The Cast
Chapter 01 - The Cast
Rain ran steady down the tall windows of the Cade estate's east bedroom, the amber glow of the bedside lamps doing little to soften the specific desperation of a seven-year-old boy slamming his own arm against a dark wooden bedframe.
Oliver sat crumpled on the floor beside his bed, sobbing, the thick white cast on his arm striking the frame's edge again and again, the sound sharp and wrong in the quiet room.
"Cut it off!" he screamed, voice cracking. "Cut it off! Please, Dad!"
Julian came through the doorway at a dead run, dropping to his knees, catching his son's shoulders and the cast itself in both hands before the next blow could land.
"Oliver," he said, pulling him close, "Oliver, look at me. What's wrong."
Oliver's whole body shook, one small fist still clutching the front of his father's shirt.
"Why are you saying that," Julian asked, voice tight with fear he hadn't fully processed yet. "What's wrong with your arm."
Oliver's eyes flicked, terrified, toward the woman standing near the foot of the bed.
"It burns," he sobbed. "It burns when she touches it."
Lauren stood very still, her champagne silk robe catching the lamplight, her voice arriving a half-second too smooth, too composed for the room's actual temperature.
"He's only frightened," she said. "The cast is fine."
Julian looked up at her slowly, something shifting behind his eyes, suspicion arriving where reassurance should have been.
Colette appeared in the doorway then, drawn by the crying, moving toward the bed with the unhurried, deliberate calm of a woman who had worked in this house for fifteen years and had learned, long ago, to trust her own eyes over anyone else's explanations.
She knelt beside the boy, examining the cast carefully, her fingers finding, near his wrist, a small, unmistakable rise beneath the white plaster that had no business being there.
Lauren's composure cracked instantly.
"Don't touch him," she said, moving fast, reaching for Colette's arm.
Colette didn't stop. She steadied Oliver's arm gently, found the hairline crack the boy's own frantic strikes had already opened along the cast's surface, and pried the white shell apart with quick, practiced fingers.
Inside, nestled against the padding near his wrist, a small silver capsule caught the lamplight. Beside it, a slender medical needle. A small square of stained lining fabric.
Julian's face drained of all color.
Colette held the broken cast steady, staring at what lay inside it, her voice dropping low and certain.
"This cast," she said, "was never meant to heal him."
Julian rose slowly, pulling Oliver behind him, his son's small hands still fisted in the back of his shirt.
He turned to face his wife, voice shaking with a fury he'd never once directed at her before.
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"You put this," he said, "inside my son's cast."
Lauren's carefully maintained calm shattered completely. She stepped back, eyes fixed on the small silver object in Colette's hand, and said nothing at all.
