It was Saturday. The Wellness Center didn’t see patients on weekends.

He parked next to the private elevator, and then rode it up to the tenth floor. He made his way through the circular-shaped hallway, the walls made of glass, the heels of his shoes clicking across the spotless white floor until he stopped at the door of Maya Dawson’s private office. He didn’t need a magnetic key card to unlock it. The master key automatically did that. But it wouldn’t help him with the next part.

Once inside Maya’s office, he secured the door with a good old-fashioned dead bolt, even though Sebastian knew he and Maya were the only ones in the building. It was more out of habit than out of paranoia. Medical offices, like schools and other facilities, weren’t immune to gunmen looking to abduct carriers. Medical offices, though, were also targeted with alarming frequency, especially for break-ins, people looking for information on carriers or, even better, discovering which facilities stored carrier blood.

Sebastian moved behind the immense glass deck and pressed his right hand flat against the section of touch-sensitive glass. It scanned his handprint and matched it to the only three stored in the database: his, Maya’s, and Frank’s. Sebastian typed the password on the keyboard—Frank always insisted on dual security measures—and turned his attention to his left, where three bookcases took up an entire wall.

A soft click of latches springing free, and then the middle bookcase opening noiselessly. It hid the treatment rooms behind the walls, not only to give the clients ultimate privacy but also to prevent them from being discovered in the event of a police raid. It had never happened to him, but it had happened to the Armenians. Sebastian had survived—and flourished—by staying off everyone’s radar. And now Paul had put his life’s work in jeopardy.

Sebastian hurried inside the small hidden alcove and with four quick steps found Maya Dawson seated in an office chair in the compact square room, staring at three privacy screens. Each one took up a wall, and each one looked inside the treatment room using the same one-way glass the police used when interrogating suspects.

The middle screen was black, but not the other two. In those rooms he saw two clients, both middle-aged women, one of whom was a successful TV actress on a sitcom called Life with Howie, where the woman played a mouthy former beauty pageant contestant from Long Island turned trophy wife of an older guy who’d won the lottery. They both sat in comfortable chairs—the actress watching something on TV, the other woman reading an actual, physical book—while a transfusion machine slowly withdrew their blood and replaced it with a carrier’s, a process that took most of the day. Clients weren’t allowed to bring their phones or any other electronic devices they owned. They were meticulously searched for everything, including GPS trackers that could be injected under the skin, before being transported to the center.

Unlike the treatment rooms in the previous building, the rooms here resembled luxury suites—fresh flowers, beds with linens made of the highest-quality merino wool woven with a silk jacquard and small amounts of gold; catered meals featuring caviar; bottled water collected from a spring off the coast of Hawaii and hailed as having amazing health benefits; and a whole host of other bullshit trappings expected by the rich and famous.