Chapter 4 - The Golden Contract And The Secret Medical History Buried Beneath Lies
I stared at him, bewildered. “What could a billionaire CEO possibly need from a night cleaner?”
“I don't need a cleaner,” Lucas said, setting the folder down. “I need a private, residential medical attendant. Someone with real medical training who is completely unconnected to the medical establishment, my board of directors, or my family.”
I shook my head. “Mr. Bennett, you have billions of dollars. You can hire the chief of cardiology from Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic to live in your guest bedroom.”
“And within twelve hours, Julian and Evelyn would bribe that doctor for my medical charts,” Lucas countered, his voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register. “You don't understand the world I live in, Bailey. My sudden collapse on Tuesday was not a random genetic anomaly. I am thirty-two years old. I run marathons. I have had comprehensive cardiovascular screenings every six months since I took over Meridian Enterprises.”
My clinical instincts immediately flared to life. “A sudden ventricular fibrillation in a healthy thirty-two-year-old athlete with no prior cardiac history? That doesn't happen without an underlying cause.”
“Exactly,” Lucas said. “The hospital’s official toxicology report came back clean. But my private toxicologist ran a specialized mass-spectrometry panel on a blood sample taken fifteen minutes after I arrived at Northwestern. They found traces of an unlisted synthetic peptide—a designer toxin that mimics acute potassium channel overload, triggering fatal arrhythmia before metabolizing into harmless electrolytes within four hours.”
My breath caught in my throat. The room felt suddenly cold. “Someone poisoned you.”
“Someone tried to assassinate me,” Lucas corrected quietly. “And they almost succeeded. If you hadn't been on the forty-fifth floor with an AED, Julian would currently be signing the papers to dissolve my voting trust and liquidate the company.”
“You think your brother did this?”
“Julian, Evelyn, or one of the foreign hedge funds trying to execute a hostile takeover,” Lucas said grimly. “Right now, I cannot trust anyone. The private nurses sent by the executive medical agency are compromised. Every pill I take, every meal I eat, and every vital sign recorded must be managed by someone whose integrity cannot be bought.”
He slid a crisp, white legal document across the coffee table toward me.
“Here is my offer,” Lucas continued. “You will move into the private guest suite on this floor tonight. You will monitor my vitals, administer my medications, oversee my cardiac rehabilitation, and act as my personal medical liaison. You will be on call twenty-four hours a day.”
“And in return?” I asked, my heart pounding against my ribs.
“In return, I will immediately wire eighty-four thousand dollars to eliminate every penny of your debt. I will pay you a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a month. And when this crisis is resolved and the person who tried to kill me is behind bars, I will fully fund an endowed scholarship in your mother’s name at Loyola, paying your full tuition, living expenses, and medical residency through graduation.”
The room seemed to spin around me. The numbers sounded like fantasy. Freedom from the crushing debt that had kept me awake crying for three years. A chance to put on a white coat again. A chance to fulfill the promise I made to my mother before she closed her eyes forever.
“Why me?” I whispered, looking up into his intense gray eyes. “You don't know me. You’ve known me for ten minutes.”
Lucas leaned back against his cushions, his expression softening just a fraction.
“On Tuesday night, when my heart stopped and the world went black, I remember hearing a voice,” Lucas said, his voice dropping to a low, intimate murmur. “You were exhausted. Your hands were breaking. You had nothing to gain, and yet you screamed at me that I wasn't allowed to die on your watch. In a world full of people who smile at me while praying I drop dead so they can inherit my wealth, you are the only person in three years who fought to keep me breathing.”
He pointed a pen toward the contract.
“Sign the paper, Bailey. Help me stay alive, and I will give you your life back.”
May you like
I looked at the pen. I thought about the drafty apartment, the endless piles of overdue bills, the smell of bleach, and the hollow ache in my chest every time I passed a hospital.
Then I picked up the pen and signed my name.
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