All Chapters of The Vision She Hid: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

“Of course they know it,” I said. I had no doubts who it was.Elky reached for the whiskey he’d poured and abandoned earlier. He didn’t drink it. He looked at the glass like it had a face he recognized in a crowd.“There’s a reason I brought you back here,” he said.“Let me guess. Because running is for people who can afford new names?” I said.“That’s also a part of it. Because the truthful answers are heavy weight,” he said. “And this is how you build the spine to carry them with pride.”The hearth popped, one ember remembering how to dance and then forgetting again. I thought about the mills—Florence and Manchester, the sound of looms like rain on old tin roofs, women laughing over thread that would turn into dresses made to outlast wars. I thought about ministers with somebody else’s sins in their pockets, and port chiefs who counted the same money twice because they loved it too much. I thought about Andros Jennings, his cold grin, his gun, his certainty that fire is a cure for a

The lights came on one by one, motion sensors reacting to the only motion that mattered. It was like watching a church wake up for midnight mass—if the congregation were soldering stations, conveyor belts, and the dubious equipment that made your fingerprints itch just by looking at it.Copper coils hung where silk skeins used to live. Servo arms rested in their cradles like dangerous birds pretending to be tame. Conveyor belts ran nowhere, waiting for orders. Vision rigs blinked, adjusted, blinked again. There were glass microfluidic chips under the glow of cold LEDs, delicate as snowflakes briefed in chaos theory.The hum wasn’t that loud; it just had the presence of something permanent, like silence you find in a chapel after the priest’s gone home and God’s still deciding whether to answer your prayer.Elky didn’t introduce the place. He just walked into it like a man walking into an intimate part of himself he didn’t show to strangers. His coat brushed the edge of a table covered

We had to make it alive to the “tomorrow at dawn” to take over Jennings empire. Council wouldn’t care if we are dead or alive if we don’t turn up. It didn’t look that promising. Whomever organized the assault was good at it, and we were running out of places to hide. Midnight snapped like a bad violin string and the house answered with security sirens. Red strobes licked the ceiling and turned the study into an emergency chapel—Adriatic blue washed in arterial light. The first shot came from the Soyth of formal gardens, a flat crack that made the window glass flinch. It didn’t break though. Elky was already on the move, jacket open, hand on steel, the calm of a man who keeps his pulse in a locked drawer.“South fence cut,” a voice rasped over the comms—one of his guards, the one who always sounded like neurotic robot in distress. “Thermals show three vans breaking in. They are likely armored. East hedge line breached. Looks like they are heading to the vault.”“You have another vault?

That’s how the main character of our drama entered the stage. Smooth talking, black haired, ageless Anatole my mother was silly enough to trust with her secret some twenty odd years ago. I had to break the new to Elky and I didn’t yet know how. The rain had decided to play percussion on the shutters, all rhythm and bad temper. The study answered with low lamplight—the kind you use when you’re reading something that would blush in a daylight. I sat on the edge of clubby leather sofa with my knees under Elky’s robe and my mother’s journal balanced on them like a relic smuggled out of a burning church.The silk scarf was around my neck like a sweet habit inherited from my mother. It smelled faintly of those fine lemons that cost more because they remember what proper aristocrats are like. I opened the leather cover. The spine breathed a soft old-person sound and forgave me for being late.My mum’s handwriting rose up, clean and sure—loops that took their time, angles that didn’t. Even on

The page under my pillow hummed the way a wire hums when it has too many messages to carry.“Fine,” I told the ceiling. “Vulture is Anatole, I got it.”In the hallway, steps paused. Guard’s, because the air didn’t tense up. He didn’t knock at the door. He doesn’t if there is no urgent need to leave or to fight. Not when the thing in the room is bigger than trouble outside. Then the handle turned a fraction and stopped, as if the door was making a promise to both of us: not yet.I lifted the pillow, slid the journal out again, and opened it at the glossy word. It gleamed back at me like a tiny knife under a streetlight.Whoever had rewritten it wanted to make sure no one mistook the metaphor for accidental doodling.The rain leaned on the house like a man comfortable in his skin. I exhaled, slow and heavy, and tasted ink on the back of my throat. Somewhere down the corridor a clock began to insist on counting seconds. Elky’s study still smelled like lemons of a better century.I put my