All Chapters of Guardian of Ruin: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Chapter Ten: The False Kings and Fractured Thrones Vienna was colder than Eden remembered. Sleek, modern, and unnervingly quiet—like the whole city was holding its breath beneath the surface of elegance. But the kind of war they were preparing for didn't care for history or beauty.This city wasn't a sanctuary. It was a battlefield dressed in glass and steel.The safehouse they secured was on the top floor of a luxury high-rise—courtesy of Kessler’s contacts and Roman’s untraceable access to dormant Tier Zero accounts. Eden stood in front of the window that overlooked the Danube River, holding the encrypted drive her father had given her.Behind her, Roman paced in a slow arc, reading the decrypted intel on a separate monitor. His brows furrowed in concentration.“He’s calling it The Mirror Project,” Roman said finally. “Real-time neural mapping, memory replication, personality segmentation. It’s not just surveillance anymore. It’s duplication.”Eden turned. “He’s creating ghosts.”“

Chapter Twelve: The Hunter's MapKassandra’s words settled like ash in the corners of Eden’s thoughts, stubborn and suffocating. Valdemar Volkov. The name had a cruel sharpness to it, foreign but not unfamiliar. She’d heard it before—in hushed voices, in the classified files her father once burned, and in the whispering spaces between Lucien’s threats.Roman said nothing as they left the safehouse.He was quiet in a way that made Eden uneasy—not brooding or detached, but focused. His hand brushed against the small of her back as they navigated the uneven cobblestones outside. A comfort. A reminder. They were still here. Still together.The sky over Vienna had turned iron-grey, and a sharp wind carved through the streets like a scalpel. Eden tightened her coat as she followed Roman to the car. The silence between them wasn’t empty—it was packed with unspoken strategy and lingering dread.“Kassandra wasn’t lying,” Roman finally said once the engine hummed to life. “Volkov is worse than

Chapter Fourteen: The Widow's WebThe safehouse in Prague was a ghost of a place—cold walls, flickering lights, and windows that had long since forgotten the sun. Eden sat at the corner table with her knees drawn up, poring over Kessler’s printed files. Roman paced the room like a caged wolf, checking his weapon every few minutes even though they weren’t in immediate danger.Not yet.The fire they’d set in Berlin had spread—metaphorically, at least. The communications node was down. Volkov’s network was scrambling. Signals were rerouting, delays stretching longer, and for the first time, cracks were visible in what had once been an indestructible machine.But Volkov wasn’t panicking. He was watching.Waiting.“We flushed something out,” Kessler said, his eyes bloodshot from too many hours in front of screens. “Not Volkov, not directly. But someone close to him. A name just resurfaced on an old contract: Alina Dormer.”Roman’s hand froze mid-motion. “Valeska’s sister.”Eden blinked. “S

Chapter Sixteen: Into the BlackThe Carpathians greeted them with a silence so complete it felt unnatural—like the trees themselves were holding their breath.Eden stood at the edge of the cliffside trail, wind biting at her face as the early evening sun dipped below the horizon, staining the sky in blood-orange hues. Below lay a forgotten valley where shadows pooled like oil, cloaking the concrete bones of an old Soviet facility reborn as a fortress. Volkov’s stronghold.It looked dead from above. But Eden knew better.Inside those steel walls, something monstrous was stirring.“We’re on a timer,” Kessler whispered, pulling the infrared tablet from his pack. “Drones sweep every five minutes. Thermal’s hot—lots of bodies, high-output generators, and multiple energy nodes.”Roman was crouched beside her, eyes on the path winding toward the ventilation shafts marked on the Broker’s floor plans. “He’s built a lab inside a mountain. Dense concrete, triple-reinforced gates. No satellite fe

Chapter Eighteen: Smoke Signals The safehouse near Innsbruck was quiet—too quiet.Snow gathered against the windows like reluctant ghosts trying to sneak in. Inside, Eden stared at a massive wall of intelligence reports and satellite images, stringing red yarn between photos like she was building a web that might finally catch Valeska Dormer.But Valeska always slipped through cracks like smoke.Roman leaned against the doorway, arms crossed. “You haven’t slept.”Eden didn’t look up. “Neither have you.”He smirked. “Touché.”Kessler walked in, holding a mug of something vaguely caffeinated and definitely burnt. “I’ve narrowed Caldera’s last supply shipment to three villages—only one matches Sovren’s usual perimeter habits. Heavy drone interference. Weak signals in and out. Rural, isolated, and with three disappearing civilians in the last month. That’s our needle.”He slapped a pin on the board.Eden followed the name: Las Nieblas, a ghost town tucked into the southern spine of Spain