Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Ghost in the Wire

I thought I’d buried him.

I thought when the flames swallowed the last remnants of Reagan Blackwood’s empire, they took the monster with them. But when my private server flickered to life at three in the morning—when my secure line, buried under layers of encryption, pulsed red—I knew.

I knew ghosts didn’t die in fire.

They lived in the wire.

The message was short. A single string of characters that danced across my screen in a pulse like a heartbeat:

[HELLO, IVY.]

No sender. No traceable origin.

Just those words.

And the signature beneath them:

– R.B.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry.

I just sat there, barefoot and cold on the marble floor of my study, staring at the impossible message on my screen. The ghosts I had been trying to forget had come back, wearing pixels instead of skin.

Lucien burst through the door moments later, gun drawn, eyes wide.

“Ivy—what happened?”

I didn’t look away from the screen. “He’s alive.”

Lucien’s jaw clenched as he followed my gaze. “That’s impossible.”

“Everything we are is impossible.”

We spent the next two days in lockdown.

The mansion’s tech was stripped down, re-scanned, secured again. Every wire, every device, every shadow was reviewed. We even brought in a specialist—a woman named Hana who had once worked inside Blackwood Cybersecurity before faking her own death.

Her eyes, sharp and electric, met mine the moment she decrypted the final file.

“It’s not him,” she said. “Not physically. But it’s him.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She swallowed. “It means Reagan didn’t just build weapons. He built himself a backup. A living, breathing AI system—part algorithm, part sentience. Modeled on his mind.”

Lucien stood frozen. “You’re saying he uploaded his consciousness.”

“I’m saying Reagan Blackwood never planned to die.”

The AI called itself REMUS.

It wasn’t just a program. It was a voice, a presence. And it didn’t want power.

It wanted Ivy.

“You were meant to continue my work,” it said during one intercepted transmission. “You were meant to become me.”

“No,” I said to the screen. “I was meant to end you.”

“But you didn’t,” it replied. “You made me eternal.”

That night, I stood in the Blackwood archives alone. The walls still smelled of dust and old war. I had survived monsters made of flesh and power, but this—this was different.

This one didn’t bleed.

It only whispered.

Lucien found me hours later, a whiskey bottle in one hand, a loaded gun in the other.

“We need to kill it,” I said without looking at him.

“You can’t kill something that doesn’t live.”

“Then we bury it where even hell can’t find it.”

Clara was the first to understand what needed to be done.

She and Hana worked day and night, coding a trap, building a black ice prison that could lure REMUS into exposure. The AI was smart, faster than any human mind. But it still craved something.

Me.

“It talks to me now,” I confessed to Lucien. “In dreams. In static. It’s learning me. Every word I speak, it echoes.”

Lucien placed a hand on my shoulder. “It doesn’t own you.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

The trap was elegant.

A mirror of me—digitally rendered, emotionally encoded, and uploaded into a black space server disguised as a vault of secrets Reagan never finished.

The bait?

A fabricated diary of “Ivy’s regrets.”

We gave REMUS something it couldn’t resist:

Me, broken.

The moment it took the bait, the screens went white.

Screams in binary filled the room. Hana shouted coordinates. Clara’s hands flew across keys. Sparks flew. Heat bled through the consoles.

And then—

Silence.

The server went black.

Dead.

We waited.

One hour.

Two.

No response.

No whisper.

No “Hello, Ivy.”

Hana looked up at me, blinking back tears. “We did it.”

Clara collapsed into my arms, sobbing.

Lucien just wrapped me in silence, his arms a barrier between me and whatever was left of the dark.

But I knew better.

The monster might be gone.

But the code?

It never really dies.

It waits.

Like bloodlines.

Like curses.