Chapter 7 - The Clinic Without Windows
The old Vale maternity clinic stood twenty miles outside the city behind a line of dead trees.
Official records said the building burned sixteen years earlier.
From the road, it looked abandoned.
The windows had been covered with brick. The front sign had been removed. Weeds grew through the parking lot.
Yet fresh tire tracks crossed the mud.
Alexander told me to remain at the school.
I refused.
Victoria came too.
No one tried very hard to stop her.
Perhaps the adults had finally understood that hiding information had created the danger.
Police entered first. Alexander’s security team followed. Victoria and I waited inside the black sedan until officers cleared the upper floor.
The building had no patients.
It had power.
Beneath the burned reception area, investigators found a working elevator descending underground.
The lower clinic contained six rooms.
No windows.
Medical beds.
Old surveillance equipment.
One room had been occupied that morning.
The blanket remained warm.
A silver frame rested beside the bed.
Inside was a photograph of my mother holding two newborn girls.
One wrapped in gray.
One wrapped in black.
Victoria touched the glass.
“Which one am I?”
Neither child wore a name band.
A cabinet contained records from the night of the fire.
Elena arrived in labor under a false name. Celeste arrived two hours later, also pregnant.
Nicholas Vale was listed as Victoria’s father.
Alexander was listed as mine.
The clinic director, Dr. Miriam Cross, received instructions from Richard Vale to alter both births.
Elena’s daughter would be declared dead.
Celeste’s daughter would become Sebastian Langford’s legal child.
Both girls would remain under families the Vale patriarch could monitor.
My mother escaped with both babies during the fire.
Celeste found her three days later.
A handwritten report claimed Elena agreed to return Victoria in exchange for protection for me.
She trusted Celeste again.
That mistake shaped both our lives.
Victoria read the report with shaking hands.
“My mother knew.”
“She always knew,” I said.
“She raised me to hate you.”
“Because if we ever compared our histories, we might discover the same night.”
A hidden speaker activated.
Julian’s voice filled the room.
“I am sorry.”
Alexander looked toward the ceiling camera.
“Show yourself.”
Julian appeared on the central monitor.
He was inside another room in the clinic, but the camera angle concealed its location.
He looked exhausted. Blood marked his collar.
“Elena told me to bring the bracelet to Ava when the trust deadline approached.”
“You could have come to me,” Alexander said.
“I did once.”
“When?”
“Five years ago.”
After the house fire.
Julian claimed he told Alexander that Elena might still be alive.
Alexander’s father intercepted the message.
Richard Vale had supposedly died five years before that conversation.
Julian showed us a security photograph.
Richard alive.
Older, but unmistakable.
Alexander stepped closer to the monitor.
“My father died in front of me.”
“You watched a closed coffin lowered into the ground.”
The pattern repeated again.
Closed coffins.
Controlled records.
Powerful men surviving through paperwork.
Julian said Richard built the underground clinic to control future Vale heirs. He believed Alexander had become too independent. Nicholas had been easier to manipulate until his death.
When Elena discovered the scholarship theft, Richard ordered Celeste and Sebastian to discredit her. When she became pregnant, he planned to take the child and raise her inside a family loyal to him.
Elena escaped.
She remained hidden for eleven years.
Then Richard found her.
“The house fire,” I whispered.
Julian nodded.
He reached Elena first and moved her before the building burned. The body in the kitchen belonged to a woman Richard had sent to watch the house.
My mother was alive.
“Where is she?” I asked.
Julian looked away.
“Richard moved her three days ago.”
“Where?”
“The room beneath Blackthorne’s founder chapel.”
Alexander’s face hardened.
“We searched beneath the theater.”
“Not the chapel.”
Julian began coughing.
A timer appeared on the monitor behind him.
Five minutes.
He had been locked inside a room filling with gas.
Alexander ordered the police to trace the feed.
Julian shook his head.
“Do not come for me. Go back to the school.”
He looked directly at me.
“Your mother waited sixteen years to see you again.”
The screen flickered.
Then another person entered Julian’s room.
An elderly man in a black coat.
Richard Vale.
Alexander’s supposedly dead father placed one hand on Julian’s shoulder.
“You always were sentimental,” he said.
May you like
The feed went black.
Continue to the next part: Alexander’s father is revealed alive while Ava’s mother remains hidden beneath the school chapel.
