He grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.
“Send the car to pick up Ms. Ricci. She’ll accompany me tonight.”
Julian left the office feeling lighter. Powerful. He’d cut away the dead weight. He was ready to conquer the world.
He had no idea that the removal notification didn’t just go to the event organizers. It was sent to a secure, encrypted server in an underground office in Zurich—a server owned by the holding company that secretly held the majority of Thorn Enterprises’ shares.
And five minutes later, in the garden of her Connecticut estate, Elara Thorn’s phone buzzed.
Elara wiped the dirt from her hands on her apron. She was thirty-two, with soft features and eyes the color of polished hazelnuts. To the outside world—and to her husband—she was Elara the housewife, the orphan who’d gotten lucky marrying a rising star. The quiet woman content to stay in the background picked up the phone from the patio table.
It was a secure alert.
ALERT: VIP guest access revoked. Name: Elara Thorn. Authorized by: Julian Thorn.
Elara stared at the screen. She didn’t cry. She didn’t gasp. She didn’t throw the phone.
Instead, the warmth drained from her eyes, replaced by an absolute, terrifying cold. She swiped away the notification and opened a different app—one that required a fingerprint, a retinal scan, and a sixteen-digit access code.
