Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Empress’s Debt: Reclaiming the Billionaire’s Throne: Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 43

"He’s gone," Elena whispered, the words catching in a throat tight with a primal, maternal grief. "He walked into the light like he was going home."Alexander groaned, stirring in the wreckage of the storefront. He braced himself against a jagged piece of rebar, blood trickling from his hairline, but his eyes were instantly on Elena. He didn't ask what happened. He saw the empty street and the silver-wood horse, and his face transformed into a mask of cold, focused obsidian."They didn't take him home," Alexander said, his voice a low, vibrating growl. "They took him to the Aether-Net. The High Cathedral isn't a place on a map, Elena. It’s the original server farm—the 'Heaven' the Holy Syndicate built in the ionosphere using the Northwood satellite arrays.""The satellites I de-orbited?" Elena asked, looking up at the dark sky."You de-orbited the civilian ones," Mara said, stepping out from the shadows of a tilted palm tree. Her bare feet were stained with the soot of the battle. "Bu

"He isn't dead," Celine said, her voice sounding like glass on silk as she stepped into the quartz chamber. She looked at the terminal where the mysterious message remained. "But he isn't here. Silas Northwood designed the Aether-Net as a one-way trip for anyone who wasn't an 'Authorized User.' Alexander bypassed the firewall with raw emotion. He grounded the system, but in doing so, he became a 'Fragment'—a piece of data that the system doesn't know how to delete, so it simply... archived him.""In the 'Cradle of the Moon'?" Elena asked, her eyes burning with a dry, jagged heat."The Cradle isn't a server, Elena," Mara said, leaning against the doorway. The 'Root' sister looked weary, her connection to the Earth strained by the massive digital discharge of the Cathedral’s collapse. "It’s a physical location. A site built by the Everett and Northwood ancestors long before the Pact was signed. It’s an ancient observatory in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco."Mara walked to the windo