In the days that followed, the world reeled from the Thorne scandal. Mo Chen was hailed as a hero, the heiress who had uncovered a plot and saved her family. Her "nervous breakdown" was now seen as a brilliant, if unorthodox, counter-intelligence operation.
But for Mo Chen, the victory was bittersweet. She had saved her family, but she had lost her innocence. She had walked through fire and been reborn in its image. The carefree Golden Heiress was truly dead.
She stood in her Nevada hangar, now her official base of operations. The system had gone quiet after the wedding, its immediate purpose fulfilled. But she knew it was still there, a dormant engine waiting for its next fuel.
Her personal wealth, accumulated from two weeks of relentless burning, stood at just over $100,000. It was a small fortune to most, but a pittance to her. It was her seed capital. Her true inheritance wasn't the Yun-Mo empire; it was this power to destroy and create from the ashes.
Silas approached her, his work done for now. "What will you do now, little dawn?"
Mo Chen looked at the piles of scrap metal, the forged armor, the supercomputer humming in the corner. She looked at her hands, which could call forth fire.
" The Thornes were a symptom, not the disease," she said, her voice calm and certain. "There will be others. Other snakes who see our family as a prize. I'm not going to wait for them to strike."
She turned to him, her eyes holding the cold light of the stars. "I'm not going back to being the heiress, Uncle Silas. I'm building something new. Something they'll never see coming."
She was no longer Mo Chen, the daughter.
She was the Phoenix. And she had risen from the ashes.