Chapter Sixty-Two: Reflections of a Monster

Lucien

I couldn’t stop shaking.

Even after Clara stitched the gash above my ribs, even after Ivy stormed out of the war room to scream into the wind, my hands wouldn’t stop. I’d faced men with guns, knives, leverage sharp enough to cut bone—and none of them had ever made me tremble like this.

Because none of them had been built by me.

THORN01.

My ghost. My sin.

My mirror.

The pain was dull now. Not gone—just buried. Ivy’s scent still clung to my skin, lavender and smoke. She’d looked at me like I was breaking right in front of her, and maybe I was. Maybe I had been for years.

I watched the monitor replay on a loop.

THORN01 didn’t hesitate. Didn’t flinch. And when he looked at Ivy—he didn’t see her as human.

He saw her as a target.

And I had made that possible.

“Sir?” Clara’s voice cracked the silence.

I looked up.

“We’ve located Thorn03. The face recognition pinged through a burned HALCYON node. Eastern sector. Norway.”

“And?”

“She’s not hiding. She wants us to find her.”

I turned back to the screen, just in time to catch a glitch—a flash of her smile. Ivy’s face, but sharper. No warmth. No doubt. Just a cold hunger.

THORN03. Iris.

“I need air,” I said.

“Lucien—”

“I said I need air.”

I walked through the silent corridor of Blackwood Estate, its walls humming with too much power and too little soul. Ivy’s door was open. I paused outside it, not out of guilt—guilt would be too easy—but out of something deeper.

Dread.

She had every right to hate me.

To run.

But she hadn’t.

That was the worst part.

I didn’t deserve the fire in her. Didn’t deserve the way she still chose to stay.

I found myself in the old wing.

The one that hadn’t been touched since the estate was first built. Mahogany and oil paintings. My father’s legacy, framed in blood and ruthlessness.

The door to his office was locked, but I still remembered the passcode.

I stepped inside.

Dust stirred beneath my feet.

And I sat in the same chair where he’d once made me sign the contract that started it all.

Five Years Ago

“You think you can build a legacy on morality, Lucien?” my father said, voice as sharp as the blade he kept in his desk drawer.

“I think it’s better than blood.”

He snorted. “You don’t get to choose between the two. You’ll be lucky if the world doesn’t devour you for trying.”

He slid a folder across the table.

THORN PROTOCOL.

I hesitated. “This isn’t what Sinclair Tech was meant to be. This isn’t what I am.”

He looked at me then, and I saw it. The disappointment. The threat.

“Either you control them, or someone else will.”

I signed.

And the world changed.

Now

I stared down at the same signature.

My name etched in ink.

I had birthed this monster. Not just Thorn. The man I had become. The one who could lie with silence, hurt with a glance, kiss with fire and destroy with logic.

And yet—

When Ivy touched me, I didn’t feel like a weapon.

I felt seen.

I needed her to look at me like that again.

Even if I had to bleed for it.

She found me there, half an hour later. No words. Just the sound of her bare feet across the marble.

“I thought you’d be drinking,” she said softly.

“I thought about it.”

I turned to her.

She looked tired. But fierce.

“You lied to me,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You nearly got yourself killed tonight.”

I stood. “That’s what monsters do, Ivy. They bleed at the wrong moment, and love the wrong person.”

She stepped closer.

“I’m not afraid of what you were,” she said. “I’m afraid of what you’re still hiding.”

And that broke something inside me.

I grabbed her waist.

Pulled her against me.

And whispered—

“I remember more than I’ve said.”

The kiss wasn’t soft.

It was war.

Lips crashing. Teeth. Breath. Her hands tangled in my shirt as if she could tear out every buried truth.

She tasted like fury and hope and fire.

We stumbled back onto the desk, her thighs parting for me like a question I didn’t deserve the answer to.

Clothes fell.

Breathless, frantic, sinful.

Her mouth on my throat. My hands gripping her hips.

But when she pulled back, eyes dark, she said—

“If you want to be mine, Lucien Blackwood… then you tell me everything.”

And I did.

About the first Thorn.

About the failsafe buried in her DNA.

About the night her father begged me to protect her—but refused to tell her the truth.

She didn’t speak for a long time.

Then she said—

“So we burn them. All of them.”

And I knew she meant it.

Later that night, I stood alone in the courtyard, watching the sky bleed silver above Blackwood Estate.

Clara’s voice came through the comm.

“We have confirmation. Iris is inbound. 36 hours.”

“Alone?”

“No. She has someone with her.”

“Who?”

Clara hesitated.

Then: “Your father.”

I froze.

“I watched him die.”

“Apparently, he didn’t stay dead.”

I turned toward the house, where Ivy waited in silk and shadows.

She was no longer the girl bartered into marriage.

She was the storm that would rewrite our bloodlines.

And I was the man who had to choose,

Between my legacy and her flame.