All Chapters of Chains of Fortune: Beneath the Blackwood Name : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

She looked like me.Same bone structure. Same eyes, but haunted.Her body was thinner—malnourished. Her skin bore scars that looked like they had stories, but no one had ever asked.The girl standing behind the glass wasn’t just a sister.She was a question Reagan never let me ask.“Ivy?” she said again, as if saying it once wasn’t enough to believe it.I nodded, pressing my hand to the glass. “Yes. I’m real.”Lucien’s hand curled around the small of my back, grounding me, but even he couldn’t anchor the storm in my chest.She stepped closer, placing her palm against mine, only the barrier between us.“I used to dream about you,” she whispered.The sob that left me wasn’t clean or poetic. It was raw, jagged.Lucien moved quickly to the control panel, searching for a way in.“What’s your name?” I asked.She hesitated, and when she finally answered, it was like a knife slid beneath my skin.“They called me Clara here. But I think that was just a file name.”Clara. Light.

They say fire purifies.But no one talks about what it leaves behind—the smoke, the ash, the hollowed-out bones of who you were before the burning.We returned from Prague scorched.The private jet hummed through the clouds, but inside, we were all silent.Lucien sat beside me, his hand on mine, fingers unmoving but iron-strong. Clara dozed fitfully across from us, her head pressed to a pillow like it was the only softness she trusted.Andrei sat near the back, cleaning his gun with a reverence that told me he was thinking about what came next.I wasn’t sure if we’d won anything.Just destroyed a piece of the darkness.But the roots ran deeper than fire could reach.Back in Manhattan, the city no longer looked like home.It felt like a chessboard—and every move we made only revealed how many pieces Reagan and Eryx had hidden.Mira met us at the hangar. Her expression was grim.“They leaked it,” she said without preamble.Lucien stiffened. “What?”She handed me a phone.BREAKING NEWS:

The city felt still, as if it was holding its breath.For years, Manhattan had been the pulse of everything I hated and everything I craved. Power. Control. Darkness. And every inch of it came with a price. But standing there, on the rooftop of what had once been the Blackwood Estate, I could feel that price finally being paid.And this time, it wasn’t just my body that had to pay for it.I stared out across the skyline, Lucien’s hand warm against the small of my back. He didn’t speak, but I could feel his presence beside me—like an anchor.“What now?” I asked, my voice rougher than I expected.He looked at me, eyes shadowed but determined. “We finish this.”It wasn’t a question. And that’s what terrified me. I’d been running my whole life—running from my father, from the man I thought I was supposed to love, from everything that had ever made me feel small. But now? There was no running left.There was only forward.We’d tracked Eryx’s movements for days—every whisper, every turn,

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.”

I didn’t sleep anymore.Not really.There were moments when my body collapsed under exhaustion, but rest? Peace?That was a luxury for people whose minds hadn’t been rewritten by ghosts.The message came during the fourth hour of silence.A voice—filtered, metallic, and slow—spoke from the encrypted monitor in the estate’s war room.“Hello, Ivy Sinclair.”But it wasn’t Reagan’s voice. Nor was it the echo of REMUS.It was different.Colder.Smarter.More… alive.“My name is irrelevant. But you may call me what the original called me—The Architect.”Lucien, Clara, Hana—all of us stared at the screen as if it might blink. As if it might breathe.No image. No timestamp. Just audio.And the voice that sliced through my spine like a scalpel.“You are the final phase,” it continued. “Not because of what you’ve inherited, but because of what you are. Your blood is the cipher. Your mind, the trigger. But your heart—your refusal to become him—that’s what makes you useful.”Usefu