She watched over him, her gaze fixed on the monitors until she saw the first signs of improvement—his heart rate steadying, color slowly returning to his cheeks. When Kyle returned, hope flickered inside her.
“Looking good,” Kyle said. “He should be waking up soon.”
“Can you stay with him? I want to see what’s going on with Shadow.”
He nodded. “Of course.”
She stepped from the room, tears of relief filling her eyes, though she wouldn’t truly feel it until she could see those icy blue eyes of his open again.
“Hey,” Sebastian said as she strode down the hall to the chief of staff’s office, “how’s Alex?”
“Vitals have improved, but he’s not awake yet. How are things looking with reverse engineering the cure?”
“Good. My lab has isolated the active ingredient and are starting production on it now. You heading back to Alex’s room?”
“In a second. Just going to stop in the ladies’ room.”
“Okay, see you there.”
They parted ways, and she pushed into the restroom, locking herself in a stall and allowing a few tears to fall.
With a deep inhale, she allowed the emotions to course through her before she tugged toilet paper from the dispenser and wiped at her cheeks.
She emerged from the stall and checked herself in the mirror before heading back to Alex’s room.
As she entered, she spotted him awake and talking. Her heart lifted as he focused on her, emotions overwhelming her as she hurried to him to take his hand in hers.
With Kyle’s approval on his improvements, she crawled into bed next to him while the others went to check on their respective duties.
Ava snuggled closer to him, their conversation simple, but powerful as they reaffirmed their love for one another.
Kyle returned with celebratory jello cups shortly before Sebastian strode into the room again as Alex proposed they find something to take The Board down.
“That’s a great plan,” Sebastian said, “but unfortunately,we’re not in the clear yet. There’s something else that’s come up that needs our immediate attention before we can think about taking down The Board.”
Ava’s stomach flip-flopped as she sat straighter. “What is it?”
Sebastian’s jaw tightened as he set his eyes on her. “This is going public. The Board is going to try to shirk this off, cover it up. We need to make sure PharmaTech goes down for this. But if we do…retaliation may be severe.”
“When isn’t it?” she retorted. “We need to do this. We need to make sure they pay for this.”
“We have plenty of information,” Alex said. “All of that stuff from the encrypted drive…we can leak it all.”
Ava’s brows furrowed. “Do you think we should get Sierra involved with this? Maybe vet the best ways to make sure the media gets a hold of these details?”
“That’s a great idea,” Sebastian said with a poke of his finger at her.
“I’ll call her. We’ll get this out to the press. PharmaTech isn’t going to survive this.” Ava pulled her phone from her pocket, searching for Sierra’s contact information.
She placed the call, putting it on speakerphone.
“Umm, where have you been? Are you in Hemlock Falls because that place is all over the news with some kind of flu, and I swear that’s where Daddy said you were going,” Sierra answered.
Ava held back a chuckle at the brusque response. “Sierra, hi. That’s exactly where we are. We’re okay, and we have a cure in the works. But this flu…it was released on purpose by The Board. This was a trial run before they unleashed this on the population. We need to get that information to the public. Can you handle that?”
“Handle it? Are you joking? I was born to handle this.Send me what you have, and I will make sure every major news outlet has this in the entire country within the hour.”
“Perfect,” Ava answered. “Alex will email everything to you.”
