Chapter 13 - The Stepmother's Shadow
I returned to my newly established clinic office, my mind operating with absolute, laser-focused precision. I refused to be a victim, and I absolutely refused to let my mother's brilliant legacy be stolen by the woman who murdered her.
As I sat down at my desk, my assistant rushed into the office, holding an iPad with a deeply concerned expression. "Dr. Hensley, you need to see this right now. Your stepsister is launching a massive smear campaign against you online."
I took the tablet and watched Haley's latest live stream. She was sitting in her lavish bedroom, crying huge, incredibly fake tears into the camera. She was telling her millions of followers that I had maliciously set up our father with false federal charges just to steal the family fortune. She painted me as an unstable, jealous sociopath who had finally snapped under the pressure of medical school.
The comment section was completely blowing up, with thousands of people demanding that my medical license be revoked immediately. Haley was using her massive digital influence to completely assassinate my hard-earned character.
I handed the tablet back to my assistant without a single flinch. "Ignore it completely. Let her dig her own public grave. We have much larger threats to deal with today."
Just then, my office door opened, and Dr. Arthur Vance walked in. The older man looked incredibly sharp, but his eyes carried the heavy, exhausted weight of a decade of hidden grief. He closed the door behind him and locked it securely.
"Evelyn knows that Thomas was arrested, and she knows he is weak enough to talk," Arthur explained, pulling a heavily encrypted laptop from his bag. "She is currently mobilizing Apex's private corporate security to completely scrub any evidence of her past crimes."
"Where is the actual proof of my mother's original research?" I asked, leaning forward on my desk. "If Apex wants it so badly, it must still exist somewhere."
Arthur nodded grimly. "Elise didn't trust the university's servers. She kept all of her raw data, the actual cure formulas, and her private journals on an encrypted physical hard drive. She hid it perfectly before she died."
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"Where?" I demanded, feeling a surge of desperate adrenaline.
"At your family's old, abandoned lake house up in the northern mountains," Arthur revealed. "But you have to move immediately, Clara. Evelyn’s corporate fixers are already on their way there to burn the entire property to the ground."
