The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 103

The sitting room at Thorne Crest was filled with a heavy, broken silence. Lillian's heartbreaking sobs had subsided into quiet, shuddering breaths as she leaned against her husband's chest. Arthur held her, his own face a mask of grief and a deep, thirty-year-old guilt.

Chase paced back and forth in front of the large windows, a caged tiger of anger and confusion. "A sister?" he said, his voice a low, raw whisper. "All this time, you had a sister? And a niece? My cousin?" He looked at his parents, his eyes filled with a pain that was both fresh and ancient. "Why did we never know?"

Lillian looked up, her eyes red and swollen. "Amelia... she made her choices," she said, her voice trembling. "She wanted to be free of this life. She cut us off completely. To speak of her was... too painful. We thought we were protecting you."

"Protecting me?" Chase's voice rose. "She was out there, alone! And her daughter... she could be anywhere! She could be..." He couldn't finish the sentence.

While her family was drowning in a sea of what-ifs and regrets, Evelyn was a still, quiet island. She had listened to the entire story, her expression unreadable. She felt a strange, distant echo of their pain, but her primary emotion was a cold, clear focus.

Grief was a luxury. Action was a necessity.

She stood up. The small movement was enough to draw all eyes to her.

"Crying won't find them," she said, her voice quiet but firm, cutting through the heavy, emotional atmosphere. "Regret won't bring them back. We need to stop looking at the past and start searching in the present."

Her words, blunt and practical, were like a splash of cold water. Arthur looked at her, his youngest daughter, and saw not a lost child, but a commander. He straightened his shoulders, a new resolve in his eyes.

"You're right," he said, his voice regaining some of its old strength. He helped Lillian to her feet. "To the command center. Now."

The command center was a hive of quiet, frustrated energy. For two days, Arthur and Chase were on the phone constantly, calling in old favors, talking to contacts they hadn't spoken to in years. The results were always the same.

"It's a dead end," Chase said, slamming his phone down on the conference table. "Amelia's old friend in Paris remembers her talking about a new boyfriend, a Russian, but that was almost thirty years ago. The trail is ice cold."

Arthur looked tired. "All of our private investigators have come back with nothing. It's like she walked off the face of the earth."

Evelyn said nothing. She was in her own world, a silent, dark universe of code. She had been staring at her screen for forty-eight hours, her eyes scanning lines of data that would look like nonsense to anyone else. She was hunting a ghost in a digital graveyard.

She found little things. A canceled credit card in Paris. A speeding ticket in Monaco. A short, unconfirmed report that she was seen with a Russian arms dealer. It was a trail of breadcrumbs that led nowhere.

And then, she found it.

It wasn't in a public record. It was buried deep in the hacked archives of a shady offshore bank, a place where the world's rich and powerful hid their secrets. A single, encrypted transaction. A medical bill.

The bill was for a very expensive, experimental treatment. And the name of the place was one Evelyn had never seen before.

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