Hot Driver - S01 E65

Story 18 hours ago

Hot Driver - S01 E65

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 65

{Creston General Hospital – Ward}

Hannah pushed through the hospital doors at a dead run, her chest heaving, sneakers slapping wet against the tiled floor. She hadn’t stopped crying since she’d left the restaurant — since she’d watched, through the front window, the paramedics carrying people out on stretchers, since she’d understood, fully, finally, what she’d actually done.

I did that, she thought, the words looping over and over in her skull as she ran. I poured it in myself. My own two hands.

She reached her mother’s ward and shoved the door open, already calling out, already reaching for the bed.

It was empty. Stripped bare. The mattress bagged in plastic.

“No,” Hannah said, the word barely a whisper. “No, no, this is the wrong room—”

A nurse stepped out from behind the curtain, and behind her, two orderlies were easing a covered gurney toward the hallway.

“Ma’am, I’m so sorry,” the nurse said gently. “Your mother passed about twenty minutes ago. We tried to reach you—”

Hannah didn’t hear the rest of it. The world had gone thin and ringing, sound sliding away from her like water down a drain, and she dropped to her knees right there in the doorway, a sound tearing out of her that didn’t feel like it belonged to a human throat.

“Mama,” she sobbed, curling forward over the cold floor. “Mama, no, please, not you too, not now—”

Her phone buzzed against her hip.

She almost didn’t check it. Her hands were shaking too hard to hold anything. But some old, trained instinct — the same one that had made her pour the powder into the tank — made her pull it out anyway.

Unknown: Like the gift? Too bad I don’t keep to my promises. RIP to your mum. Your own life is not even safe.

Hannah stared at the screen until the letters blurred into meaningless shapes.

She screamed then — a raw, wrecked sound that turned heads down the whole corridor — and scrambled up onto unsteady legs, chasing after the gurney as the orderlies wheeled it toward the elevator that would take her mother down to the morgue.

“Wait,” she begged, reaching for the sheet. “Please, wait, just let me — just one more minute, please—”

Nobody stopped for her. The elevator doors slid shut, and Hannah sank against the wall beside them, sliding all the way down to the floor, alone with the phone still clutched in her fist.

{A Police Station – Interrogation Room}

Celeste sat with her hands folded tightly on the metal table, five of her workers seated in a row of plastic chairs against the wall behind her, all of them pale, all of them exhausted.

“I’ve told you everything I know,” Celeste said again, voice hoarse from repeating herself. “None of us put anything in that food. We wouldn’t. Why would we destroy the very thing we built?”

The detective across from her tapped his pen against a folder, unmoved. “Someone did, Mrs. Brooke.”

“It wasn’t us.” One of the workers, a thin young man near the end of the row, finally spoke up, leaning forward. “We’re not even complete. Hannah’s not here. She’s the one who was working closest to the water supply this morning. Nobody’s seen her since it happened.”

The detective’s pen stilled.

Down the hall, health officials moved through a side room with sealed containers and swabs, collecting samples from the ingredients Celeste’s team had bagged as evidence — the flour, the vegetables, the large containers of water that had supplied every dish that morning.

“We’re testing everything,” the detective said finally. “Until we have answers, all of you stay here.”

Celeste closed her eyes, pressing her fingers against her temples. None of the victims had died yet — that was something, a fragile thread of relief in an otherwise collapsing day — but the news vans parked outside the station told her everything she needed to know about how fast the story had already spread.

If even one of them dies, she thought, dread pooling cold in her stomach, this isn’t just the restaurant anymore. This is prison. This is the rest of my life.

{Bennett Group of Companies – Conference Room}

The room hummed with quiet, expensive efficiency — laptops open, documents stacked, the low murmur of numbers being discussed across a polished glass table.

“Our logistics network alone would cut your international shipping costs by nearly forty percent,” Mr. Hale was saying, sliding a tablet across to Arthur. “Combined with your regional distribution strength, I don’t see why we couldn’t be looking at full market saturation within two years.”

“Agreed,” Arthur said, scanning the projections. “And in exchange, we’d want equity stakes reflected proportionally to—”

“Already drafted,” Hale said smoothly, nodding to his assistant, who produced a folder without being asked. “I told you, Mr. Bennett. I don’t do business halfway.”

The negotiation carried on, terms passed back and forth with practiced ease, and through it all, Diana found her attention drifting, again and again, toward the woman seated beside Hale.

Mrs. Hale was elegant in the quiet, understated way that old money often was — soft-spoken, precise, occasionally offering a correction to a figure that made her husband smile with visible pride.

Diana had been turning a question over in her mind for the better part of an hour, and finally, in a lull between topics, she found the nerve to ask it.

“I hope this isn’t too forward,” Diana said carefully, “but I’d love to know a little more about your family. It always helps to understand who we’re truly partnering with.”

Something flickered across Mrs. Hale’s face — brief, unreadable, gone almost as quickly as it appeared.

“We had a daughter first,” Mrs. Hale said quietly, her hands folding together in her lap. “She was lost to us. Very young.”

The room went still.

“I’m so sorry,” Diana said softly.

“It was a long time ago,” Mr. Hale said, his voice carefully even, though something tightened at the corner of his jaw. “We have twins now. A boy and a girl. Twenty-five years old, both of them, thriving.” He offered a small, controlled smile.

“We’re telling you this only because we’re partners now. Family matters some things, in business as much as anywhere else.”

Diana nodded, filing the detail away carefully, though something about the phrase lost to us sat strangely in her chest, refusing to settle.
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