Related Cases (8)
Related Novels (37)
Related Chapters (93)
The Well and the Moon
Words: 2823 · Source Novel:: Poison Highway
They stumble upon an abandoned farmstead, its centerpiece a deep stone well. While Maia cleans his wound, Ellis demands the truth. She reveals she was hired by ApexCare's founders to spy on the compliance department, but fell in love with the very whistleblower they killed. The flash drive was a decoy; the real evidence is encrypted inside her memory. Ellis descends into the well, spending hours in total darkness, confronting spectral patients and hearing the distant hum of billing machines. He emerges transformed, and when Maia kisses him, he cannot tell if he is the poison or the cure.
Adjuster's Eye
Words: 2989 · Source Novel:: Regular Use
Ellis Boone, a wolfish claims investigator for the insurance company, senses the scent of a cooked claim. She methodically tears apart the “occasional driver” narrative, unearthing a trail of ruined witnesses and a botched alibi that crumbles like dried clay. Simultaneously, Silvio’s blackmail escalates from threats to arson, setting Marcus’s old neighborhood ablaze. Caught between the electric chair of legal exposure and the blunt-force trauma of a vengeful family, Marcus’s duality spirals into psychosis. The weight of acting the part of an aristocrat while hiding a murderer’s paranoia presses down on him with brutal physicality; he is a man being slowly crushed by his own aspirations.
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Words: 2247 · Source Novel:: Poison Highway
Desperate for passage, they meet a trucker named Viktor who offers to hide them in his cargo bound for the Nordican frontier. Over a campfire, Viktor drinks whiskey and speaks of his daughter, crippled by a faulty ApexCare hip implant. At dawn, Ellis realizes the trucker has radioed their location; the black van closes in. A shootout at a desolate gas station leaves Viktor dead and the flash drive shattered. Maia pushes the wounded Ellis into a dry riverbed, but not before the lead pursuer—a woman in a grey trench coat—calls out Maia's real name. Trust begins to dissolve.
The Sanatorium of Unnecessary Surgeries
Words: 2489 · Source Novel:: Poison Highway
The engine dies near the ruins of the Greenfield Rehabilitation Pavilion, shuttered after a string of patient deaths linked to ApexCare's kickback scheme. Maia leads Ellis inside, where decaying wheelchairs and phantom IV drips haunt the corridors. She confesses she once worked here, watching a teenager die from an implanted pain pump he never needed. As they gather supplies, Ellis hears jazz piano—Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight"—drifting from a hollow room. Maia finds a teddy bear stuffed with old medical invoices. The van appears on the distant ridge, and two figures step out.
The Cat in the Parking Lot
Words: 1563 · Source Novel:: Poison Highway
Ellis Crane wakes in a cheap motel outside the capital, the television buzzing with news of ApexCare Holdings' stock crash and the disappearance of its compliance officer. Beside him, Maia Frost, a surgical nurse with a cryptic half-smile, repacks the revolver and a flash drive filled with doctored referral records. They steal a vintage sedan and merge onto the Trans-Valdorian Highway. In the rearview mirror, a black van lingers. Ellis recalls the night of the accident, when a senior vice president fell from a glass balcony, and Maia murmurs about a calico cat that watched them from the empty lot.