All Chapters of Tangled In Velvet : Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

The city outside whispered in quiet neon, soft and amber-stained, brushing its glow against the tall windows of Dorian’s penthouse.Isolde lay still on the bed, one leg tangled in the sheets, the other hanging off the side like she might stand. But she hadn’t moved in nearly twenty minutes. Not since the notification buzzed on her phone.VIVIENNE WRENLEIGH1 audio message00:03:51[Received: 2:04 AM]The preview didn’t give anything away. No transcript. No text. Just her sister’s name like a soft echo.Dorian was asleep beside her, chest rising and falling in the even, silent rhythm of deep rest. He slept like a soldier too still. Always on alert. Except with her.She didn’t want to wake him.She slipped out of bed carefully, bare feet padding to the far end of the room where the floor-to-ceiling windows met a low bench. The sky was dark. New York looked like it had exhaled for once.She plugged in her earbuds. Pressed play.“Hey,” Vivienne’s voice began.“I didn’t want to write this

Penelope hadn’t slept in thirty hours.She sat at her converted workspace inside the East Village flat, surrounded by three phones, two laptops, and a military-grade firewall system borrowed from a contact she never named.At 3:41 a.m., she broke through.“Isolde,” she said flatly over the comm. “You need to see this.”The line crackled.Isolde’s voice, groggy and tense, came through. “What is it?”“I got into Velvet’s old mirror-server. The one tied to atmospheric response and psychological tracking.”“Meaning?”“Meaning they didn’t just record footage. They recorded behavior. Eye movement. Breath rate. Mirror-tracked reflections. It’s how they trained the girls to replicate desire.”Isolde sat up straighter. “So?”“There’s a codename that repeats every twelve sessions. Even in sessions where the Archivist never appears physically. It’s encoded in a dead user field like someone wanted to be seen only by the mirrors.”Penelope sent the file.The tag blinked across Isolde’s screen:Use

Isolde stood in the beam of sterile white light, the clear mask in one hand, the folded note in the other.Below her, cameras hummed softly, like insects before a storm.She didn’t wear a mask.She let it drop.It cracked against the floor like a glass confession.The timer above the screen hit 00:00:03.Then LIVE.She took a breath.And began.“My name is Isolde Wrenleigh.I was told to speak a truth that wasn’t mine.So here’s the real one.”A pause.In the gallery room above, Penelope’s voice crackled through the comms.“Feed’s active. Global. They’re not blocking it yet.”Dorian: “Keep it moving. She’s rewriting the file headers as she speaks.”Back onstage, Isolde stepped forward. The camera followed.“Velvet isn’t a club. It’s a stage. One that was never meant to free us. Only to train us.My sister didn’t disappear. She was drafted into a war that doesn’t wear medals.Her body was currency. Her voice, collateral. And I became the ransom.”She reached into her coat and pulled so

It arrived wrapped in ivory ribbon.No address. No stamp. No return name.Just Isolde’s full birth name, written in script so familiar it made her stomach twist.Isolde Wrenleigh-Grey.She stood in the hallway of Dorian’s penthouse, the city a silent backdrop through glass as she turned the envelope over once, then again.“It was hand-delivered,” Penelope had said earlier. “Left at the doorman’s desk at midnight, exactly. No security footage. No prints.”Now, Isolde held it like a shard of something sacred.She hadn’t cried since the trial.But she felt the warning ache behind her eyes now.She slid her thumb under the seal and unfolded the paper inside.Dearest Isolde,If you’re reading this, it means I’m either finally free… or someone else wrote the ending for me.I hope it was me.But I know you, sister. You would never stop with just the truth. You would never let me vanish into a final scene. You always hated the idea of a closed curtain.So I’m giving you one more act.Isolde’s

The elevator ride down felt like descending into a crypt.It was a freight lift with no buttons, only a key override. Penelope stood beside Isolde, a burner tablet clutched under one arm. Dorian was already tense, his body positioned between her and the lift doors, eyes tracking every flicker of light above them.“Brooklyn?” he asked, low.Penelope nodded. “Technically Red Hook. No signage. No public record after 2013. But this place processed Velvet’s biometric log-ins for five years before it ‘burned’ everything.”“You think that message came from here?” Isolde asked.Penelope gave her a sharp look. “I don’t think so. I know.”The lift hit bottom with a mechanical sigh.The doors opened.And cold air hit them like a slap.The facility was dark except for emergency strips that glowed along the floor. Concrete walls. Rows of thick server columns stretched out ahead of them, humming faintly not loud enough to suggest full processing, but definitely not powered down.Dorian stepped forw