Lili lay in the hospital bed, her skin clammy with fever, the sheets sticking faintly to her arms as the nurse carefully peeled away the dressing from her shoulder. The wound still throbbed, a pulsing sting that felt alive, almost unnatural—like something deeper than mere injury lurked beneath the flesh.
“You shouldn’t have moved, miss,” the nurse scolded, her tone clipped with frustration as she dabbed at the raw, inflamed skin. “Your wound will never heal if you keep putting stress on it.”
Lili bit down on her lower lip, hard enough to taste blood, but she said nothing. Her body trembled faintly, not entirely from pain. She was barely holding her tongue through the haze of fever, sweat slicking her brow as her breaths came shallow and tight.
A sudden knock echoed against the door and before either of them could respond, it creaked open.
Fosin stepped in without waiting for permission, dressed immaculately as always in a dark, tailored coat. His expression was unreadable, somewhere between forced concern and cold calculation.
The nurse immediately stepped in front of Lili, protective by instinct. “Sir, you can’t just come in like this!” she protested, arms folding across her chest. “She’s not in any condition to see visitors.”
Fosin barely spared her a glance. “She’s not just any patient,” he said, voice smooth and dismissive. His eyes locked onto Lili, and the faintest curl of a smile tugged at his lips—as if he were amused to find her so helpless.
The nurse hesitated, clearly torn between her orders and the air of authority that clung to him. Lili didn’t speak, but her narrowed eyes said enough—she didn’t want him there either.
Yet Fosin stepped further inside, letting the silence tighten between them. He looked down at her wrapped shoulder, the faint blood seeping through the bandages, and then met her gaze with something far colder than concern.
“You look terrible,” Fosin said smoothly, as if it were some kind of greeting rather than a jab. “But at least you’re still breathing.”
He turned his gaze toward the nurse, who hovered protectively at Lili’s side. “Leave us alone. We need to talk.”
The nurse didn’t move. Her jaw clenched slightly as she looked from Lili’s pale face to Fosin’s commanding stance. Her eyes narrowed, as if she were debating whether to defy him.
“I said leave us,” Fosin repeated, his voice rising, sharpened by authority and irritation. “You were paid to follow orders—not to hesitate when they’re given.”
The nurse flinched. Her face went pale, and without another word, she turned on her heel and left the room, the door clicking softly behind her.
Lili’s breath caught in her throat. The realization settled deep in her gut—if Torin wanted her dead, it wouldn’t take more than a quiet command.
“You do understand what comes next, Lili?” Fosin asked, stepping closer to the bed. There was a glint of challenge in his eyes, a veiled threat behind the cool calm of his voice. “The police will come. They’ll want answers. And I want to know exactly what you’re going to tell them.”
Lili stared at him, refusing to blink. She had hoped—naively, perhaps—that he would feed her the story they wanted her to tell. Something clean. Simple. Scripted. But he didn’t.
“I don’t know,” she said finally, her voice raw from fever and pain. “Maybe that I was heading to work… and someone took the shot along the way.”
Fosin’s smile disappeared, replaced with something far colder. “That won’t be enough. They’ll press. You’ll need to tell them more. Where it happened. How it happened. What the attacker looked like. What direction the bullet came from.”
She studied him through the haze of pain and disbelief. “You think I was conscious enough to map out the trajectory of a sniper’s bullet?”
“You’re not stupid, Lili,” he said. “And you’re not helpless. Not unless you want to be.”
His words stung more than she expected. There was a deeper current under them—a warning, perhaps even a test. One she couldn’t afford to fail.
Lili drew in a shallow breath, forcing herself to steady her voice. Her shoulder pulsed with sharp pain, and every word felt like it scraped something raw inside her—but she had to focus. Had to sell it.
She met Fosin’s eyes and began, slowly. “It was good weather that morning. Clear skies. Warm for the season.” Her gaze drifted slightly, as if she were visualizing the lie. “So I decided to leave my car a few quarters away from the Stronghold Enterprise skyscraper. Thought the walk through the central park would clear my head.”
Fosin didn’t move, but his eyes never left her face.
“I was walking along the main path when someone shouted behind me. I turned—just in time to see a man standing a few steps off the trail.” She paused for half a beat, adding subtle tension to the memory. “He was in black, dirty clothes, the kind that sag from wear. A torn jacket. A hat pulled low over his brow. But I think… I think he had black or maybe dark brown hair underneath. Short. Messy.”
She exhaled, then continued, her voice softer now, as if reliving a blurred, painful moment. “He looked about forty. Maybe older. A big nose, sharp cheekbones. Dark eyes—empty, like he wasn’t really there. He didn’t say anything. Just raised the gun.”
She let the silence stretch for a moment. “Then he pulled the trigger. I don’t remember the shot. Just… falling. And then nothing until I woke up here.”
Fosin studied her, head tilted slightly. It wasn’t just the words he was listening to—it was the pacing, the emotion, the cadence of falsehood made to sound like truth.
“You even described his eyes,” he said at last, voice unreadable.
“I figured they’d ask,” Lili replied faintly, keeping her tone as neutral as possible.
He gave a short, humorless smile. “Let’s hope they don’t ask too much more.” Then, stepping back toward the door, he added coldly, “Stick to the story, Princess. We all know what happens when someone decides to get creative.”
The door clicked softly behind Fosin, but the echo of his presence lingered like smoke in the room. Lili lay still, her breaths shallow, the weight of her lie pressing down on her chest even more than the bandages wrapped around it. The pain in her shoulder had dulled to a cold, steady throb, but now her mind raced far louder than her body hurt.
Half an hour passed. Maybe more. Then came the sound of footsteps outside—heavier than a nurse’s shuffle. The door opened, and the nurse returned with a clipboard pressed to her chest and her eyes carefully avoiding Lili’s. Behind her, two men stepped into the room. Detectives.
The first one was tall and lean, with dark blond hair tied back in a short tail and eyes that looked like they’d seen too much and trusted too little. His coat was still damp from the rain outside, and he carried the air of someone who could read a crime scene just by walking through it. This was Detective Caspian.
His partner, Thomas, was broader in build, shorter in stature, with a blunt expression that masked sharp instincts. His tie was crooked, his coat a little rumpled.
“Miss Morgut,” Caspian said, stepping forward. “Sorry to come in like this, but we have questions that can’t wait.”
Lili tried to sit up straighter, but the nurse rushed in to adjust her pillows and gently pushed her back down.
“She’s still very weak,” the nurse warned.
“I can talk,” Lili rasped, brushing the concern aside with as much composure as she could muster. She looked at Caspian, already knowing the game was starting again—but this time, the stakes were even higher. “Go ahead.”
Caspian pulled a small notepad from his coat pocket. “We’re investigating the incident that left you in this condition. A sniper shot, broad daylight. That’s not random, Miss Morgut. We need you to walk us through what happened… in your own words.”
Lili took a slow breath and forced her gaze to hold steady, though every part of her body screamed to look away—to retreat behind silence, behind the haze of pain and fever. But she couldn’t afford that. Not with their eyes locked on her like hunting dogs waiting for a sign of weakness.
“My name is Lili Morgut,” she corrected gently, her voice strained but steady enough. Caspian gave a brief nod and jotted it down without comment.
“It was… a good day,” Lili began, her voice low, carefully measured. “Clear skies. I decided to leave my car a few quarters away from the Stronghold Enterprise skyscraper. I like the walk through Central Park—it helps me focus before work.”
Thomas leaned forward slightly, his brows knitting as he listened.
“I was maybe halfway through the park,” she continued, her hands fidgeting slightly beneath the hospital blanket, “when I heard a voice behind me. Someone shouted something, but it was too fast to catch. I turned. There was a man—dark clothes, worn out, like he’d been living in them for weeks. He had a dark hat on, pulled low, but I saw short hair. Black, maybe dark brown. He was… older. Forty, maybe older. Big nose, dark eyes.”
She paused, closing her eyes as if to summon the image more clearly—or to hide from it.
“He didn’t say anything. He just raised the gun. I didn’t even have time to scream.”
Thomas scribbled something in his notebook while Caspian’s eyes narrowed, studying her closely. Not with suspicion, not yet—but with the sharp focus of someone used to catching the shift between truth and fiction.
“And then?” Caspian asked.
“That’s it,” Lili lied softly. “I remember the shot. The pain. Then everything went dark. I woke up here.”
There was a long silence as both detectives processed her words. Caspian tapped his pen once against the notepad before slipping it back into his coat.
“You’re lucky to be alive, Miss Morgut,” he said finally. “Sniper attacks like that… they’re rarely meant to leave survivors. If you think of anything else—anyone who might want to harm you, or anything unusual you saw that day—call us immediately.”
He placed a card on the small table beside her. Thomas nodded politely, but neither moved to leave just yet.
Caspian’s eyes lingered on her for a moment longer, as though trying to peel back a layer she wasn’t even sure she still wore. “This wasn’t a robbery,” he said again, slower this time, like the words carried more weight than the sentence alone. “It wasn’t random. Whoever pulled that trigger knew exactly who you were… and exactly where you’d be.”
Lili held his gaze. “And who am I, detective?” she asked, her voice deceptively calm despite the fire pulsing in her shoulder. “I’m just a simple secretary.”
There was a beat of silence, a pause so taut it nearly vibrated. Then Thomas stepped forward, his notebook closed but still resting in his palm. “Stronghold Enterprises is a well-known company, Miss Morgut,” he said, his tone gentler than Caspian’s, but no less pointed. “It’s made a lot of noise in the business world—power moves, corporate takeovers, funding quiet wars behind closed doors. That kind of power makes enemies. Especially the kind of people it’s wronged before.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Lili replied, her tone flat but controlled.
Caspian let out a soft breath, more amused than frustrated. “You’re good at this,” he said, no mockery in his voice. “Staying calm. Staying quiet. But good liars always know more than they admit.”
Thomas shot his partner a sidelong look, not quite approving but not stopping him either.
“I’m telling you what I remember,” Lili said, carefully, not letting the heat rise to her cheeks even as her chest constricted. “You want more than that, you’ll have to dig somewhere else.”
For a moment, neither detective responded. The room held a brittle silence, like glass waiting to shatter.
Then Caspian nodded, once. “Alright,” he said.
“If anything else comes to you,” Thomas added, “even the smallest detail—you call us.”
Lili didn’t answer. She just gave a slow, solemn nod and watched as they turned and walked out, the echo of their shoes fading down the sterile hallway like a countdown ticking somewhere deep in her chest.
The room had gone quiet again, eerily so, save for the gentle beeping of machines and the low hum of fluorescent lights overhead. Lili remained still, her body sinking into the hospital mattress, her breath shallow, as though afraid that even the act of breathing too deeply might shatter the fragile moment of stillness. The voices of the detectives still echoed faintly in her memory, each question reminding her of the shot that nearly ended her life.
But then it came again—faint at first, a distant sensation somewhere beneath the surface of her skin. A pulse. Not just the dull ache of a healing wound, but something far stranger. It pulsed in rhythm, deliberate and unnatural, as if something foreign was alive inside her shoulder.
Her chest tightened, and a thin sheen of sweat broke across her brow.
Without thinking, she reached up with one trembling hand toward the bandaged wound, her fingers hovering over it, uncertain. The sensation grew stronger beneath her touch, each throb more intense than the last—like something cold and wrong was pressing outward from within.
She caught her breath. A chill ran down her spine. Then, with a quiet, urgent hiss, she tore the IV line from her arm and ripped away the adhesive sensors sticking to her skin. The sting barely registered. She needed to move. She needed to see. The machines around her beeped in protest, but she ignored them, slowly swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. Her feet touched the ground, shaky and weak beneath her, but she forced herself forward.
Every step felt heavier than the last, as though gravity itself was conspiring to pull her back into that hospital bed.
She reached the sink at the far wall and clutched the cold ceramic edge, using it to steady herself. Her breath came in shallow bursts as she finally raised her gaze to the mirror above the basin. What she saw made her stomach twist.
Her skin was pale—no, not just pale. It was ghostly, ashen, drained of color like someone had pulled every drop of blood from her veins. The dark bags under her eyes gave her a sunken, almost hollow look. Her lips were blanched, and beneath the edge of the shoulder bandage, she saw the faint, spidering lines of something darker—veins, or something like them—stretching in unnatural patterns beneath her skin.
Her heart thudded in her chest, not from exertion, but from fear.
“No…” she whispered hoarsely, pressing her palm flat against the cool sink. “No, this isn’t real…”
But it was. She had seen it before. Panic clawed at her throat. Her breath hitched as she reached for the bandage again, her fingers trembling, the pulsing beneath it intensifying with each second. It was no longer pain—it was something else, something alive, something wrong.
She gritted her teeth and began to tear at the gauze, trying to see what had embedded itself in her, what had infected her, what—
The door slammed open behind her with a burst of sound.
“What are you doing, miss?!” the nurse shouted, rushing forward, eyes wide as she saw the blood, the torn wires, and the wild look in Lili’s eyes.
“Let me see it!” Lili screamed, her voice raw and desperate. “I have to see it!”
The nurse grabbed at her arms, trying to restrain her, trying to calm her down, but Lili thrashed weakly in her grasp, her panic overriding her strength.
“Miss Morgut, please—calm down! You’re hurting yourself—!”
But Lili couldn’t hear her. Her thoughts were drowning beneath the rising tide of fear. The wound throbbed violently, spreading a sickening cold through her arm and chest. Her legs gave way again, and the world tilted, dimmed, swirled in shades of grey and black.
She collapsed into the nurse’s arms. Her vision faded, the edges darkening with each passing second.
And just before the void claimed her, she caught one last glimpse of her reflection in the mirror—ashen skin, wide eyes filled with terror, and beneath the cracked edge of the bandage, something black and unnatural snaking across her shoulder…
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