It was 2:47 a.m. when the alarms on Floor 0 buzzed like an angry hive.
Mia slammed the scalpel down on the tray. "Lock down the OR," she ordered. Her patient—a gunshot-wounded mercenary with more metal than blood in his body—was unconscious and stable enough to pause. For now.
A second beep pulsed in her earpiece. Perimeter breach. Eastern exit. One heat signature. Human. Not armed.
"Unauthorized?" she asked, already moving.
"Unknown. But... familiar," came the reply from her assistant, Yuki. "It's Elias."
Mia cursed under her breath.
Ten minutes earlier.
Elias Vance stood at the gated back alley entrance of Aegis Medical Center, blood soaking his sleeve and a smirk on his lips.
"Can't believe I'm doing this again," he muttered.
The cut was shallow—a warning slash from someone who hadn't meant to kill. He'd stolen a file from a Syndicate courier's briefcase mid-commute. Not his smartest move. But it had the same phrase he'd seen in Mia's father's research notes: Protocol Thirteen.
Now, standing under a flickering streetlight, he used his elbow to buzz the emergency intercom.
"This is Elias. Again."
Now.
She found him in the sub-basement hallway, swaying on his feet and half-conscious.
"Vance, you idiot," Mia muttered, catching him before he hit the floor.
"Nice to see you too," he mumbled into her shoulder. "Missed the sarcasm."
She dragged him into a side infirmary. No anesthesia this time—just local antiseptic and a sharp glare.
"This wound is barely anything," she said as she stitched it. "Why risk coming here?"
"Because you won't let me take your files home as bedtime reading."
"And breaking into my base is your solution?"
"Technically, I knocked."
He winced as she pulled the suture tight, more annoyed at her touch than the pain. There was something in her hands—always so controlled. Too controlled.
She didn't reply, but her eyes lingered on him longer than necessary. Her thumb grazed the edge of the stitched skin, softer than she meant to.
"What did you find?" she asked, quietly.
Elias slid a thin memory card out from his belt. "Encrypted log from the Syndicate. Mentions 'Protocol Thirteen.' And a Dr. H. Takahara."
Her hands froze. Her father.
Later that night
Elias sat on the edge of a cot, shirt off, rubbing his arm. Mia leaned over a terminal, decoding the files he brought.
"They tracked your father's research through multiple shell hospitals," Elias said. "There's something called 'The Lazarus Stem'—some kind of gene-editing therapy he was working on, right?"
She didn't answer. Just stared at the decrypted file. Her father's notes. Annotated in shorthand only she could read.
"Why are you really doing this?" Elias asked. "The clinic, the assassin team, the double life?"
Mia turned to him. "Because my parents believed healing and killing weren't opposites. They were parts of the same truth: control over life. I want to know why they died—and if their truth still matters."
Elias studied her. In her eyes, he didn't just see grief. He saw someone still choosing to believe in something dangerous. Someone trying not to be alone.
"Well," he said, leaning back against the wall. "If this Protocol Thirteen is real… then your truth and mine are tangled up."
Mia smirked. "So you're staying."
"I thought that was obvious. I even brought my own stitches."
She tossed him a pillow. "You're sleeping here tonight. But if you use my coffee machine again, I'll paralyze you."
"I like our dynamic," he said with a tired grin. "You threaten. I ignore. Sparks fly."
She rolled her eyes—but her smile betrayed her.