Chapter 6 - The Confession of Margaret Vale
I didn't step away from the desk. I stood in front of Nora, keeping myself between my mother and the console displaying the evidence of her crimes.
"Where is Arthur?" I asked coldly.
"Downstairs in the main boardroom," Margaret replied, her voice trembling slightly as she walked toward the center of the room. "He is preparing the press statement for 6:00 AM. He is telling the world that you were mentally compromised by the stress of the merger, that Nora Bennett kidnapped you from Fifth Avenue, and that Cross Biomedical has assumed temporary management of Vale Meridian to protect shareholder value."
"And you agreed to that?" I asked, my voice laced with disgust.
Margaret stopped ten feet away, looking at me with eyes filled with a desperate, tragic sorrow.
"I had to keep you alive, Adrian!" she cried out, her composure finally breaking. "You don't know what Arthur Cross is! You think he’s just a corrupt CEO? He has network access to every diagnostic device, every surgical robot, every emergency response system across thirty-two states! If I had fought him twelve years ago, he would have destroyed your father’s reputation and put you in a federal prison before you ever turned twenty-five!"
"He killed Dad!" I shouted, the words ripping through the quiet penthouse like thunder.
Margaret flinched as if I had struck her.
"Your father wanted to destroy the company, Adrian!" she wept, tears streaming down her face. "He wanted to go to the press! He wanted us to lose everything—our home, our legacy, our future! Arthur offered me a choice that night. Either Richard died quietly of a 'heart condition,' or Arthur would release forged records showing that Richard had intentionally poisoned those patients in Newark for research data!"
"So you chose his murder over your reputation," I said quietly.
"I chose you!" she sobbed, stepping closer, reaching out her hands. "I did it to save your name! I did it so you could inherit a thirty-billion-dollar empire instead of a disgraced legacy! Every sacrifice I made for twelve years—every lie, every deal, every night I spent sitting across from Arthur Cross—was to ensure that one day you would be the most powerful man in American medicine!"
Nora stood up from the desk, her dark eyes burning with quiet, unyielding rage.
"You didn't save him, Margaret," Nora said, her voice steady and clear. "You turned him into the public face for a murder syndicate. And when I found out I was carrying his daughter, you tried to erase us because we reminded you of the truth you were too cowardly to face."
Margaret turned her head sharply toward Nora.
"You were a research assistant!" Margaret spat, trying to reclaim her cold authority. "You were nothing!"
"She is the mother of my child," I said, stepping right up to my mother, looking down into the eyes of the woman who had raised me on lies. "And she is the person who just uploaded your father’s final recording to every major news network, regulatory agency, and law enforcement server in the western hemisphere."
Margaret’s face drained of all remaining color.
"What?" she whispered.
I pointed to the console behind me.
The green progress bar had reached one hundred percent.
Beneath it, a global broadcast relay signal was blinking in bright red text:
GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION COMPLETE.
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"The press conference at 6:00 AM won't be Arthur’s," I said softly. "It will be the federal government’s."
Suddenly, the heavy glass windows of the penthouse shuddered as the dark silhouette of a heavy twin-engine helicopter descended out of the mist above Park Avenue, its spotlight cutting through the darkness, blinding the room in a harsh, white glare.
