The Year I Stopped Being His novel Chapter 289

"Rest assured, I will guard it with my life," Garrison said, weighing every word.

*

Holding the cardboard box and the cello, Garrison caught a cab through the empty, midnight streets of the city, returning to the place he had practically lived in for the past five years.

Five years ago, after his return from Antarctica, nothing had gone according to plan. Although they possessed The White Microbe, the original Vitas Strain had been destroyed during Archie's kidnapping, and the only remaining sample—The Vitas Strain (Remnant)—had been stolen.

He was forced back to square one, starting the cultivation process all over again.

Project Vitas was indefinitely suspended. Some patients dropped out, returning to traditional chemotherapy, while several late-stage patients who relied entirely on the Vitas Strain passed away shortly after the trials halted.

The patients' families rallied together to sue, and the media descended like vultures.

The rivals and competitors he had once eclipsed smelled blood in the water. They reported him for academic fraud and accepting bribes. Two female subordinates, who had virtually no interaction with him, suddenly wept on camera, accusing him of abusing his position to sexually harass them.

Kick a man when he's down. Garrison understood the cruelty of the world.

But he hadn't expected it to hit him so violently, nor for his fall from grace to take a mere seventy-two hours.

What Garrison knew, with absolute certainty, was that this onslaught was too coordinated, too relentless. An invisible hand was orchestrating his ruin from the shadows.

Undoubtedly, it was the legacy of the dead David Lancaster—the power of Knox Biosciences.

But their foundation was murky, tangled in a complicated web that undoubtedly led back to Knox.

And then came Genesis-1. Its pharmacology was a carbon copy of Project Vitas, utilizing bacteriophages to target and kill cancer cells. They claimed an eighty percent success rate with virtually zero side effects.

But none of that mattered to Garrison.

He didn't trust any pharmaceutical company, let alone their so-called "miracle cures." He only trusted his own research, his own clinical data.

His own two hands.

Because she was still out there, asleep on that freezing, desolate continent... waiting for him to save her.