Standalone Volume

Sutures Of Silence: The Marburg Betrayal

By Vivienne Ashcroft

Quick Summary

She stitches the dead back together for a living. He hunts the people who unstitch the truth.

She stitches the dead back together for a living. He hunts the people who unstitch the truth.

Dr. Alexandra 'Lex' Reiner has spent her career reading the last honest sentence a body ever writes. As lead forensic pathologist at the Marburg Institute for Emerging Pathogens, she has learned to trust the incision over the alibi. So when a rising virologist is found dead in a sealed containment lab ruled a tragic exposure to a level-4 pathogen - Lex is the only one who notices the wound underneath the official story: a puncture mark no accident could explain.

BKA federal investigator Damian Voss doesn't believe in tragic accidents inside the world's most secure virus vault, and he doesn't believe in coincidences either least of all the one that has put him back in a room with the woman he walked away from three years ago, for reasons he has never let himself say out loud. Lex hasn't forgiven him. She isn't sure she wants to. But she needs a man with a badge and a grudge against liars, and Damian needs a scalpel sharp enough to open what the institute has sealed shut.

As they dig past the biosafety protocols, they uncover a black-market pipeline moving engineered pathogen samples out of Marburg's most secure freezers funded by a pharmaceutical patron who has spent a decade buying silence one grant, one NDA, one disappearance at a time. Every colleague Lex trusted is a suspect. Every answer draws them closer to a truth that could end her career, and closer to each other, in a hospital corridor at 2 a.m., a stairwell during a lockdown, a confession neither of them meant to make.

With a courier already dead, a whistleblower missing, and a shipment of live samples forty-eight hours from a buyer with no conscience, Lex and Damian have one chance to expose the Institute before the next body on her table is one of their own.