Chapter 81: Racing the Clock
Chloe left the press room while the cameras were still turning towards the evidence screen.
She did not explain where she was going.
There was no time for explanation when the island doctor used the phrase cardiac collapse and then stopped speaking for one second too long.
Leo was beside her before the lift doors closed.
By the time they reached the roof, his medical team had already rerouted a private helicopter, cleared an emergency landing corridor, and placed a senior cardiac surgeon on a secure video call.
Ethan answered from the island on the first ring.
His face filled Chloe’s phone, pale beneath the ward lights.
“They are stabilising him,” he said. “But they cannot hold him for long.”
Chloe gripped the edge of the seat as the helicopter rose above the city.
“What do they need?”
“A surgical team. Equipment. Blood units. Everything this place was never designed to provide.”
Leo turned to his chief of staff.
“Send the full cardiac package. Airlift the theatre module. Put the surgeons on the faster aircraft and give them priority clearance.”
No one questioned the cost.
The surgeons were lifted from a specialist clinic before their morning lists began, while portable pumps and monitoring units travelled separately under emergency clearance.
Within minutes, the rescue had become an operation larger than the island itself.
The helicopter cut across the water while Chloe watched the island grow from a dark mark into a piece of land capable of taking her father away twice.
Every mile felt stolen from a future she had only discovered hours earlier.
When they landed, rain struck the rotor wash and turned the tarmac into silver noise.
Ethan was waiting outside the west wing.
He looked as if someone had removed the last hour from his life and replaced it with fear.
“He asked for you,” he said.
Chloe ran.
Edward lay beneath a clear oxygen mask, smaller than he had looked that morning, surrounded by wires, monitors, and nurses moving with careful speed.
The surgeon arrived behind Chloe and began reading the scans before he removed his coat.
“His heart has been under strain for years,” he said. “The medication history did not help. We can operate, but we need to move now.”
Chloe heard every word and understood almost none of them.
All she understood was the hand lifting weakly from the blanket.
She took it.
Ethan moved to the other side of the bed and closed both hands around their father’s fingers.
Edward opened his eyes.
For a second, the room slowed.
His gaze found Chloe, then Ethan, as if he were counting the two lives Robert had tried to erase and discovering both of them standing beside him.
“I thought I had lost the chance,” he whispered.
“You have not lost us,” Chloe said.
Edward tried to smile.
“You found each other.”
Ethan bowed his head, unable to answer.
Edward’s fingers tightened with what little strength remained.
“I am proud of you,” he said. “Both of you. More than I can say.”
The nurses moved closer.
The surgeon touched Chloe’s shoulder gently.
“We have to take him now.”
Chloe released her father’s hand only when the bed started rolling towards the theatre doors.
Leo caught her before her knees gave way.
Ethan sat beside her on the cold corridor bench, close enough that their shoulders touched.
Beyond the glass, equipment cases arrived one after another, carried by people Leo had summoned across sea and sky.
Then the theatre doors closed.
A nurse removed Edward’s empty bed from the corridor, leaving behind a crease in the blanket that looked painfully human.
The red light above them turned on.
Chloe stared at it until the colour became the only thing left in the world.
Somewhere behind that door, the clock had started.