Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 987

Chapter 987: Famous Ghost: The Ghost in the Machine

Her eyes narrowed a bit as she realized...

Someone was making Eros go viral.

That much was obvious. But they weren’t making him known.

Not really.

Every video showed his face. His kindness. His beauty. His presence. But not a single one contained anything real about him beyond his names.

Nothing.

The more she watched, the more she understood what she was actually looking at.

This person—whoever was orchestrating this—wasn’t making Eros known to the world. They were making him more mysterious.

The more popular he got, the more nothing about him—apart from what they chose to post—would ever be known. His real traces weren’t just hidden. They were being erased. In real time. Actively. Professionally.

By someone or something that understood digital infrastructure at a level that Aurelia’s entire team of analysts couldn’t match.

Every search led to a wall. Every breadcrumb dissolved before you could follow it. Every trace self-destructed the moment you reached for it.

He was becoming the most famous ghost on the planet.

Aurelia set the tablet down on the desk. Slowly. The anger in her chest was still there—but it had shifted.

Cooled.

Hardened into something sharper.

She smiled.

It was the smile her enemies knew. The one that preceded the worst decisions she’d ever made—worst for other people, anyway.

The smile she wore before she went full villainous, as her late business partner had once described it, three days before she’d dismantled his entire portfolio and left him begging for a severance package.

"Whoever’s protecting him," she murmured, more to herself than to Lena, "is better than anyone I’ve ever hired. Better than anyone I’ve ever seen."

She said it with admiration. Genuine admiration. The kind one predator extended to another when the territory markings were clean and the kill was fresh.

She could respect excellence even when it was being used against her.

Especially when it was being used against her.

She walked to her desk, opened the top drawer, and retrieved the drive Senithe had given her.

Small. Nondescript. The kind of hardware that looked like it cost ten dollars and contained information worth ten lifetimes.

Senithe had handed it to her personally at the auction. No intermediaries.

Physical exchange only — because Senithe, whatever else she was, understood operational security in a way that suggested she’d been practicing it since before Aurelia was born. Which was impossible given Senithe’s apparent age.

But Aurelia had learned not to apply conventional logic to anyone in certain orbits.

She inserted it into her computer. The files loaded. Everything was there—exactly as Senithe had provided. Detailed. Comprehensive.

The kind of intelligence that didn’t exist on any server or in any database because it had never been digital before this moment.

Aurelia selected a file. Copied it. Sent it to Lena’s tablet via their encrypted channel.

"There," she said without looking up. "Start with that. Reveal everything!"

Lena’s tablet chimed. She opened the file.

Her eyes went wide.

"Ma’am—"

Aurelia was already reviewing the next file. "What are you still doing here? Release that to the—"

"Ma’am." Lena’s voice had changed. Smaller now. Confused in a way that confused people didn’t usually sound—they sounded like they’d just watched reality malfunction.

Aurelia looked at her.

Lena turned the tablet around, screen facing her boss.

The file was gone.

Not corrupted. Not quarantined by antivirus software. Not moved to a different folder by an auto-sort function. Gone.

As if the tablet’s memory had simply decided that the file had never existed and rearranged reality accordingly.

"That—that—" Lena stammered, turning the tablet back, tapping the screen, swiping through her downloads. "It was here. I opened it. I saw it. The preview loaded. And then it just—it disappeared. As soon as it fully transferred, it—"

She trailed off, staring at the empty download folder with the expression of a woman who was questioning whether she’d hallucinated the last thirty seconds.

Aurelia frowned. She turned back to her computer.

The copy she’d saved on her hard drive was gone too.

She checked the desktop. The downloads folder. The recent files log. The clipboard history. Nothing.

Lena’s tablet chimed. The file appeared. The preview loaded—

Gone. Gone. Gone.

The drive was an island. The information existed on it and only on it.

Something she hadn’t felt in years. Something Aurelia did not feel because Aurelia was the one who made other people feel it.

Fear.

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