LOGINShare
Chapter 83: Protocol
Last Updated:
2025-04-30 21:00:52
Related chapters
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 84: Spread like Flame
We disappeared again.After the collapse of the Gulf site, we scattered — not out of fear, but necessity. The storm was here, and its winds were erratic. Some of us went deep underground. Others surfaced in plain sight, shielded by the sheer power of exposure. But none of us stayed still.Will went dark first. He dumped the remaining drives with five trusted allies — digital custodians who mirrored the data across anonymized networks. Then he vanished. No signal, no trace.Callum and I relocated to Berlin. It was noisy enough to be invisible, paranoid enough to be safe. Elena joined us three weeks later, still weak, but burning with focus. She had changed in the black room. There was a sharpness to her now — like metal hardened by fire.The world outside roared louder each day.The “Recursive Ethics Protocols” leaked across more than 120 news outlets. Some tried to discredit them, spinning tales of synthetic forgeries or “AI-generated disinformation.” But forensic analysts — the good
Last Updated : 2025-04-30My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 85: We were free
We lay low in Prague.After the Horizon Gaze breach, the world felt thinner — like the distance between reality and illusion had collapsed. Will’s virus was still compiling, Elena had vanished into the underweb to work her channels, and the drive we stole was secured in a modified Faraday crate beneath three feet of reinforced concrete.The fight wasn’t over — it never really was — but for the first time in months, we had a moment to breathe.And it was in that breath that something broke open.It started simple.Callum and I shared a small flat above a shuttered jazz bar, the kind of place that smelled like old wood and rain. The windows overlooked a narrow cobbled street, always damp and glowing with soft amber lights from a broken lantern across the way.We didn’t speak much those first two days. We didn’t need to. Silence had become our currency — quiet glances, shared coffee, his steady presence beside me as I sifted through surveillance dumps and predictive scripts.But the sile
Last Updated : 2025-04-30My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 86: Burns Fastest
Berlin had gone quiet.After the virus launched, there was a lull — not peace, exactly, but the kind of stillness that follows a tectonic shift. Protestors were still in the streets, headlines still spun, and Novus Shield’s remnants were scrambling to erase their fingerprints. But for us, it was waiting time.Will was off-grid chasing down a suspected mole. Elena was silent again — not unusual, but it gnawed at me all the same. And Callum…Callum was perfect.Too perfect.He brewed my coffee exactly the way I liked it. He woke up before me, padded around barefoot, bare-chested, humming some song I didn’t recognize. He kissed me like we had all the time in the world. And when I had nightmares — and I still did — he held me until they stopped mattering.That’s what made it worse.The message came in through an old comms relay we hadn’t used since Prague — a secure terminal we’d buried beneath three encryption layers and a rotating cipher. It shouldn’t have been active.I found it by acc
Last Updated : 2025-04-30My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 87: Not even Callum
I didn’t leave Berlin.Not really.I stayed close enough to watch Callum from a distance — to feel the gravity of him without getting pulled back into orbit. He didn’t chase me. That was worse than if he had. Because it meant he knew I wasn’t ready to hear anything that would make this less real, less raw.I stayed in an old Cold War-era substation the resistance had converted into a shelter for journalists and data couriers. The air smelled like copper and engine oil. The beds were steel slabs with thin foam. It was perfect. Unemotional. Unattached.I needed that right now.Because I couldn’t stop thinking about the messages.Not just the words Lara wrote — but the pauses. The silences in between. The way Callum had answered her, and more damning: the way he hadn’t.He hadn’t denied it meant something.He hadn’t told her to stop.He hadn’t told me the truth.I’d trusted him with my life. With my mind. With my body. And in the end, it was something so simple — a lie by omission — that
Last Updated : 2025-04-30My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 88: Feel empty
There’s a kind of silence that doesn’t feel empty.The kind that wraps around you after a moment so sharp, so unforgiving, that your brain hasn’t caught up yet. Like the second after a gunshot, or the pause before someone says, “It’s not what you think.”I sat in that silence, staring at the message on Callum’s encrypted tablet.It had lit up when he stepped away to take a call — some logistics check-in with Will. He’d left it open. That alone should’ve been a red flag. Callum never left anything unsecured.But maybe… maybe part of him wanted me to see it.The message was from Lara.Lara: The flight from Riyadh is booked. If we do this, there’s no turning back.Below that, a location ping.Not Novus-related. Not a safehouse.A villa. Remote. Coastal. Private.There was a follow-up message, timestamped an hour earlier.Lara: Are you sure about her? You said she’d never find out.And then — the worst part — the reply.Callum: She’s distracted with the child protocols. Let’s finish this
Last Updated : 2025-04-30My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 89: Bring him home
Three days had passed since Will told me Callum was dead.Three days since the convoy firestorm — since the smoke, the silence, and the sound of nothing on the other end of the line. We buried his name in an encrypted memorial on the darknet, posted beneath a single phrase: Some ghosts burn brighter than the living.The world kept moving.The children were safe — scattered across hidden sanctuaries with new identities and guardians who still believed in justice. Nora-3 was adapting faster than we thought possible. Her neural scans had begun to normalize, as if freedom was rewriting her brain.But me?I was static.Functioning. Breathing. Moving.But not feeling.Not really.Until the ping.It came through Will’s system at 2:17 a.m. — a ghost packet embedded in a relay node we’d used back in Prague, long since scrubbed and mothballed.I was the one who saw it.The days were a blur of comms and half-formed plans. Every hour that passed with Callum’s message sitting like a hot ember in m
Last Updated : 2025-04-30My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 90: He's Alive
And he was trying to reach me.“I thought he died,” Will said, hands trembling as he decrypted the next packet.“He was supposed to,” I whispered. “He wanted us to believe it.”Julian joined us ten minutes later, still bruised but sharper than ever. He scanned the metadata twice before nodding.“This wasn’t sent from the convoy,” he said. “It came from inside the Calidus fallback grid. Probably rerouted through a relay station using a clean identity.”“So he’s behind enemy lines,” I said.“Or being kept alive by someone with an interest in not killing him.”“Leverage,” Will said. “Or… bait.”The thought made my stomach clench.“Either way,” Julian added, “he sent this for a reason. He’s telling you he made it. That he’s waiting.”I looked at the screen again.Echo. Down. Survived.Not help. Not run. Not goodbye.Just three words.A signal in the dark.We flew to Montenegro the next day.Julian tracked the signal’s bounce path to a portside comms hub buried in a crumbling Cold War-era
Last Updated : 2025-04-30My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 91: The Fire we bring
He looked at me like a dying man trying to remember sunlight.The flickering fluorescent light above cast shadows across his face, deepening the hollow beneath his cheekbones, making the bruises bloom darker on his skin. I reached out, but he flinched.“Callum,” I said again, gentler this time. “I know what they’ve done. I see it. But they don’t get to keep you.”He swallowed, and the sound felt deafening in the silence. “You don’t know what I’ve given them, Athena. What I had to give.”Julian appeared behind me, scanning the room with his weapon drawn, tense and ready. “We need to move. This place won’t stay quiet for long.”I looked back at Callum, still shackled to the cot. “We can’t leave him like this.”“There’s no time,” Will’s voice crackled through my comm. “Guards converging. Eastern hallway. You’ve got five minutes, max.”I turned to Julian. “Cut him loose.”Julian hesitated only a second before crossing the room. “He’ll slow us down.”“Then we’ll move slower,” I snapped.Ca
Last Updated : 2025-05-02
Latest chapter
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 93: Memory
The corridors beneath Reykjavik were colder than death. The walls hummed faintly with latent energy — the kind that made your skin crawl, like the building itself remembered violence.We’d split into two groups. Julian and Will were planting the disruptor arrays across the upper levels. Sage was syncing the transport failsafe. I stayed with Callum.He was quiet beside me, moving slowly but steady, hand trailing lightly against the steel walls like he needed to touch something real. The tremors in his body had lessened, but I could still see the fatigue in his eyes.“Pain okay?” I asked, adjusting my grip on the rifle slung across my shoulder.He gave me a faint smile. “Manageable. I’ve had worse.”That much was true — but it wasn’t his body I worried about. It was what they had done to his mind. What they had put inside him.We reached a chamber lit only by our headlamps. The walls narrowed here, funnelling down into the main vault. The Eidolon core was just beyond.Callum paused at t
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 92: Reclaim
The chopper thumped across the burning skyline like a bleeding heartbeat, rhythmic and urgent. I sat beside Callum, cradling him against my side, his blood soaking through my sleeves. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, and every time his eyes fluttered open, I reminded him, “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”Julian sat across from us, checking a battered tablet that had somehow survived the inferno. The glow on his face was pale and grim.“We didn’t get it all,” he muttered. “Their central servers were offline before we reached the lab. Everything in Callum’s head may be the last uncorrupted copy.”Will glanced over his shoulder from the cockpit, voice tense. “And now they know that. Which means we’ve got a target painted on our backs the size of a continent.”I turned my head, looking back at the black column of smoke curling into the sky. Calidus wouldn’t mourn the loss. They didn’t grieve — they adapted. A fallen lab was just another lesson. A reminder to harden the next one.B
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 91: The Fire we bring
He looked at me like a dying man trying to remember sunlight.The flickering fluorescent light above cast shadows across his face, deepening the hollow beneath his cheekbones, making the bruises bloom darker on his skin. I reached out, but he flinched.“Callum,” I said again, gentler this time. “I know what they’ve done. I see it. But they don’t get to keep you.”He swallowed, and the sound felt deafening in the silence. “You don’t know what I’ve given them, Athena. What I had to give.”Julian appeared behind me, scanning the room with his weapon drawn, tense and ready. “We need to move. This place won’t stay quiet for long.”I looked back at Callum, still shackled to the cot. “We can’t leave him like this.”“There’s no time,” Will’s voice crackled through my comm. “Guards converging. Eastern hallway. You’ve got five minutes, max.”I turned to Julian. “Cut him loose.”Julian hesitated only a second before crossing the room. “He’ll slow us down.”“Then we’ll move slower,” I snapped.Ca
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 90: He's Alive
And he was trying to reach me.“I thought he died,” Will said, hands trembling as he decrypted the next packet.“He was supposed to,” I whispered. “He wanted us to believe it.”Julian joined us ten minutes later, still bruised but sharper than ever. He scanned the metadata twice before nodding.“This wasn’t sent from the convoy,” he said. “It came from inside the Calidus fallback grid. Probably rerouted through a relay station using a clean identity.”“So he’s behind enemy lines,” I said.“Or being kept alive by someone with an interest in not killing him.”“Leverage,” Will said. “Or… bait.”The thought made my stomach clench.“Either way,” Julian added, “he sent this for a reason. He’s telling you he made it. That he’s waiting.”I looked at the screen again.Echo. Down. Survived.Not help. Not run. Not goodbye.Just three words.A signal in the dark.We flew to Montenegro the next day.Julian tracked the signal’s bounce path to a portside comms hub buried in a crumbling Cold War-era
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 89: Bring him home
Three days had passed since Will told me Callum was dead.Three days since the convoy firestorm — since the smoke, the silence, and the sound of nothing on the other end of the line. We buried his name in an encrypted memorial on the darknet, posted beneath a single phrase: Some ghosts burn brighter than the living.The world kept moving.The children were safe — scattered across hidden sanctuaries with new identities and guardians who still believed in justice. Nora-3 was adapting faster than we thought possible. Her neural scans had begun to normalize, as if freedom was rewriting her brain.But me?I was static.Functioning. Breathing. Moving.But not feeling.Not really.Until the ping.It came through Will’s system at 2:17 a.m. — a ghost packet embedded in a relay node we’d used back in Prague, long since scrubbed and mothballed.I was the one who saw it.The days were a blur of comms and half-formed plans. Every hour that passed with Callum’s message sitting like a hot ember in m
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 88: Feel empty
There’s a kind of silence that doesn’t feel empty.The kind that wraps around you after a moment so sharp, so unforgiving, that your brain hasn’t caught up yet. Like the second after a gunshot, or the pause before someone says, “It’s not what you think.”I sat in that silence, staring at the message on Callum’s encrypted tablet.It had lit up when he stepped away to take a call — some logistics check-in with Will. He’d left it open. That alone should’ve been a red flag. Callum never left anything unsecured.But maybe… maybe part of him wanted me to see it.The message was from Lara.Lara: The flight from Riyadh is booked. If we do this, there’s no turning back.Below that, a location ping.Not Novus-related. Not a safehouse.A villa. Remote. Coastal. Private.There was a follow-up message, timestamped an hour earlier.Lara: Are you sure about her? You said she’d never find out.And then — the worst part — the reply.Callum: She’s distracted with the child protocols. Let’s finish this
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 87: Not even Callum
I didn’t leave Berlin.Not really.I stayed close enough to watch Callum from a distance — to feel the gravity of him without getting pulled back into orbit. He didn’t chase me. That was worse than if he had. Because it meant he knew I wasn’t ready to hear anything that would make this less real, less raw.I stayed in an old Cold War-era substation the resistance had converted into a shelter for journalists and data couriers. The air smelled like copper and engine oil. The beds were steel slabs with thin foam. It was perfect. Unemotional. Unattached.I needed that right now.Because I couldn’t stop thinking about the messages.Not just the words Lara wrote — but the pauses. The silences in between. The way Callum had answered her, and more damning: the way he hadn’t.He hadn’t denied it meant something.He hadn’t told her to stop.He hadn’t told me the truth.I’d trusted him with my life. With my mind. With my body. And in the end, it was something so simple — a lie by omission — that
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 86: Burns Fastest
Berlin had gone quiet.After the virus launched, there was a lull — not peace, exactly, but the kind of stillness that follows a tectonic shift. Protestors were still in the streets, headlines still spun, and Novus Shield’s remnants were scrambling to erase their fingerprints. But for us, it was waiting time.Will was off-grid chasing down a suspected mole. Elena was silent again — not unusual, but it gnawed at me all the same. And Callum…Callum was perfect.Too perfect.He brewed my coffee exactly the way I liked it. He woke up before me, padded around barefoot, bare-chested, humming some song I didn’t recognize. He kissed me like we had all the time in the world. And when I had nightmares — and I still did — he held me until they stopped mattering.That’s what made it worse.The message came in through an old comms relay we hadn’t used since Prague — a secure terminal we’d buried beneath three encryption layers and a rotating cipher. It shouldn’t have been active.I found it by acc
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 85: We were free
We lay low in Prague.After the Horizon Gaze breach, the world felt thinner — like the distance between reality and illusion had collapsed. Will’s virus was still compiling, Elena had vanished into the underweb to work her channels, and the drive we stole was secured in a modified Faraday crate beneath three feet of reinforced concrete.The fight wasn’t over — it never really was — but for the first time in months, we had a moment to breathe.And it was in that breath that something broke open.It started simple.Callum and I shared a small flat above a shuttered jazz bar, the kind of place that smelled like old wood and rain. The windows overlooked a narrow cobbled street, always damp and glowing with soft amber lights from a broken lantern across the way.We didn’t speak much those first two days. We didn’t need to. Silence had become our currency — quiet glances, shared coffee, his steady presence beside me as I sifted through surveillance dumps and predictive scripts.But the sile
