The Wife He Forgot to Marry (Winona and Yule) novel Chapter 342

Winona sat for three solid hours before finally answering the last student's question.

Her throat was parched. She grabbed a bottle of water and took a long, desperate gulp.

Mr. Gage walked over. "You really worked hard today, Winona. Since your leg is still bothering you, let me have a company car drop you off at home."

Winona shook her head. "No, it's fine. Don't you need the vehicles to transport the promotional materials back? If you send me home, it'll hold up your schedule. I can just grab a cab."

Seeing her limp slightly as she walked, Mr. Gage still didn't feel right about it. He asked a female colleague to walk her out of the campus to make sure she got a taxi safely.

Once in the cab, Winona waved goodbye to her coworker and pulled out her phone, scrolling through her work group chats and replying to a few pending issues.

Just as she finished and was about to close her eyes to rest, her phone rang. It was Nolan.

"Winona, I'm sending you a news clip. Promise me that when you watch it, you'll stay calm. Try not to get too angry. We've already called the police and looped in our legal team. We'll figure out which competitor leaked this fake video to the press soon enough."

Winona opened the link. Barely a few seconds in, a wave of nausea washed over her.

The video showed a woman performing a horrific, unanesthetized experiment on a lab monkey. The footage was graphic, bloody, and deeply disturbing.

What shocked her to her core was that the video used incredibly sophisticated AI deepfake technology. Her own face had been seamlessly superimposed onto the woman's body. It was so flawless that to the untrained eye, it was impossible to tell it was fake.

The headline read: *Goddard Group Researcher Winona Jowett Uses Inhumane Animal Testing Methods to Accelerate Drug Development, Leading to Gruesome Monkey Deaths.*

Major animal rights organizations, pharmaceutical watchdogs, and high-profile influencers were already flooding the comments, ripping her to shreds.

The video was skyrocketing up the trending charts. The internet was practically out for blood, hurling venomous insults at both her and the Goddard Group's R&D team.

Nikita didn't understand what a deepfake was. To her, seeing was believing, and she assumed Winona was lying to cover it up.

"Winona, it's not that I don't want to believe you, but the person in the video is clearly you. Why are you still denying it?"

Seeing that explaining was pointless, Winona simply said, "Believe what you want. The fake news will be cleared up soon enough."

Nikita wanted to keep nagging her, but Winona walked straight to her room, clearly refusing to engage. This only deepened Nikita's worry.

Was there something seriously wrong with Winona's job? Had she been tricked into doing these cruel things?

Fretting, she pulled out her phone and dialed Yulen's number.