Chapter 3: The Digital Scavenger Hunt
Logan didn’t go home. He went to the basement of the Thorne Estate, to the private server room that served as the heartbeat of Arthur’s empire. He knew that if his mother was right, the evidence wasn’t just in bank statements; it was buried in the encrypted communications Arthur used to maintain his double life.
He spent the night in the glow of dual monitors, his fingers flying across the keys. He had to bypass his father’s firewalls—security systems he himself had helped build. Every line of code he broke felt like a betrayal of his own youth, a dismantling of the trust he had held for twenty-five years.
Around 4:00 AM, he found it.
It wasn't a bank transfer. It was an email thread, buried in a deep-storage directory. It was a contract—a cold, clinical agreement between Arthur Thorne and an agency known for ‘discreet asset management.’ The target: Elena Thorne. The cause: ‘Irreconcilable divergence of interests regarding the dissolution of the estate.’
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The ‘interest’ was the family trust—a billion-dollar fund that Elena was legally entitled to control if she survived Arthur, or if she divorced him under the terms of their prenuptial agreement. Arthur had been bankrupt for years, gambling the family fortune on failed ventures in the Pacific Rim. He needed her death to be seen as a ‘natural heart failure’ to claim the insurance and liquidate the trust.
Logan stared at the screen, his stomach churning. It wasn’t just an affair, or a business rivalry. It was an execution.
