The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 97

The weekend before the attack was a masterclass in psychological warfare. The financial world was a storm of nervous energy. Rumors flew. Analysts on every major news network predicted a bloodbath on Monday morning. The consensus was clear: the public breakup of the Thorne-Blackwood alliance had left both empires fatally exposed.

Claudia Lancaster's Syndicate fed the flames, leaking anonymous, pessimistic "internal reports" to financial bloggers. The narrative was set: two great houses, weakened by scandal and infighting, were about to be torn apart by the wolves of Wall Street.

This was the story the world saw.

The reality was happening in the quiet, focused calm of the Thorne command center.

It was the calm before the storm.

Kaelen, using the media frenzy as the perfect cover, began to move his pieces. Citing the "imminent family crisis," he quietly liquidated billions in offshore assets. He called in decades-old favors from international banks. A river of quiet, untraceable money began to flow into a single, dormant holding account, a sleeping giant waiting for the signal to wake. The total sum was a number so vast it could have destabilized a small country.

At the same time, Evelyn made her own move.

She logged into the anonymous, encrypted blog of Oracle. Her followers, the most powerful investors in the world, had been waiting for a new post for weeks, desperate for guidance in the volatile market.

She gave it to them.

She didn't mention Thorne or Blackwood. She didn't talk about the scandal. She posted a dense, highly technical analysis of global shipping logistics, filled with complex algorithms and obscure data points. It was a post so academic, so boring to the casual reader, that it seemed completely irrelevant to the drama of the day.

But buried deep in the final paragraph, for those clever enough to understand, was a single, cryptic sentence. It spoke of a "structural realignment" in the market for rare earth mineral transport, a sector so small, so niche, that it was almost completely ignored by major investors.

The post was a piece of bait. A quiet, elegant trap.

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