The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 15

The room had become a silent temple, and Evelyn was its high priestess. For twenty-five minutes, the only sounds were the impossibly fast, rhythmic clicking of her keyboard and the occasional sharp intake of breath from one of the mesmerized technicians watching over her shoulder.

She wasn't just defending; she was attacking. With a few dozen lines of her elegant code, she had completely walled off the ransomware, trapping it within a digital cage of her own making. The menacing countdown clock on the main screen froze, then shattered into a million pixels of harmless light. A ragged cheer started to build in the room, but it died instantly as they realized she wasn't finished. She wasn't even close to being finished.

"They were arrogant," Evelyn murmured, almost to herself, her eyes never leaving the screen. "They used a modified version of the 'Loki's Scythe' virus. It has a traceable signature if you know where to look. Amateurs."

With another flurry of keystrokes, she re-purposed the attacker's own code, turning their weapon back on them. She had built a trap, and now she was springing it. On the main screen, a world map appeared, a red line snaking back from their servers, jumping from continent to continent, unraveling the attackers' proxy network in seconds. The line finally came to rest on a non-descript office building in a grim, industrial city in Eastern Europe.

"Got you," Evelyn whispered.

The IT team watched, their jaws agape, as she launched her counter-assault. It wasn't a hack; it was a digital annihilation. She crashed their servers. She wiped their hard drives. She bypassed the security on their encrypted cryptocurrency wallets—a feat considered impossible—and began to drain them. Millions of dollars in Bitcoin and Ethereum began to flow out.

"Where is it going?" Chase asked, his voice hushed with awe.

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