The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 83

That evening, Evelyn sat in her dorm room, the video call with Kaelen active on her main screen. The residual anger from the hearing still simmered beneath her calm exterior.

"…so the crew manifest for that ship, the *Andromeda*, is a ghost," Kaelen was saying from his office, his own screen showing a complex web of shipping data. "The records were conveniently ‘lost' in a fire at the port authority's archives. A fire that was ruled an accident, of course."

"Of course," Evelyn murmured, her mind only half on the conversation. The image of Caspian Higgins's cruel, smug face was superimposed over the data in her head. The disrespect he had shown to Professor Davies felt personal.

Kaelen noticed the shift in her tone, the way her eyes were unfocused. "You're quiet tonight. Is something wrong?"

Evelyn sighed, leaning back in her chair. It felt strange to talk about something so trivial when they were hunting a global conspiracy, but the injustice of it still bothered her.

"It's nothing, really," she said. "Just a minor campus issue. A particularly unpleasant man is trying to tear down one of the oldest departments to build a monument to himself." She gave a small, humorless laugh. "His name is Higgins. He called the life's work of a respected professor ‘unprofitable garbage'."

She said it as a passing comment, a simple complaint about her day.

On the other end of the call, Kaelen went still for a moment. He looked at her face on the screen, at the flicker of genuine annoyance in her eyes. His expression hardened, but not with anger at the Syndicate. It was a different kind of anger. A cold, protective fury.

This man, this insignificant corporate bully, had upset her. That was a line he was not willing to tolerate.

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