Todos los capítulos de Betrayed, I Become The CEO'S Contracted Bride: Capítulo 341 - Capítulo 350

The alarm panel by the front door flashed green and let out a single, piercing beep.A digital counter appeared on the small screen. It read ninety minutes, and the colon in the center began to flash as the seconds ticked down.Alexander pushed the heavy front door shut behind them. He turned the deadbolt, checked the lock, and dropped his keys into the ceramic bowl on the console table. The metal rang in the quiet space.Elara watched the numbers on the screen shift to eighty-nine. She checked her own watch to confirm the time.She had come to collect a stack of clinical files and a replacement centrifuge rotor from the laboratory at the back of the house.It was her house, and she had not stood in this hallway for three months.She lived with a sixteen-year-old named Mira who cooked the meals and rearranged the kitchen shelves so Elara could reach the glasses without asking. Lucia, who was six, drew pictures on scrap paper. The drawings went on the fridge, and there were more of the

The radiator beneath the tall windows ticked every few seconds. Someone in the back row silenced a ringing phone. Elara sat beside Elena at the heavy table and watched the clerk sort gray folders into two uneven piles.The room smelled of floor wax and wet wool. They were here for a blank box on a sworn application. She had written forty in it to keep the clinic doors shut.Now the defense wanted the whole case thrown out because nobody could have known the real count that day, which meant the files and the transport logs and the children would all go back.She had stayed up until three counting the real admissions. The number was sixty-one and she had her own examinations behind every one of them.Nobody was arguing about that. They were arguing about a figure she had written down before she knew it.Elena aligned the edges of her legal pad with the edge of the table. She uncapped a silver pen and left it resting on the yellow paper."He's going to stick to the form," Elena said. "Ju

Elara closed the folder on the table.The Turin file was 40 pages of billing claims for treatment nobody had needed. She'd spent the last hour matching them against the clinic dates. Ordinary children, given something that made them test badly, written up as damaged, and charged to a federal funding scheme for the damage.Every claim in the folder was correctly filled in. That was the part she couldn't get past.Hammond squared the intake sheets on the wood and put them in the box on the floor."That's the last of the November batch."Past six. They'd been moving paper around all afternoon so they wouldn't have to talk about the thing they'd come in to talk about.Leonie Vass had set up the first medical trust in 2009 and kept the ledgers after it. The ones that turned a diagnosis code into a child with a name. She was the only person left alive who could put Arthur inside the thing he'd built before he faked his death 5 years ago, and he'd stopped using her the moment those ledgers s

Mira stacked 14 pages of patient codes into the red folder and reached for the next pile.The kitchen table was covered in them. She was doing this because there was nothing good on her phone and because she could read the clinic intake paperwork faster than anyone else in the house. She knew what the boxes meant because she'd been the subject of forms exactly like them 10 years ago. The codes for risk and the codes for compliance were burned into her head. Now she lived here with Elara, and Elara was out trying to prove a shut-down clinic in Turin had spent years billing funding networks for treating children they'd actually damaged.Hammond was sitting at the far end of the table. He was typing numbers from the Turin bank statements into a spreadsheet. He'd been doing it for two hours and he hadn't spoken since he sat down. The only sound from his end was the heavy clicking of his keyboard.Lucia was sitting on the floor under the window. She had a green crayon and was aggressively

Hammond tapped the edge of the weekly summary against his desk to square the pages. He put them in the out tray. It was ten past ten. The application had been sitting on a judge's desk since yesterday afternoon, and he had been checking the clock every twenty minutes since eight.Vass had told Elara she was coming in. Elara had stood in a park yesterday and gotten her to agree. But frightened people changed their minds, and Vass had been running for three weeks. The warrant Hammond was waiting for was the insurance. It was a material witness order. Once a judge signed it, Hammond could send people to pick Vass up, put her in a secure room, and keep her there until she opened Arthur Vance's ledgers. They would not have to hope she showed up at the federal building.Those ledgers were the only way to turn a list of correct billing forms back into the names of the children Arthur had used. Arthur had built a network that faked diagnosis scores to trigger state funding, and every invoice