Chapter 24
Chapter 24: The Devil Returns The world narrowed to the two headlines—one digital, one written on Tom’s face. The truth about his mother, raw and devastating, was instantly buried under the avalanche of this new, more visceral betrayal. The man who had just been shattered by a decades-old lie now faced a present-tense attack on his remaining family. The cognitive dissonance was too much. His mind, trained for binary outcomes—friend or enemy, truth or lie—snapped into a familiar, darker alignment. The vulnerable, devastated man vanished. In his place stood the King of Ruin, but a king whose throne was made of ash, his eyes burning with a cold, nihilistic fury. He looked from the phone on the desk to Dream, and the connection she’d seen flicker in his eyes—the shared shock, the mutual ho
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