Chapter 580:

He reached out and pressed a key on his keyboard.

A countdown timer appeared on the main screen. Red numbers glowing against the black background.

“Let’s see how strong that love is when the poison spreads,” he said.

Back at Thorne Manor.

We were celebrating. A small, intimate dinner. Lady Thorne, Seraphina, Julian, Elias, and me.

Seraphina raised her glass. Her hand was steady. “To Aurora. And Elias. You saved me. Now save each other.”

“To family,” Elias said, clinking his glass against mine.

I looked around the table. This was it. This was what I had fought for. Not the money. Not the fame. This. People who knew me, who saw the scars and the trailer park and the Phoenix, and loved all of it.

But the phone call from the night before still echoed in my mind. The Architect.

After dinner, Elias and I walked in the rose garden. The night air was cool.

“You’re thinking about the call,” Elias said.

“He said seventy-two hours,” I said. “Or… wait, he didn’t say a time. He just said the game has started. But my intuition…”

“Your intuition is rarely wrong,” Elias said. “What happens in three days?”

I stopped. My eyes widened.

“The Kensington Annual Shareholder Meeting,” I whispered. “It’s the first one since I took over. It’s the first time all the board members, the investors, and the press will be in one room.”

“A perfect stage for a villain,” Elias noted grimly.

Mor shapters on 𝔾Ɐ𝗅𝗇𝗈ν. ℭo𝓂

“He’s going to hit us there,” I said. “He wants to humiliate me. To prove I’m not a ‘Queen.'”

Elias took the phone from his pocket. “Then we prepare. We sweep the venue. We vet every attendee. We have Cloud monitor the network.”

“And we need a trap,” I said, my mind shifting into strategy mode. “If he wants to play a game, let’s change the rules.”

“What are you thinking?”

“He thinks I’m a chess player,” I said, looking at a blooming white rose. “But I’m not just a player. I’m the board designer. We’re going to let him think he’s winning. We’re going to let him walk right into the trap.”

Elias grinned. “I love it when you get that look in your eyes.”

“What look?”

“The look that says someone is about to regret being born.”

I laughed, leaning up to kiss him. “Let’s go to work.”

The next seventy-two hours were a blur of preparation.

While the world celebrated our romance, we were building a fortress.

Cloud, our hacker extraordinaire, was practically living in the server room.

“I’ve set up a digital perimeter around the Kensington Tower,” Cloud said, his eyes bloodshot. “If anyone tries to hack the presentation, I’ll trace them back to their grandmother’s basement.”

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