Page 66 of Forged in Deception

She could go to jail.

Senera wouldn’t protect her, they’d made that beyond clear.

No, it was worse than that.

They only had this file in the first place as a form of insurance, she was certain of it.

She’d bet her life that it contained evidence against her, probably carefully curated to shield them as much as possible.

The more she thought about it, the more it made sense.

The whole thing had been designed from the start to place her as the scapegoat if it ever became necessary.

For all she knew, they were doing the same thing right now.

Maybe her name was somewhere on the papers that permitted Destiny and Cora to join the current cohort. Maybe the secrecy and lies ran even deeper than she’d thought.

She could go to jail.

Sheshouldgo to jail.

That part, she could handle. It was the rest of it that she couldn’t bear. John would suffer. Her patients would continue to be put at risk.

And Axel would hate her.

That might have been the worst possibility of all.

“What? Report you?” he asked, looking more confused than before. “You need to calm down and explain to me what on earth you’re even talking about.”

He reached out to her and pulled her into his chest.

She wanted to pull away. She didn’t deserve to feel his warmth, not after everything she’d done. He had to be crazy.She’d all but told him that she’d committed a terrible crime, and his first reaction had been to cradle her in his arms.

It was enough to set the tears flowing all over again, as desperately as she wanted to stop them.

“Sweetheart, please. You’re scaring me.”

She could feel his breath whispering against her ear as he spoke, his words gentle and full of so much trust, trust she was about to destroy. But she had to do it. Even if it made him hate her.

She had carried too many secrets for too long. The burden had become unbearable.

“Amira Gorsky’s death was my fault,” she said at last, pressing her eyes shut, though she could see nothing but the deep green of his shirt. “I’m the reason she’s dead. I took her husband’s wife away. I took her daughter’s mother away.”

Her body was wracked with fresh sobs.

“Shh, breathe,” Axel said, still stroking at her hair, still holding her, as though her confession hadn’t just irreparably destroyed every reason he cared about her.

“I was fresh out of school, and when I got a junior researcher job with Senera, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. Brilliant scientists to mentor me, top of the line equipment, cutting-edge research–it was intoxicating.”

Axel didn’t say anything or ask for clarification. She paused to take a breath, wishing there were a way she could share the story without sounding like she was making excuses for the inexcusable. Then again, maybe that was exactly what she was doing.

“I noticed a few things that were ethically questionable about the way the company operated, but I’d seen enough even in grad school that I wasn’t naive. I knew that boundaries were pushed all the time, even in something as serious as medical research. So I just kept going.

“When I worked my way onto a team for an actual DX8 trial–it wasn’t called DX8 then–I was ecstatic. This was the real thing. This was everything I wanted to do. Keep in mind, Bajwa didn’t work here back then, so the day to day environment was a lot less stressful. If I’m being honest, it was usually a lot of fun.

“They had me sign off directly on the patients that we accepted into the trial, including Amira. I had her medical history. I sat in on her interviews. I knew she had a history of major depression. I signed off on her anyway.

“During the trial, she had a severe panic attack, pretty similar to what you saw happen to Destiny. But we didn’t take her to the hospital. We managed to calm her down, and since it was the last dose of the trial, we didn’t bother formally releasing her, either. I honestly thought she seemed fine.”

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