All Chapters of Betrayed, I Become The CEO'S Contracted Bride: Chapter 321 - Chapter 330

Two uniformed officers stood outside the glass doors. Elara walked past them and stepped into the clinic.She had one hour before the police emptied the waiting room and turned the day's appointments away.Mira followed her inside. The sixteen-year-old kept her hands in her jacket pockets. Mira could read the assessment files because the same network had run the same process on her when she was small.The heaters ran high in the reception area. A boy slept across the chairs in the corner, his coat pulled over his legs. Prams sat parked in a line against the wall.A nurse crossed the floor and stopped by the play area. She spoke to the children on the rug by name.Elara looked at the corner. Somebody had spent money on the toys. There was a rocking horse, a shelf of picture books arranged by reading age, and a box of dressing-up clothes with the collars still stiff.Parents sat reading magazines. They had come voluntarily. They looked comfortable.Renata stood behind the reception desk

Chapter 321Elara smelled cold pasta and paper dust in the air. Traffic noise drifted up from the wet street outside, and it mixed with the low hum of the small refrigerator by the wardrobe. She pushed her medical credentials into the side pocket of her bag and she pulled the zipper shut.She watched the sixteen-year-old sort the copied intake paperwork. There were four boxes left on the carpet between the beds. At this rate they would be awake until two in the morning, and the index had to be ready for the prosecutors tonight because they were on an early flight home.Mira had been one of the children on these documents years ago. She had been indexing the pages since the police raided the Turin facility that morning.Elara counted the loose pages on the desk. There were at least two hundred sheets in the current batch. The girl was reading the handwritten notes and converting them into a spreadsheet, and she had been doing it for three hours without a break. Mira lifted a page and t

Elara opened the folder on the desk and smoothed the first page flat. She had forty minutes to verify the timeline before the evening filing deadline locked the statement for the upcoming hearing. The clinic records formed a heavy stack on the right side of her desk. They were waiting to be checked against the financial disclosures.The screen mounted on the wall clicked and connected. Marcus appeared in the frame. The window behind him showed the dark of the evening, and the sill where he usually kept a plant was empty. He was taking the session from his apartment because the supervision office was closed for the night.Hammond leaned into the camera view from his seat beside her and did not bother with a greeting."Federal case file four zero," Hammond began. "Scope is the Turin site arrest. It changes your status."Marcus watched the camera. "Go on.""Your account moves out of the background file," Hammond told him. "It becomes evidence, which means you go on the stand, they use you

Dr James Chen aligned the next rack of sample vials on the stainless steel bench and picked up his marker. He was her lab colleague and the only person in the building who never asked how she slept. They were running the bloods from the Tuesday intake, trying to match the heavy metal markers to the dates on the shipping manifests."Four more from the transport." Chen slid them across the resin surface."Check the iron levels first." Elara pulled a new pair of gloves from the dispenser. "The last batch were borderline anaemic, and the police want a pattern."He uncapped the marker and wrote a patient code on the first label. "They are all borderline everything.""Just run them."She slotted the vial into the centrifuge. There were eleven days until the police needed her statement on the referral network, and this data was the last piece of the timeline. She checked the seal on the rotor, closed the lid, and set the timer.The machine spun up, vibrating through the floorboards. They wor

The federal system put a counter in the top corner of the screen. It started at forty minutes and counted down in green numbers. Elara propped the phone against a mug and pulled the first stack of referral forms to the center of the desk.Marcus was looking at something off camera. Behind him was the wall of the flat the federal office had picked for him, chosen for access control rather than comfort."They fixed the radiator in the hall." Elara opened the first folder."The loud one.""It was a valve. A man came yesterday.""That took them three months." Marcus leaned back. "I assume they left the plaster dust on the skirting board.""I cleaned it up.""Did you get the dust out of the carpet?""Most of it.""You have to use the stiff brush on the attachment. The regular one just pushes it down into the weave.""I used the stiff brush.""And it came up.""It came up."He nodded once.Elara picked up her pen. She had spent the morning working her way through a box of physical clinic re