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Chapter 91: The Fire we bring
Last Updated:
2025-05-02 20:09:45
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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
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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
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The snow came in thick that morning.It blanketed the ridge in silence, muting the world until everything beyond the windows blurred into shades of white and grey. Callum stood outside, barely a silhouette against the swirling flakes, wrapped in that old green coat he found in the closet and claimed as his own. I watched him through the frost-laced glass, my hands cupped around the ceramic mug—his coffee, still bitter, still undrinkable.But I sipped it anyway.Because he’d made it for me. Because the effort mattered more than the taste.I opened the door slowly. The cold slapped my skin, immediate and bracing.“Morning,” I called.He turned slightly, his breath visible in short puffs. “Didn’t want to wake you.”“You didn’t.” I stepped beside him. “You okay?”His jaw tensed. “I’m… almost.”I waited. We’d fallen into a rhythm like that—one of pauses and offerings. No pressure. Just space, held gently.He finally said, “I dreamed I was back in the vault. But this time, I walked in willi
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I can barely process the words on the screen, the image of Callum standing next to Emelia, both of them glowing with happiness, the life I thought was mine now a cruel mockery of what I had once hoped for. The tears start to fall again, slow and heavy, each one a reminder of how completely I was deceived, of how utterly meaningless my love for him was. I hear my mother’s voice, sharp and protective, cutting through the haze of my disbelief. “Look at him! Look at how he’s throwing you away, just like that,” she hisses, barely able to contain the fury in her voice. I don’t respond. I can’t. My throat feels tight, as if every word I might speak would be a betrayal of the reality I can no longer deny. With a sharp exhale, my mother crosses the room and sits beside me, her presence warm despite the storm of emotions she’s holding back. I know she’s angry, but I also know she’s heartbroken for me. “Listen to me,” she says gently but firmly, wrapping her arms around me. "I don’
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My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 95: Trigger
The snow came in thick that morning.It blanketed the ridge in silence, muting the world until everything beyond the windows blurred into shades of white and grey. Callum stood outside, barely a silhouette against the swirling flakes, wrapped in that old green coat he found in the closet and claimed as his own. I watched him through the frost-laced glass, my hands cupped around the ceramic mug—his coffee, still bitter, still undrinkable.But I sipped it anyway.Because he’d made it for me. Because the effort mattered more than the taste.I opened the door slowly. The cold slapped my skin, immediate and bracing.“Morning,” I called.He turned slightly, his breath visible in short puffs. “Didn’t want to wake you.”“You didn’t.” I stepped beside him. “You okay?”His jaw tensed. “I’m… almost.”I waited. We’d fallen into a rhythm like that—one of pauses and offerings. No pressure. Just space, held gently.He finally said, “I dreamed I was back in the vault. But this time, I walked in willi
My Ex, the Widowed Billionaire Chapter 94: Shut down
The safehouse in the Scottish Highlands didn’t look like much—half-buried in moss and stone, tucked beneath a crooked ridge. But after what we’d been through, it felt like the world’s last cathedral. Quiet. Empty. Untouched by programs and wires and memories that weren’t ours.Callum barely spoke the first day. He slept. For once, real sleep—not the restless, drug-induced recovery that followed every mission. I watched him from the armchair across the room, wrapped in the heavy plaid blanket someone had left behind, eyes tracking the rise and fall of his chest as if I still didn’t quite believe he was breathing freely.I wanted to reach for him. But after Reykjavik, after the screaming and seizures and crimson light inside that vault—I was afraid of shattering something fragile. Not him. Us.So I waited.On the third night, the fireplace crackled back to life, and so did he.“You should sleep,” Callum murmured from where he stood by the window, arms crossed loosely over his chest. “I
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
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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
