The tour groups clear the east wing by eight-twenty. After nine, security normalizes."She looked at the marked corridor. Mira's room was at the end of it."Natasha's credential puts her inside as a visiting

Elara walked the east corridor at one minute past eight with the stabilizer case logged as a sample carrier.Natasha was three steps ahead in a borrowed institute lanyard, her visiting-researcher credential clipped at the collar where the corridor cameras would read it. The open-evening crowd thinned past the second junction , a dozen guests trailing a staff guide toward the imaging suite, none of them coming this far down. The residential wing smelled of floor cleaner and recycled air. Elara kept her pace to Natasha's and her eyes on the room numbers, the way a researcher checking an assignment sheet would.The man was at the nurses' station.He stood with a visitor's badge and a paper cup of coffee, reading a noticeboard he had no reason to read, angled so the length of the corridor sat in his sightline. Elara had seen one photograph of him, eleven days old, taken through a cafe window. The set of his shoulders matched it. She did not slow and she did not look at his face. She looke

"Keep your hand on the rail," Elara said, and took the next step down with Mira's weight against her side.Mira's legs held, but only just. The girl's breath came quick and thin against Elara's shoulder. Natasha moved a flight ahead of them, testing each landing with one foot before she waved them down onto it.The second landing sat in full dark.Natasha stopped at the edge of the black. "He told us about this one on purpose.""Then he wants us to use it." Elara guided Mira toward the dark square of the landing. "Take it slow right here. Talk to me, Mira. Give me your full name.""You already know my name." The words came out frayed, but the edge under them held."I want to hear you use it.""Mira Catherine Soto, same as an hour ago.""That helps. Stay annoyed with me, it keeps your blood up where I want it."A door opened somewhere above them, two flights up, and a wedge of light dropped down the stairwell. Natasha lifted one hand and they all stopped on the stair. Footsteps crossed