A Mother's Love, A Daughter's Fury

My father, Richard Sterling, built his empire on control, and I, Ava, was just another asset in his meticulously ordered life.

My mother, Dr. Eleanor Vance, the brilliant AI ethicist, was deemed inconvenient, a "disaster" to be managed.

One day, she was gone, taken by men in dark suits on my father's orders, her privacy twisted into shame.

He paraded his new assistant, Charlotte Hayes, her smile triumphant, pregnant with his "new beginning," while my mother lay in the woods, a body identified only by a stranger.