The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 13

The doors to The Vault slid open with a quiet hiss, breaking the funereal silence in the room. Evelyn stepped inside. She was carrying a high-end thermal food container, the kind that could keep soup hot for hours. She had driven in from the Hamptons, her expression unreadable to the driver who had silently obeyed her command to race to the city. She had come to bring her brother dinner, a small, normal act of sisterly care in the midst of a crisis she knew he was facing. Her face was calm, her movements unhurried. She was an island of tranquility in an ocean of chaos.

Chase looked up, his face etched with exhaustion and stress. "Ev? What are you doing here? It's not safe."

Peter, the defeated IT chief, barely glanced at her. His nerves were frayed, his ego in tatters. All he saw was a civilian, an interruption, a pretty girl who had no place in his world of complex algorithms and high-stakes cyber warfare.

"Chase, can you please get your little sister out of here?" he snapped, his voice sharp with irritation. "This is a secure crisis zone, not a place for civilians to be bringing snacks."

The condescension in his voice was thick enough to taste. He dismissed her as utterly irrelevant, a distraction from the billion-dollar disaster he was failing to solve. Chase started to gently guide Evelyn toward the door. "He's right, Ev. You should go. We're in the middle of something..."

Evelyn's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. "I know that your firewall's third protocol layer has a recursive logic loophole in its authentication sequence," she stated, her tone as factual and unemotional as a machine. "It creates a temporary data echo during high-traffic events. The attackers didn't blast their way through your wall. They waited for the echo, inserted their payload into it, and your own system carried it past all your defenses like an invited guest."

She paused for a beat, letting the weight of her words settle into the sudden, shocked silence of the room. "They didn't break in, Mr. Peterson," she finished, her voice dropping to a cool, clinical whisper. "You let them in."