She Was the Treasure All Along novel Chapter 659

But they hadn't expected Lucian to be so devastatingly blunt about it. He told them he wasn't there to compete for her attention. He admitted that Baldwin Shapiro's household was too suffocatingly perfect, that he couldn't adapt to a family dynamic built entirely on ulterior motives.

"To me," Lucian had said, "wherever Loyce is, that's my home."

That single sentence had instantly shut up every man in the Lonsdale family.

And so, he stayed.

Typing away on his laptop, Lucian listened to the ambient noise of the live broadcast and asked, "Notice anything interesting?"

Loyce continued tying a ribbon on her gift box. "The blast marks I told you about before? They've been completely scrubbed."

Lucian's fingers didn't stop moving across the keyboard. "Not surprised. If they hadn't, I wouldn't have had to resort to this ridiculous public trial stunt."

Because the evidence had been tampered with, the stream had been running for over two hours and the internet had yet to spot a single anomaly. Throw in the orchestrated bot armies actively trying to steer the narrative into conspiracy theories, and the comment section had devolved into massive shouting matches.

Loyce had a terrifyingly sharp eye for detail, but marine forensics wasn't her specialty. Seeing nothing but baseless guesses and toxic arguments online, she sighed. "Asking random netizens to find a microscopic clue is like looking for a needle in the ocean."

"Maybe an experienced sailor will spot something?" Lucian offered.

Loyce's eyes lit up. "You're right. This kind of work needs to be outsourced to actual professionals."

Professionals like, say, Somali pirates.

Those absolute lunatics spent their entire lives repairing, modifying, and upgrading their stolen vessels using scavenged scrap metal. The fact that their ships didn't sink was a miracle of engineering. In a weird way, their technical guys were probably vastly more qualified to spot anomalies on a ship than ninety percent of the internet. Plus, they literally lived and breathed the ocean.

Not to mention, the pirate captain, Buck, was weirdly active on social media. Contacting him would be a breeze.

Without missing a beat, Loyce forwarded the live stream link to Buck, asking him to have his crew look for anything the cameras might have missed.

If they found something useful, she promised to throw in a bonus crate of heavy weaponry and a spare torpedo on their next arms deal.

After sending the encrypted message, she left the stream running and went back to making Christmas gifts for her brothers.

With the holidays just days away, everyone had dialed back their workloads to focus on family time, making sure to be home every evening for dinner.

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