Last Rites, First Kill

In the high-tech fortress of Blackwater Peak Federal Penitentiary, death row inmate Marcus Troy dies hours before his scheduled execution—not from the needle, but from a catastrophic cellular collapse that mimics natural causes. Public defender turned prison investigator Elena Cross uncovers that Troy was the latest subject in a clandestine "therapeutic" program run by the prison's medical director, funded by a private biotech corporation that trades in condemned lives. As she digs deeper, she finds that the program doesn't just experiment on the dying—it manufactures their deaths to harvest biological data for elite clients. With the warden complicit, a ghost hacker feeding her leaks, and a U.S. Attorney determined to bury the case, Cross must prove that the state's ultimate punishment has been hijacked by a corporate agenda that makes execution look merciful.