Reborn to Love Mr. Right â Episode 81
Arianna read the encrypted message twice before closing it. The airport terminal pressed around her with rolling suitcases, reunion signs, and ordinary impatience. Whoever had sent the warning wanted those ordinary sounds to become the backdrop to panic.
She called Hayden. His phone rang until voicemail. The airline confirmed that he had checked in for the evening flight but left the gate before boarding. No emergency alert had been issued under his name.
Donald wanted to send Taylor security across the city. Arianna refused to authorize a search built on private tracking. Haydenâs location settings belonged to him, even when uncertainty made violating that boundary tempting.
Instead, she contacted airport police and the federal agents already investigating the unauthorized continuity program. The encrypted message used the same routing architecture as the false university invitation.
Security footage showed Hayden approaching the gate with one bag. A woman in a federal visitor badge spoke to him for less than a minute. He handed his boarding pass to an airline employee, then followed her toward an interview room.
He did not appear restrained. That fact eased nothing. Arianna knew how easily threats against other people could turn consent into a performance.
The womanâs badge identified her as Dr. Lena Morris, an ethics auditor assigned to verify deletion of Ariannaâs copied medical files. Her credentials were genuine, but the oversight office had not sent her to the airport.
Agents found the interview room empty. Haydenâs phone lay on the table beside a printed photograph of Arianna entering her residence hall. Someone had used her arrival as leverage.
The photograph carried a handwritten demand: Hayden would be released after Arianna reported alone to the federal research facility. No ransom or technology was mentioned. The sender wanted access to her.
Arianna forwarded the demand to counsel and campus security. Then she completed residence check-in. Refusing the trap did not mean ignoring Hayden; it meant denying his captors the response they had predicted.
Her new room contained two narrow beds, a scarred desk, and a window overlooking bicycles chained in uneven rows. She placed the silver pendant in the desk drawer rather than wearing it like armor.
Emmy called from her own campus and offered to come immediately. Arianna asked her to remain where she was and preserve the message history. Friendship did not require everyone to enter the same danger.
Donald arrived at the airport command center while Haydenâs father searched Scott records. A company vehicle had collected Hayden from a restricted exit using authorization issued under Evelynâs former executive account.
The account should have been disabled after her conviction. Its survival exposed a failure in Scott Globalâs reforms, not proof that Evelyn had acted from prison.
Haydenâs father traced the vehicle to a records annex scheduled for demolition. The building stored paper files excluded from the continuity evidence trust because they appeared unrelated to Victorâs experiments.
Agents surrounded the annex. Arianna joined the operation by secure video, providing details about Haydenâs responses under pressure without pretending she could direct a rescue.
Inside, Hayden sat unbound before a camera. Dr. Morris instructed him to describe every memory he had integrated from Guardian Hayden. A neural scanner waited beside them, powered but unused.
Hayden had followed her because she threatened to publish the medical data of every student in the archive. Once inside, he refused the scan and prolonged the interview by demanding written proof.
Agents entered before Dr. Morris could activate the device. She surrendered, but the server beside her began deleting files through a remote command.
Hayden reached Arianna by phone at last. Before either could speak about the missed flight, the encrypted sender delivered a second message to them both: âMorris was only the invitation. The final lesson begins now.â