Semua Bab Fool Me Once: Bab 141 - Bab 150

Cassie’s POVThe table was cluttered with flash drives, coffee cups, and printed photos; my life lay bare across grainy footage and scanned documents.Anton stood over the projector screen, playing clips from the Black Archive. Footage of Edward smiling at senators, shaking hands with known arms brokers, and whispering into the ears of people who’d long since claimed no knowledge of him.Across the room, Margaret was deep in a series of calls, coordinating with the digital forensics team Jeffery had put on standby. Her fingers flew over her keyboard, pulling together a database that would soon hold every piece of truth we had or what we hoped was the truth.And me?I sat at the center of it all, feeling like the eye of a hurricane wearing lipstick and guilt.“This needs to land hard,” Anton said, pausing the screen. “If you’re going public, we can’t afford ambiguity. No more polite statements. This has to punch.”I looked up. “You mean bury the nuance?”“I mean, bury the people trying

Jeffery’s POVThe silence inside the war room was heavier than any courtroom I’d stood in. The Cassandra Files had just been taken down, but not before the doctored content trended worldwide.Cassie’s original video - clear, honest, devastatingly brave had been replaced by something far darker. Footage was manipulated to show her talking about “taking over” the empire. About using her inheritance “by any means necessary.”I knew every word in that video was fake but the world didn’t.Anton tapped away at his console like a surgeon trying to restart a failing heart. “The malware was injected through a mirror node, someone hacked the release timer, redirected the scheduled push.”“Do we know who?” I asked, my fists clenched against the edge of the table.He didn’t look up. “Not yet but they knew the exact timing and internal scheduling sequence. This wasn’t some troll in a basement. This was high-level access.”Cassie sat beside me, her face pale but composed. I could see the war behind

Cassie’s POVThe camera lights were blinding, but not half as harsh as the silence that followed my announcement.“I, Cassandra Jones, hereby step down from all official roles connected to Richards Global, including my board appointment and consulting contracts. Effective immediately.”No questions, no clarifications, and no emotion.Just the truth, or what they needed to believe was true.The headlines would eat it alive before noon: Richards’ Heir Resigns Amid Scandal. PR Queen Falls from Grace. Cassandra Jones: From Architect to Anomaly.It was all part of the plan.The war wasn’t over, not even close. But I’d learned something Edward never understood: the most dangerous woman in the room isn’t the one shouting into the spotlight. It’s the one who’s already moved into the shadows.Margaret was waiting in the van outside the press room, her eyes darting over her tablet as the livestream lagged by ten seconds.“They’re buying it,” she said without looking up. “Twitter’s melting down.

Cassie’s POVThe storm outside Geneva rolled in like a warning, clouds heavy with unspoken truths. I stood in the underground command hub Anton had retrofitted into a broadcast center, staring at the screen that would soon carry my voice to the world.“We’re patched into four international satellite lines,” Anton said, checking the feeds. “This goes out across all major financial networks, the media circuit… even dark web mirrors.”Margaret looked at me from across the console. “Once this plays, Cassie… you don’t come back from it.”“I don’t want to,” I replied, my voice flat but unwavering.Jeffery was safe, bandaged but whole, sitting beside me with a silent kind of fury in his eyes. We’d escaped Luke Grieves’s trap barely, but the war hadn’t ended. It had simply changed its face.Now, it was public.We called it The Cassandra Broadcast - a strategic data drop wrapped in raw confession. It would contain the tapes from Edward’s Black Archive, the unedited documentation of The Matchst

Jeffery’s POVThe rain tapped like static against the armored glass of the conference chamber. I stood before a shattered screen where, minutes ago, Cassie had delivered the boldest broadcast of her life... our life.The global investment summit had been hijacked, not by sabotage but by truth IN A Vault footage. The Matchstick Doctrine. The raw, unfiltered confessionals of Edward Richards. The world had finally seen the man for who he was, whom I was ashamed to call my father.But now the screen was dark.And in its place, a single phrase pulsed in red across every monitor in the room:ONE MATCH LEFT.It wasn’t just a threat.It was a countdown.Cassie stood beside me, shoulders squared, breath shallow. Her voice was calm, but I knew her too well now; it was the calm before a storm she planned to walk through with nothing but fire and resolve.“Is this from the same network?” she asked Anton, who was frantically working the decryption panel on his mobile server rig.“Same root encrypt