Reborn to Love Mr. Right – Episode 35
Victor’s ambulance left the detention center six hours before his scheduled hearing. The route bypassed the hospital and entered a tunnel beneath the courthouse, exactly as future Ivy predicted. Police units converged from both ends.
The ambulance stopped in darkness. When officers opened the rear doors, they found a sedated guard, an empty stretcher, and Victor’s restraints cut cleanly through. A maintenance hatch in the tunnel ceiling led into the courthouse archive. Victor had converted a medical emergency into an escape route before the ambulance ever left custody.
Arianna watched the operation from a secure command room with Hayden and Ivy. Authorities had refused their presence at the courthouse, but future Ivy’s warning made them essential to interpreting Victor’s choices. He was not merely escaping; he wanted something stored inside the building.
The original master key revealed his target. Decades of sealed corporate cases contained evidence against officials he had recruited. If he destroyed those files, witnesses would lose the proof protecting them from retaliation and might return to his control. His network survived by making every accomplice fear exposure more than they feared him.
Hayden mapped an archive route using courthouse plans. Victor would pass through a climate-control chamber before reaching the sealed records. Police closed the obvious exits, leaving one service stairwell deliberately unguarded as a trap.
Ivy received a message from Victor on the future cloud account. He offered to explain why her older self bore a scar if she disabled the building alarms. The threat reached across two lives, using a wound she had not yet suffered.
She handed the phone to detectives instead of answering privately. Arianna saw fear in her face, but also a new refusal to let fear choose her actions. Ivy typed a response under supervision, pretending to accept Victor’s offer. Her fingers shook, yet she did not delete a single honest word from the plan.
Victor instructed her to upload the original key through a courthouse terminal. Hayden created a false credential that would appear valid long enough to expose Victor’s location. Ivy sent it and watched the system request travel through the climate chamber.
Motion sensors detected someone inside, yet cameras showed an empty room. Victor had looped the feed with the same software used at the Taylor gate. Officers entered wearing body cameras disconnected from the courthouse network.
They found Jeff beside the ventilation controls, holding the stolen replacement key. Victor had promised to free Derek if Jeff opened the records vault. Jeff’s face collapsed when officers explained Derek was already under federal protection and Victor possessed no power over his sentence.
Jeff surrendered the key and revealed Victor’s escape route through the judges’ parking level. His decision came late, after years of enabling his son, but this time he accepted arrest without asking Arianna to protect the Davis family. Accountability looked smaller than redemption and demanded more from him.
Victor reached the parking level disguised as a paramedic. He entered a car registered to Leonard Graves’s former assistant and drove toward the exit before barriers dropped. Trapped between police vehicles, he activated a device in his hand.
Smoke filled the garage as fire doors slammed shut. The command-room screens lost every feed except the Mirror Archive. On its monitor, future Ivy’s video resumed without anyone pressing play.
She warned that Victor would use the smoke to reach a judicial elevator leading to the roof. Police redirected upward, but Arianna noticed the older Ivy never said he would board it. The wording described what Victor wanted them to believe.
Arianna asked officers to search beneath the garage ramp. They found a storm drain opened behind Victor’s abandoned car. His true escape route led toward the river, where a boat waited beneath the courthouse wall.
Hayden’s security team reached the river first. Victor emerged from the drain and froze when spotlights illuminated him. Rather than surrender, he held the archive’s portable drive over the water.
He threatened to destroy every future record unless Arianna guaranteed immunity. She answered through an officer’s speaker that the original key had already copied the partition. The drive no longer gave him ownership of anyone’s future.
Victor threw it into the river anyway and ran toward the boat. Jeff, being escorted from the garage, broke away long enough to block the dock gate. Victor struck him, but the delay allowed officers to surround them.
As police forced Victor to his knees, he looked toward the command-room camera and smiled. “Ask Witness what she had to sacrifice to keep Arianna alive,” he said. “Ask her why Hayden never appears in the final files.”
The Mirror Archive responded before anyone could question Ivy. A new photograph showed a future graduation ceremony at Maple Valley High. Arianna stood onstage receiving her diploma, while Hayden’s seat among the guests was empty and covered with the same black ribbon that once marked Donald’s chair.