The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 100

The image of Kaelen and Evelyn, united and triumphant, lingered on the screens in Claudia's command center long after the broadcast had ended. The connection to the outside world had been severed by Shadow, but that single, victorious image was burned onto the monitors as a final, cruel monument to her failure.

The financial reports that had managed to get through before the lockdown told a story of absolute devastation. The Silver Council was in ruins. Their assets, built over centuries, had been either seized or devalued into nothing in a matter of hours.

Claudia's loyalists, the men and women who had served her family for generations, were gone. They had been discreetly and efficiently apprehended in coordinated raids across the globe, led by Kaelen's security teams.

It was over. Every piece of her empire, every pawn she had ever commanded, was gone.

The victory in the Thorne command center was quiet. The frantic energy of the financial battle had subsided, leaving a calm, profound sense of finality. Chase and her parents had come in, their faces filled with a mixture of awe and overwhelming relief. They had watched the broadcast from the living room, and Lillian was in tears, but this time, they were tears of pure joy.

She hugged her daughter fiercely. "You did it," she whispered. "You brought her down."

"We did it," Evelyn corrected softly, looking over her mother's shoulder at Kaelen, who was watching them with a soft, rare smile on his face.

Later, after her family had left them to celebrate in private, a sense of quiet settled over the room. The war was over. The silence felt different now. It felt peaceful.

Evelyn was archiving the data from the attack when a single, unexpected notification popped up on her personal, encrypted terminal. It wasn't an alert from her network or a message from an associate. It was from an unknown, untraceable source. A ghost.

Her fingers went still over the keyboard. Kaelen, sensing the sudden shift in her focus, walked over to stand behind her. "What is it?"

"I don't know," she said quietly. It was a single, sealed file. There was no subject, no sender.

Her instincts, honed by years of navigating the digital shadows, screamed at her that it was a trap. A final, hidden piece of malware.

But her curiosity, and a strange sense of finality, made her open it.

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