Seeing that Charlie and Alex were still busy discussing patient cases over dinner, Zinnia realized she wasn’t much help here and decided to get some fresh air. She said, “Charlie, you eat first. I’ll step outside for a bit.”
“Sure, we’ll head home after I finish eating. Zinnia, don’t wander too far. Call me if you need anything,” Charlie said. He hadn’t eaten all day, and now that most of his work was done, he could finally sit down and enjoy a hot meal.
Zinnia closed the office door behind her and walked down the quiet corridor. She had heard from Alex that Anne was in the VIP ward on this floor.
Making her way to the innermost room, Zinnia peered through the glass door and saw Anne lying on the hospital bed, connected to a ventilator.
The ward was eerily quiet. No one was standing guard outside. After glancing around to confirm no one was nearby, Zinnia gripped the doorknob, quietly opened the door, and tiptoed in.
The ward was silent except for the steady beeping of medical monitors. Anne lay motionless on the hospital bed, showing no signs of consciousness.
Afraid of being discovered, Zinnia hurried to Anne’s bedside. Anne’s hand lay outside the covers. Zinnia bent down and checked her pulse. She thought, ‘Thank goodness, I’m in time. It’s not as bad as I feared.’
Zinnia withdrew her hand. She took out her acupuncture kit and selected a slender silver needle. She glanced at Anne and murmured, “Though you’re on Betty’s side and always team up with her, I don’t want Ethan and the others to carry a guilty conscience.
“Besides, I don’t want your father to worry himself sick over you. You’ve got a good dad. I’ll help you this once. But if you ever bully me like Betty does, don’t expect any mercy from me.”
Zinnia decided to help Anne because she felt Anne was also a victim of the whole mess. Moreover, she didn’t want Ethan and the others to carry the guilt.
Ethan once said that if he and Brian had kept silent, maybe Betty wouldn’t have gone so far and hurt Anne. That thought weighed on Ethan and the others, leaving them with a lingering sense of responsibility.
In addition, Zinnia envied Anne for having a loving father. Her father didn’t like her, so when she saw Daniel anxiously worried about Anne, Zinnia felt a pang of envy.
Zinnia gently parted Anne’s hair, her fingers expertly finding the acupoint. With swift precision, she inserted the acupuncture needle and slowly rotated it between her fingertips, carefully guiding the clotted blood to a safer spot.
She thought, ‘By tomorrow, once her attending physician checks on her, she should be ready for surgery.’
Zinnia could completely clear the blood clot for Anne, but that would raise suspicions. Besides, she couldn’t swallow her pride to save someone who stood on the opposite side of her.
The acupuncture session was brief, just half a minute. After that, Zinnia checked Anne’s pulse once more and figured there was nothing seriously wrong.
She thought, ‘As long as these doctors aren’t complete quacks, Anne should wake up. But if they still can’t manage the surgery after this, I’ll just have to call them utter incompetents.’
Zinnia carefully withdrew the needles. After confirming no one had seen her, she gently smoothed Anne’s disheveled hair back into place, turned, and slipped away.
Just as Zinnia closed the ward door and was about to leave, a cold voice cut through the hallway ahead.
The voice said, “Ms. Shaw, what brings you here? Come to gloat over our family’s misfortune?”
Zinnia looked up and fixed her gaze on the man emerging from the nearby corner.
It was Hugo. He wore a black T-shirt, his features sharp and angular, but his eyes were bloodshot.
Chapter 110
Zinnia understood Hugo’s anxiety and chose not to take offense at his harsh tone. She just said, “She’ll be fine.”
Hugo looked coldly at Zinnia and said, “You think just because you say she’ll be fine, she will?
“It’s your Shaw family’s mess that got Anne into this state. How can you say that so casually? Do you think Yannis will always be there to clean up after you? Or that the Lynn family will shield you forever?”
Hugo complained inside, ‘Since it isn’t someone she cares about, of course, she isn’t in a hurry!’ But facing Zinnia’s calm eyes, his anger toward her faded.
He thought, ‘She is just another victim in this mess. The Shaws are still trying to drag her down. If not for Yannis protecting her, she’d be just as wretched as the rest.’
Hearing Yannis’s name come up so suddenly, Zinnia blurted out, “What does this have to do with Yannis?”
Hugo felt a knot of frustration in his chest, yet his anger was quietly subsiding before he even realized it.
“Has Yannis been looking for you?” Zinnia asked. She hadn’t seen Yannis in the past two days, and now that his name was mentioned, she found herself wanting to know almost instinctively.
Hugo was momentarily speechless. He thought, ‘Does she really know nothing?’ Then he said, “Don’t tell me you don’t know your sister’s been taken to the police station?”
“Yeah, I know,” Zinnia replied plainly. The whole school’s been talking about Betty getting taken to the police station.
Hugo shot her a look and said, “You should’ve gone to the police for questioning too.”
As a key figure in the incident, Zinnia should have been questioned by the police, but Yannis intervened to keep her out of it. Given that Anne’s life was hanging in the balance, the Carson family’s investigation traced her condition back to Zinnia and Betty.
The Carsons and Shaws were evenly matched in terms of status, though the Carsons held a slight advantage. If things had escalated into an all-out power struggle, the Shaws wouldn’t have been able to protect Zinnia and Betty.
But as soon as Yannis learned what had happened, he stepped in at once to protect Zinnia. Just as the Carsons were about to confront Zinnia, Yannis sent an envoy bearing a lavish gift.
It was a multi-million dollar contract, exactly what the Carsons family desperately needed. Yannis said it was amends for the trouble Zinnia had caused Anne. With this gesture, Zinnia was officially placed under Yannis’s protection.
Though the Carson family was rising in prominence, there was still an insurmountable gap between them and the powerful Perkins and Lynn families. Left with no choice, the Carsons had to swallow this bitter pill.
As for Betty, the Shaw family couldn’t protect her, so she landed in police custody. Although Zinnia was also a victim, it was their entanglement that dragged Anne into this mess. Naturally, the Carsons held both of them in contempt.
But upon reflection, the Carsons realized Zinnia had little to do with the incident. If they needed to get to the bottom of it, the accident was mainly caused by Anne’s poor choice of friends.
Yet the mere sight of a Shaw still made the Carsons’ blood boil. That was why Hugo had snapped at Zinnia when he first saw her lingering outside the ward.
But after a few words with her, the anger coiled in his chest began to ease.