Chapter 10 - What Daniel Signed
I did not sleep.
At sunrise, I went through every file on the memory card.
Claire had drugged me.
That fact did not change no matter how many times I replayed the footage.
But Noah was right.
Hiding answers only created worse questions.
So I asked the next one.
Why?
The syringe label appeared for three frames.
Hale enlarged it.
“Flumazenil.”
“What is that?”
“An antidote. It reverses benzodiazepine sedation.”
I stared at him.
“She wasn’t drugging me.”
“No.”
Hale looked sick.
“She was trying to wake you up.”
The assumption shattered.
Again.
Someone else had sedated me first.
Claire had found me and tried to reverse it.
The next clip showed me waking enough to sign a stack of documents.
I heard Claire shouting off-camera.
“Don’t sign anything!”
A man answered in my father’s voice.
“Daniel, sign.”
My hand moved immediately.
I signed.
Once.
Twice.
Nine times.
Hale whispered, “Conditioned cue.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“His voice.”
The room went cold.
I had obeyed because I thought my dead father was ordering me.
Adrian Voss had not merely copied Dad’s appearance.
He had used Dad’s voice as a command.
Vanessa covered her mouth.
“What did he sign?”
I opened the documents.
The eighty-six-million-dollar authorization was only one.
Another transferred control of a research subsidiary.
Another changed the company’s emergency succession rules.
The last document made my sister legally responsible for the transfers if fraud was discovered.
Claire had been framed before she ever disappeared.
I understood why she ran.
But there was still one document missing.
Page nine.
The signature page existed.
The contract did not.
Hale searched the metadata.
“Page nine was removed later.”
“By who?”
He looked at the audit trail.
“Claire.”
A knock came at the front door of Carter House.
Three slow knocks.
Noah went pale.
“That’s how Aunt Claire knocked.”
I opened the door.
No one was there.
Only an envelope.
Inside was the missing page nine.
At the top were six words.
CONSENT FOR MINOR SUBJECT: NOAH CARTER.
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