Chapter 5 - The Doctor’s Ledger
The digital clock on the wall of the seventh-floor administrative office read 3:45 a.m.
Dr. Everett Voss sat at his mahogany desk, his hands shaking so violently he could barely hold his fountain pen. The hospital was quiet, but to Voss, every creak of the ventilation system sounded like heavy footsteps marching down the hall.
He pulled a small leather-bound ledger from the bottom drawer of his desk—a private record of every payment wired into his offshore Swiss account over the past six months.
The transfers didn't come from St. Jude Memorial. They came from a shell corporation controlled by Vincent Gallo—the ruthless leader of the South Side syndicate, and the exact man who had planted the car bomb that killed Genevieve Kade three weeks ago.
The logic had seemed foolproof at the time: Gallo wanted the Kade bloodline wiped out entirely. A bomb had failed to finish the infant in utero, so Gallo had approached Voss with an offer he couldn't refuse—two million dollars to slowly starve the baby under the guise of natural medical decline, ensuring Weston Kade suffered a slow, agonizing psychological destruction before breaking his empire entirely.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Voss jumped out of his chair as if he had been shot.
The office door slowly pushed open.
Standing in the doorway was not a hospital security guard. It was Weston Kade.
Behind Weston stood Marcus and two armed enforcers, blocking the hallway completely. The overhead lights reflected off Weston’s black leather gloves as he stepped into the office, closing the door behind him with a soft, ominous click.
“Eighty-two thousand ounces of formula,” Weston said softly, walking slowly toward the desk. “That’s roughly how much milk a healthy baby consumes in his first year. But my son didn't even get eighty ounces of real nutrition, did he, Doctor?”
Voss backed up until his spine hit the bookshelf, his breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps.
“Mr... Mr. Kade,” Voss stammered, raising his hands defensively. “You... you shouldn't be in here. This is a restricted administrative area—”
“Shut up,” Weston said. The two words held so much lethal weight that Voss snapped his mouth shut instantly.
Weston reached across the desk, picked up the leather ledger, and flipped it open. His dark eyes scanned the columns of numbers, the dates, the wire transfer confirmation codes bearing Gallo’s digital signature.
“Vincent Gallo,” Weston murmured, a cold chuckle escaping his lips. “He thought he could finish the job through a medical chart. He thought a white coat could hide a killer.”
“I was... I was forced!” Voss blurted out, tears of sheer panic springing to his eyes. “Gallo threatened my family! He said if I didn't cooperate with the nutritional restrictions, my children would never make it to college!”
Weston stopped pacing. He turned his head slowly, looking at Voss the way a cat looks at a cornered rat.
“Your children?” Weston asked, his voice chillingly calm. “My son is three weeks old, Doctor. He hasn't even seen the sun outside this hospital. He has tiny fingernails the size of ladybugs, and you stood by his incubator every single day and watched him wither away for a paycheck.”
Before Voss could utter another syllable, Weston closed the distance between them with terrifying speed.
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He grabbed Voss by the collar of his white coat, hoisting him off the floor with one hand, and slammed him against the wooden bookshelf with enough force to shatter the glass cabinet doors behind them.
“Where is the rest of the altered TPN batch?” Weston hissed into Voss’s ear. “Give me the names of everyone in the pharmacy who signed off on those swaps, or I swear to God, I won’t let Gallo kill you—I’ll do it myself.”
