Chapter 3

The bet was the talk of New York, ten days to see who would triumph.

Ethan went directly to the hospital where Sarah Chen lay unresponsive.

Linda Chen met him at the door to Sarah' s private room, her eyes filled with a fragile hope.

"Mr. Miller, you accepted the bet... for Sarah?"

Ethan nodded, preparing a small vial of his own blood, diluting it into a saline solution. "I did."

He administered the blood-infused remedy intravenously to Sarah, his touch gentle.

"Don't misunderstand, Mrs. Chen," Ethan said, his voice low, "my primary motivation is to win this bet, to ensure Chad Kensington faces public humiliation."

Linda Chen simply nodded, tears in her eyes. "Whatever your reasons, if you can save my daughter, I will be indebted to you for life."

A few days into the ten-day period, Chad Kensington and Bree Vanderbilt made an ostentatious visit to Sarah' s hospital wing.

They found Ethan by Sarah' s bedside, monitoring her vitals.

"Well, Miller," Chad sneered, "still tending to your hopeless case? I hear Bree is already showing remarkable improvement with my Amazonian Sunpetal."

Bree, from her wheelchair, added, "It' s true, I can feel tingling in my toes, something your 'expert' opinion said was impossible."

Ethan ignored their taunts, his attention on Sarah.

But as Bree spoke, Ethan noticed something, a faint, almost imperceptible discoloration on her ankles, visible just above her silk slippers.

Her legs, under Chad' s supposed "care," seemed to be subtly worsening, not improving.

Chad, misinterpreting Ethan' s silence as defeat, continued his tirade. "You' re a charlatan, Miller, preying on desperate families, you should be ashamed."

Ethan finally looked up, his gaze cool. "Time will tell, Kensington, who the real charlatan is."

Later that evening, Ethan received an anonymous, encrypted video message.

It was from Eleanor Vanderbilt.

The shaky footage showed Chad in a private lab, meticulously grinding herbs, the supposed Amazonian Sunpetal.

But then, Chad furtively glanced around and added a small, unlabeled vial of dark, viscous liquid to the mixture, stirring it in carefully before packaging it.

The substance looked suspicious, dangerous.

Eleanor' s desperate, typed message accompanied the video: "I don' t know what this is, I fear for Bree, please, what is he doing?"

Ethan now understood the subtle signs he'd seen on Bree's legs. Chad wasn't healing her, he was poisoning her with something that gave a temporary illusion of vitality.

On the eighth day, as Ethan was checking Sarah' s responsiveness, her eyelids fluttered.

Slowly, Sarah Chen' s eyes opened.

She looked around, disoriented, then her gaze focused on Ethan.

A flicker of recognition, then a weak, raspy whisper.

"Ethan?"

Ethan was stunned, he had no memory of ever meeting Sarah Chen before her accident in this life, or the last. How could she possibly know his name?