All Chapters of Chains of Fortune: Beneath the Blackwood Name : Chapter 61 - Chapter 68

Ivy I stood frozen as the names bled across the screen, each one more damning than the last.Lucien’s name—etched in red—flashed like a branding iron across my mind.Authorization Level RED.THORN01 – ACTIVE.THORN02 – DECEASED.THORN03 – UNKNOWN.Beneath it, a timestamp: nearly a decade ago. His signature. His access. His creation.The truth tasted like rust on my tongue.He hadn’t just been part of the story.He was its architect.Lucien didn’t flinch. Not when the lights flickered, not when I turned on him, trembling.“Tell me this isn’t you,” I whispered.He stared at the screen. His face pale. His jaw clenched so tightly I could see the muscle twitch in his cheek.“I don’t remember doing it,” he said again. “But it’s my clearance. My voice. My code.”“And that’s supposed to comfort me?”His voice cracked. “No.”Clara stepped forward, her hands trembling as she pointed to the feed from Cell Unit 4.“Something’s happening inside the Vault.”The screen zoomed in.And I saw him

IvyThey say blood remembers.I used to think it meant legacy. Lineage. History passed down through dinner conversations and gold-trimmed birth certificates. But as I stared at the terminal flashing Iris’s face—my face, twisted into something razor-sharp—I realized the truth.Blood doesn’t remember like a story.It remembers like a scar.I paced the cold floor of the tower suite, too wired to sleep. Too furious to think.Lucien’s confession echoed in my chest like an explosion I hadn’t braced for.The Thorn program.My father’s deal with the devil.Lucien’s complicity.I wanted to scream.Instead, I stood at the window and watched the estate’s courtyard flicker with motion sensors and shadows. War was coming. And it wore my skin.Iris.A name meant to be beautiful.A woman engineered to be anything but.She looked like me—only perfected. Programmed. No softness around the edges. No grief in her gaze. She was what I might’ve become, had I not clawed free of the data, the needles, the

Ivy The transmission replayed in my head like a wound that wouldn’t close.“You burned my body, Lucien. But not my code…”It shouldn’t have been possible. I’d seen her die. I’d heard her last breath rasp through cracked lips before the flames took her. And yet—Iris’s voice had returned like a ghost coded in smoke and fire.I stood in the HALCYON vault, my fingers pressed to the cold titanium console, and wondered—not for the first time—what the hell I had become. What we had become.Because ghosts don’t leave messages.And monsters never stay dead.The lights above flickered slightly as the system recalibrated. We were still underground—deep beneath Blackwood Estate. Clara had ordered a lockdown immediately after the message. No one in. No one out. My body still ached from everything Lucien and I had done hours before, and my skin buzzed like static. Not just from him.From the sense that something inside me had shifted.Lucien stood in the corner, arms crossed, silent and motionl

IvyThe night after Chamber Null felt like a weight pressing against my skin.Lucien hadn’t spoken much on the way home. Neither had I. But his hand had never left mine in the car. Fingers locked. Knuckles white. Like we were both afraid that letting go would mean we’d fall—into the old world, into the memories that were no longer dead.Back in the Blackwood Estate, everything felt… smaller. Less pristine. As though the house sensed something in me had changed.It wasn’t just me who’d walked out of that vault.It was the girl who’d died in it, too.I didn’t sleep.My body buzzed with something hot and coiled. Not adrenaline. Not fear.Awakening.At 3:14 a.m., I found myself standing in the mirror of the guest wing. My hair tangled from the wind. My eyes hollowed by too many truths. And for the first time, I didn’t recognize the woman staring back.She blinked—and I didn’t.I stepped back. The air snapped like static.Was I losing my mind?Or were the pieces just finding their way back