Chapter: Chapter Hundred and Seventy SevenDamien's POV~Ilsa had not stirred since she had uttered that name. Veliseth. She merely continued to gaze at the baby, as though the word had arrived not from her lips, but from someplace lower down. “What did you see?” I asked.Her voice was faint. “Not a place. Not first. A person.” I stepped closer. “Who?”“A name that Jasmine cut from her memory. A soul that she lost just to remain hidden.”“Why?” Elara inquired, clutching the child to her chest protectively. Ilsa blinked slowly. “Because it was the key to her becoming what she became. Whoever they were, Jasmine loved them and loved them so that she could forget them. That type of grief is once in a lifetime.”A silence settled over us. One that wasn’t hollow, but thick. Purposeful. I looked at Elara, and we both knew what we had to do. “Where?” I asked. “There." Ilsa indicated the other side of the Academy, to the old barracks that had crumbled in the first quake. “Underneath. In the roots of the mountain. There’s an old vault.
Last Updated: 2025-08-02
Chapter: Chapter Hundred and Seventy SixElara’s POV~I did not say anything when I saw him. I couldn’t. Caspian was standing in the doorway like a ghost unwilling to be quiet. Shirt ripped, face smudged with dirt, eyes hollow from fatigue. But still him. Still real. He gazed directly at the baby in my lap. “She’s not the only one,” he repeated.Damien was the first to burst forward, somehow positioning himself between us on reflex, protective as always. But I was on my feet and rearing to take a step closer, clutching the baby tightly. “Where have you been?” I asked.Caspian exhaled, then staggered. Damien checked his fall by grasping his arm as he fell to the floor. “I need…A second,” Caspian mumbled. “There’s too much. I don’t know if I even made it back that far.”I led him to the cot next to the one the baby had been in. Sitting on him, the fingers of her little hands wandered fumblingly in the cloth of his shoulder. Caspian’s voice cracked. “I didn’t die. I don’t think. But I wasn’t anywhere. I was… between.”“Between
Last Updated: 2025-08-02
Chapter: Chapter Hundred and Seventy FiveDamien's POV~I didn’t move.The sound of the baby crying had gone soft. More like whimpers. Her little fingers curled at the corner of her blanket. My hands trembled as they went out to her. Not from fear. Not even from disbelief. But more from the terrifying, beautiful weight of it. She didn’t move a muscle when I lifted her. She nuzzled my chest, as if she already knew me. Like she had been waiting.I looked around the clearing. There were no footprints. No breeze. Nothing but the dim glow betrayed where Jasmine had been standing. Where she had watched. Where she had disappeared. “Elara,” I whispered. “Ilsa—someone—” while carrying the baby and turning to the Academy. Her head lay on top of my heart, where my mark tingled brightly. And it was burning. Not in pain. But in recognition.I hadn't even made it to the eastern gate when Ilsa was already there to intercept me. She didn’t say anything at first. Her eyes widened when she saw the baby, and she opened the door without speaking
Last Updated: 2025-07-31
Chapter: Chapter Hundred and Seventy FourDamien's POV~Jasmine’s name remained carved in stone.I froze in place as the entire Academy went silent behind me. The wind had whisked away the remaining smoke. The earth beneath my boots was still hot from what had just been — like the world hadn’t yet soaked itself in her absence.I couldn’t walk away.The grave wasn’t deep. She would have hated some grand tomb. She railed against being made famous only after she was dead. But it had to be here, Elara had said—at the very spot where the old altar had been. Jasmine had broken it with her body and sealed it with her soul. This land owed her that.So did I.I kneeled, fingers grazing the line of fresh soil. No flowers. Not yet. Ilsa had said until the gate locked that nothing would grow here in the soil. I had no idea how long that would take. Maybe never.I sucked in a sharp breath through my lungs.I didn’t cry at the burial. Not until Elara read the last words of Jasmine, in the note she had left with the Uncut. Certainly not the
Last Updated: 2025-07-31
Chapter: Chapter Hundred and Seventy ThreeJasmine's POV~The woman who shared my face stepped outside the gate, and everything tilted.Not metaphorically.Literally.The air behind her warped in gently like a ripple, the sky split open to a bruised red, and the world gaped below our feet. She was beautiful in the way ruin is beautiful. It was cracked, shiny, impossible to look away from. Her gown drifted like smoke; she made no sound as she moved. But the legions behind her — those echoes of consequence — marched like thunder.“Jasmine,” Elara whispered, voice trembling. “What are we looking at?”“Not a copy,” I said. “Not a shadow.”“Then what?”“The weight of every decision I never made. Every life I left unlived.”The other me—The Consequence Queen, I guessed—lifted a hand. Her army stopped as one. They were silent, watching. Their eyes sparkled with memories I had not lived, and yet somehow recalled. A version of Caspian who never said goodbye. A Damien who turned away. A me that took the crown. I remembered Kaelen’s last
Last Updated: 2025-07-29
Chapter: Chapter Hundred and Seventy TwoJasmine's POV~I barely had time to react before the thing attacked. But it did not strike me cold, like a blow. It struck me like memory — full-bodied, mind-shattering, blood-deep. My gasp was ripped from my throat when the force of my stumble sent me back, slamming into Damien’s chest. He caught me, steadying me, but I didn’t register his touch. I wasn’t even paying attention to my own body. Since the creature hadn’t attacked me. It had entered me.“No — no, no, please no,” I panted, holding my head. It was tearing me apart, in my mind. Not pain. Something worse. Recognition. All the pieces of myself that I’d broken off and buried. Every doubt. Every selfish thought. Everything I had ever doubted and pretended was my strength rose to the surface.”“I did not ask for this,” I murmured.“But the decision was yours,” the voice resounded inside. “You left me there. In the glass. In the stillness. I now put on what you threw away.” I dropped to my knees. Damien was screaming for me, but
Last Updated: 2025-07-29
Chapter: Chapter Eighty TwoLocket’s EchoRosanna’s POV~I was in the study when Valenticia’s feed came from my monitor. Galden Exposed danced on the screen. She had called Ravi Patel by name, linked Lazareth inextricably to the illegal serum trade, and shaken Gregor’s empire to its foundation.I could feel it in my chest — a gradual, creeping terror. Gregor would come for us now. He had always been brutal, but Valenticia’s defiance would lose something much worse from him. I’d seen that rage once, during Eleanor’s time. I had lived beneath it. And now, it was rising again.I fisted the locket around my neck—Eleanor’s locket—its warm silver rose coin burning beneath my hand. It was Eleanor's gift to her now, parent to child, a sign of lineage. But it was more than that. It held something deeper.“That’s your mom’s final gift,” I whispered to Valenticia over the secure line. “It has another chip inside — encrypted information.”There was a crackling gasp in my earpiece. “What’s in it, Nana?”My heart swelled. She
Last Updated: 2025-07-22
Chapter: Chapter Eighty OneStockpile's HeartGregor’s POV~I was in the central part of my Lazareth bunker. The machines around me hissed and clicked, and vials of serum flowed from them. My heritage, my rifle, my will—compressed and packed, a row of chemical peace perfected.A smile played at the corner of my mouth while the vials rolled off the line. “Valenticia’s just a waste of life,” I muttered low, my voice nearly drowned out by the buzzing. I was wearing gray today.Vallentcia Clawford had thought she could unravel me with her shabby little leak—board contacts, buyers lists, and financials she could barely read. It was the last thing she knew she was doing.But then her voice came crackling over the command center speakers. Another episode of Galden Exposed appeared on the screen. She was broadcasting again. Loud, smugly and infuriatingly familiar.Her language made me think of Eleanor, not my friend, but my aunt. The woman who had blocked me back then, with shaking hands. “You’re a monster, Gregor,” she’
Last Updated: 2025-07-22
Chapter: Chapter EightyShadow's DealStefan’s POV~I squatted in a Seryne safehouse, the stale atmosphere heavy with damp and regret, guilt a blade cleaving through my chest. Valenticia’s face — her piercing hazel eyes, her faith in me broken because of my cafe heart-to-heart with Natasha — haunted me. I’ve hurt her, I thought, feeling my heart like a raw wound. It was Gregor Galden’s doing, driving the deal with the threat to her life—“Spy on her, or she dies”—a bargain I despised but accepted to keep her alive. As the safehouse’s crumbling walls closed in and Seryne’s neon buzz filtered through the boarded windows, terror spiked as I hacked into the logs that tracked Natasha’s serum shipments on a burner laptop. “For you, Valenticia,” I muttered under my breath, sabotaging her lines, shipping crates to no man’s land, resolve dimming like a light with a short in it.There, too, fear pulsed, casting Gregor’s spies a shadow I couldn’t shake. Their drones had been buzzing Seryne’s alleys last night, hunting m
Last Updated: 2025-07-11
Chapter: Chapter Seventy NinePier’s Reckoningvalenticia's POV~I was on Seryne’s pier, the waves beating below, a roaring noise, blitzed by the fear in my chest. Ravi Patel stood at the end of the pier, a silhouette against the lights, smirk chilling, slowly turning my way. “You’re late, Clawford.” Mentz snarled, that cutting-in-the-air voice of his, which sounded like sanding boards across salt air. My heart pounded, fear sharp—Christ, he’s Gregor’s mole, but how much more does he know? The tape recorder in my pocket hummed, awaiting his confession, heavy with Rosanna’s file, my satchel. Eleanor’s locket was warm against my clothes, and my mother’s voice whispered against the locket-- Hush, my star--and I was determined. “Speak, Ravi,” I said sternly — “why would you betray us?” His laughter was ice, “Stefan has delivered you to Gregor - your lover has sold you out”. My heart split, agony shard piercing through—Stefan?Fear spiked, piercing doubt—are we already lost? I held the phone, live-feed of Seryne’s und
Last Updated: 2025-07-10
Chapter: Chapter Seventy EightTraitor’s GameNatasha's POV~I braced myself against the rusted railing of my Seryne dockside lair, the scent of salt and diesel tearing at my nostrils, a smirk pulling at my lips while I paged through Ravi Patel’s intel on my tablet. “She’s trapped,” I grumbled, Valenticia Clawford’s leaks—the ousting of Galden’s board, the tying of Lazareth to serum—gleaming like pressed metal I’d soon squash. The shadows of the warehouse danced, decoy serum crates slumbering, my effort to bait Valenticia wobbling as purchasers recoiled from her transmission. A small bright flicker of fear—Gregor’s going to turn me in, isn’t he? My leather jacket groaned, red hair spilling over one eye, my knife’s handle cool in my hand, a leash to hold on to. Gregor’s sham arrest, his cold voice echoing in my head from our previous conversation, was a chain I would’ve broken, but now his silence bit at me— what was he up to? And drove the fear down, the ambition searing to overtake him.The tablet’s blue light ca
Last Updated: 2025-07-09
Chapter: Chapter Seventy SevenDr. Patel's POV-Rosanna’s file lay open on my desk, and it screamed betrayal: Ravi, my brother, named as Galden’s mole. How could he? I thought, my hands shaking, our memories as boys — sharing kites under Mumbai’s sky — in flames now. Fear shot through me like a cold pulse as I opened a secure line to Valenticia, my voice quavering: “Ravi’s double-crossing you, releasing your plans to Gregor. Her breathless voice snapped: “Patel, you’re sure?” I clutched at the desk, “Rosanna’s evidence—it’s him. The thing was, my Galden past — as a serum trigger-maker — was smothering me with shame. I had made this bad dream, I thought, feeling a surge of fear. Valenticia’s firm, “Get proof,” centred me, but dread murmured — can I meet my brother?The monitors hummed, Valenticia’s Galden Exposed leak looping, Ravi’s name a wound. I hacked a drive stolen from him, serum formulas I’d designed, reworked now for warheads…and I can’t do it, Ravi, my fingers fumbling, heart pounding—he’s not the Ravi I u
Last Updated: 2025-07-09
Falling for my Billionaire Ex Again!
I stepped inside the office and sat before the doctor. But my thoughts suddenly drifted.
"Mr. Blackwood?" The doctor’s voice pulled me back to the present.
"How is she?"
The doctor sighed, flipping through Natalie’s chart before meeting my gaze. "She suffered a severe head trauma. We managed to stabilize her, but…" He hesitated.
My stomach twisted. "But what?"
"She has retrograde amnesia. Right now, her memory is… fragmented. From what we’ve assessed, she doesn’t recall the last five years."
Ethan froze. "How do you mean, five years?"
"She believes it’s still 2018. In her mind, she’s still your wife."
The words punched the air from my lungs. Still my wife.
"This kind of memory loss can be temporary or permanent—we can’t say for sure. She may recover bits of it over time, or it may come back all at once." The doctor’s gaze softened. "It’s important, Mr. Blackwood, that no one tries to force her to remember anything. Pushing her could make things worse, even more dangerous."
I swallowed hard, my pulse roaring in my ears. Five years of pain, five years of regrets—wiped away.
"Can I see her?"I pleaded.
The doctor hesitated before nodding. "Go easy on her....And Mr. Blackwood?"
"Stay strong."
^^
Five years ago, Natalie Elise Blackwood walked away from her husband, Ethan Blackwood. After discovering his betrayal, she left without a trace. But when a tragic accident erases her memories, she wakes up believing she’s still Ethan’s devoted wife, unaware of the past that tore them apart. Seizing the opportunity to fix his mistakes, Ethan is determined to keep her by his side, even if it means hiding the painful truth. But when the memories return, will Natalie stay...or will history repeat itself?
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Chapter: Chapter FiveEthan's POV:The air left my lungs.I swallowed hard. "Can I see her?""She will be moved to a ward soon. You can see her then.""I want a private ward arranged for her,” I said without hesitation. "The best one. The most expensive."The doctor nodded. "I’ll have that done."I barely heard him as he walked away. My gaze was fixed on the doors leading to her.Five years of searching. And now, I could only pray she’d wake up.Suddenly, the door swung open and the nurses wheeled Natalie out on a stretcher. An IV drip was connected to her arm. Bandages covered her head, and legs.She looked nothing like the fiery, stubborn woman I had spent years searching for. She looked... broken. And I hated it.I followed closely as they guided her down the hall. Now and then, one of the nurses would glance at me. But, I ignored them.They entered a private ward and gently transferred her onto the hospital bed. Adjusting the monitors and IV stand, they made their final checks before stepping back.“Sh
Last Updated: 2025-02-26
Chapter: Chapter FourEthan’s POV:“Mr. Blackwood?”I barely heard the voice calling me. My mind had drifted again, back to her. Natalie.God, how could I not think of her? Even after all these years, she still haunted me.She used to sit beside me in meetings like this, taking notes with a wide smile.She was my secretary—until she became my wife. But life had a way of proving my father and grandfather right: Kindness was a weakness. And losing her—losing us—was all the proof I needed.I clenched my jaw, pushing away the memories. The past had no place here.Murmurs swept through the room as my silence stretched too long. My secretary, Samuel, leaned toward me and whispered the question I had missed.I blinked, shaking my head slightly to clear my thoughts. Straightening, I adjusted my cufflinks and finally spoke. “The question was regarding our investments in the European sector, correct?” I asked.The CFO nodded. “Yes, sir. There have been fluctuations in the market due to political instability. Our st
Last Updated: 2025-02-26
Chapter: Chapter ThreeNatalie's POV: FIVE YEARS LATER:I sat in my art studio, surrounded by canvases covered in several colors. Some were unfinished, while others were completed yet waiting for meaning. I dragged my brush across the canvas, blending hues of deep blue and ivory. Suddenly, the door was pushed open."Miss Natalie!"A small voice filled the room, followed by hurried footsteps. I turned just as a little boy, no older than six, rushed to my side, clutching a medium-sized whiteboard in his tiny hands. His dark eyes were bright with excitement, his cheeks flushed from running."Did I do it properly?" He asked, his voice tinged with eagerness and a little nervousness.I smiled and set down my brush, placing my palette on the wooden stand beside me. Wiping my paint-streaked hands on my apron, I pulled it off and knelt before him, taking the board from his hands."It's looking great, Kelvin." I praised, scanning the sketch of a small house surrounded by trees, the lines were wobbly
Last Updated: 2025-02-26
Chapter: Chapter TwoNatalie's POV:Stepping out of the house, I hurried past the front porch and through the gates, my feet carrying me aimlessly down the road.My vision was blurry from the tears that refused to stop. I wasn’t just crying—I was wailing. I fought for this marriage.I endured the whispers, the disapproving glances, the silent judgment of people who thought I didn’t belong in Ethan’s world.But Ethan… he never made me feel like I was beneath him. He never felt like a billionaire to me.He loved eating greasy pizza on the couch while watching his favorite sports, his arm lazily slung around my shoulders. He loved cooking, taking over the kitchen with a kind of reckless passion that always ended in a mess, and surprising me with breakfast in bed. He laughed with me. Held me. Kissed me like I was the only woman in the world.So how? When?There were no signs—no distance, no arguments, no strange behavior.What went wrong?My hands trembled as they landed on my stomach. Was he unhappy becaus
Last Updated: 2025-02-26
Chapter: Chapter OneNatalie’s POV:"What a hectic day.” I sighed, relaxing in the driver’s seat. But despite how exhausted I was, I couldn't stop smiling.Tonight was everything I ever dreamed of. My paintings debuted at the gallery, and I received recognition from some of the most renowned artists in the industry. I glanced at my phone, half-expecting a message from Ethan. He came early but left almost immediately for an emergency meeting. I understood, of course. He always worked hard for us, for our future.I bit my lip, to suppress a smile. I couldn't stop picturing him, waiting for me. Already changed into his sweatpants, lounging on the couch with a glass of whiskey in hand. Maybe he asked the maids to prepare something extraordinary. Maybe he ordered takeout. Maybe he’s waiting to celebrate my success properly.Pulling into the driveway, my heart swelled with anticipation.The house was dark except for the porch light. Strange. Ethan usually makes sure the maids leave a few lights on whenever
Last Updated: 2025-02-26
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