The Thorne Heiress Unveiling Shadow novel Chapter 99

The financial battlefield had turned into a slaughter. In Claudia Lancaster's command center, the triumphant mood had curdled into pure, undiluted panic.

"Sell!" Claudia shrieked, her voice a raw, ugly sound that was completely stripped of its usual elegance. "Sell the council's assets now! I don't care what the loss is, I want our capital back!"

Her traders, their faces slick with sweat, hammered at their keyboards. But nothing happened.

"Your Grace," the head analyst stammered, his voice trembling. "We can't. We're locked out. The sell orders won't go through."

"What do you mean you're locked out?" Claudia snarled, striding towards his terminal. "That's our own network!"

"It's not responding," another trader yelled from across the room. "All our external communication lines are dead. I can't even get a signal on my cell phone."

The low hum of the servers was suddenly the only sound in the room. They were trapped. Digitally entombed.

And then, the screens changed.

The chaotic waterfall of red and green stock tickers vanished. Every single monitor in the room, from the massive wall display to the smallest personal tablets, flickered and went dark for a single, terrifying second.

When they came back on, they were all displaying the same thing.

A single, elegant, gothic letter "S".

Claudia stared at the signature, her blood running cold. She knew that mark. It was the digital fingerprint of a ghost. The one person whose skills were whispered about with a mixture of terror and awe in the deepest corners of the global elite.

Shadow.

"No," she whispered, stumbling back.

The "S" faded, replaced by a live video feed.

In New York's Times Square, every single massive billboard, from the Toshiba screen to the Coca-Cola display, had simultaneously switched to the same broadcast. The usual cacophony of bright, flashing ads was gone, replaced by a single, powerful image.

The same image that was now burning on every screen in Claudia's prison.

"That was a play. A piece of theater my fiancée and I staged for a very specific audience."

He looked back at the camera, his smile vanishing, replaced by a look of pure, cold fury.

"We wanted to see what kind of rats would crawl out of the shadows when they smelled blood in the water. And they did not disappoint."

The truth hit Claudia with the force of a physical blow. The breakup. The scandal. Her perfect plan. It was all a trap. A trap she had not only walked into, but had helped to build.

Her brilliant, masterful scheme had been nothing but a script, written by the very people she thought she was destroying.

She stared at the screen, at the triumphant, united couple. She saw the look in Evelyn's eyes, a look of pure, cold victory.

A sharp, burning pain exploded in her chest.

She choked, and a spray of dark red hit the monitor in front of her.