The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 53

The fire of the Thorne family's fury had been banked, but not extinguished. They agreed to the alliance, but on one condition. "I'm staying," Chase announced, his arms crossed as he took a seat in the command center. "If you two are going to be hunting monsters, I'm going to be here to make sure my sister doesn't get bitten." His tone was non-negotiable. He was now Evelyn's self-appointed, highly suspicious bodyguard. The atmosphere in the room was a strange mix of high-stakes tension and an awkward family dinner. Chase positioned his chair like a sentry, his sharp gaze scrutinizing Kaelen's every move on the screen.

"Alright," Evelyn said, breaking the tense silence as she turned back to her console. "Let's start with what we know. Aegis Security."

And so, the hunt began, with the "big brother-in-law" watching over their shoulders. It became an unspoken, silent competition between the two titans, Evelyn and Kaelen, each determined to prove their worth.

Kaelen, working from his own office, immediately mobilized his real-world assets. "I'm having my team pull the complete financial history of every known board member of St. Jude's hospital from eighteen years ago," he reported through the comms, his voice all business. "We're looking for any unusual payments, any shell corporations, any links, no matter how tenuous, to Aegis." He was a master of the corporate world, following the money, hunting the paper trail.

Evelyn, on the other hand, dove back into the digital realm. "And I'm going after their digital ghosts," she murmured, her fingers already a blur across the keyboard. While Kaelen was chasing existing records, she was hunting for the ones that had been deliberately erased. She began by infiltrating the hospital's long-archived server backups, looking for fragments of deleted emails and altered security logs from the week of her birth.

For the next hour, the only sounds in the room were the soft click of Evelyn's keys and the occasional, crisp report from Kaelen. Chase watched them, his initial hostility slowly morphing into a grudging respect. He was a business prodigy in his own right, but he was watching two masters operate on a level he had never seen before. It was like watching two grandmasters play on the same side of a chessboard against an invisible opponent, each anticipating the other's moves with a silent, flawless synergy.

"I have something," Kaelen announced suddenly. "A series of charitable donations made by Dr. Finch to a foundation that was later discovered to be a money-laundering front for an arms dealer. The donations stopped the year after you were born."

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