Lionel stared at the bizarre, empty screen,pletely baffled by what Hannah was trying to convey.


    "Find someone to restore the cked-out portion," he instructed, handing theptop back to Owen.


    "Yes, sir. I''ll get someone on it right away." Owen took theputer with a calm,posed expression and walked aside to make a call.


    The fix he had applied was simple, but he had no intention of reversing it.


    Instead, he instructed his apprentice to permanently corrupt that section of the video file, making it utterly unrecoverable.


    An hourter, Sandra''s wounds were cleaned and bandaged. When she saw Lionel still waiting outside, her eyes welled up with tears again.


    "I told you to go back to Hannah and exin everything. Why are you still here? If she finds out, she''ll only resent you more."


    Sandra sat up in her hospital bed, letting the tears fall. The anesthetic had numbed the pain, but looking at her gauze-wrapped arm, her heart ached.


    Luckily, there hadn''t been any passersby near the Temple estate; otherwise, the humiliating image of her being dragged out would have been all over the inte.


    "I had the contents of the USB drive Hannah gave me extracted," Lionel said tly.


    Sandra''s heart skipped a beat. She knew his mind was on Hannah, not her. But he had waited for over an hour, seen her covered in bandages and hooked up to an IV, and still hadn''t offered a single word offort or concern.


    A sharp pain throbbed in her head. She closed her eyes and grimaced.


    "What was on it?" she asked, her voice strained.


    "Surveince footage from the Temple family''s great hall."


    "What?!" Sandra''s eyes flew open, her voice an octave higher.


    "Footage from when?"


    Lionel didn''t answer, just watched her silently.


    "It''s not from when I visited the Temples, is it?" Beneath the nkets, Sandra''s hand clenched into a fist.


    Surveince footage! That damn bitch had used such a dirty trick. Didn''t that mean Lionel had already discovered the lies she''d told him in the car?


    "You don''t look well. Should I call a doctor?" Lionel asked. Sandra shook her head frantically Just as she was about to speak, she caught sight of Owen standing behind Lionel, giving her a subtle hand signal.


    "I just didn''t expect Hannah to give you that," she said, the weight in her chest lifting instantly. She took a deep breath.


    "She probably assumed I would lie to you. That''s why she told you to watch it after


    I spoke, to see if I was telling the truth." She looked at him earnestly.


    "But Lionel, you know me. I would


    never lie to you. Besides, Mr. Cooper beat me like this right in front of her and she didn''t lift a finger to stop him. She just watched." Her O clenched fist rxed. Content S


    "We were colleagues, friends even. Now that she''s a Temple heiress, with all that power... Back when you hadn''t been found by the Rosenberg family treated you both as equals: I never looked down on you because I was a youngdy of a wealthy family. But now, look at her." She finished with a long, helpless sigh. It


    wasn''t a sigh of sadness, but of


    immense relief.


    If she hadn''t caught Owen''s quick, almost imperceptible gesture—a snapping


    motion with his fingers-she would have exposed herself.


    Thank God, she thought. Thank God he was still on her side.