All Chapters of Tangled In Velvet : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The first headline appeared 53 minutes after the broadcast ended.“EXCLUSIVE: Global Blacklist Leaked by Masked Seductress”Then another.“Interpol Issues Warrant for Isolde Wrenleigh: Cyberterrorism or Heroism?”By the time Isolde stepped back into Dorian’s control room, six different countries had launched conflicting investigations and two were issuing extradition requests.She stared at the screens.One displayed her own face, blurred behind a red filter.“Suspect. Hacker. High-profile escort.”The words crawled below in bold type.“They’re faster than I expected,” she said flatly.Dorian stood beside her, expression unreadable.“They always are. Power knows when it’s bleeding.”Penelope sat cross-legged at the terminal, fingers flying over her keyboard. “They’re scrubbing the original stream. Metadata’s being corrupted in real-time. They want to erase your voice while amplifying your body.”Isolde exhaled sharply. “The classic playbook. Make the woman the spectacle. Make her sham

The private jet’s cabin was quiet, save for the occasional creak of turbulence and the soft hum of encrypted data streams uploading from Penelope’s tablet. Outside, clouds smeared across the horizon in bruised hues of lilac and blue.Isolde sat curled in a corner, arms tight around herself, as the wind threatened to pull old memories forward.She didn’t sleep. Couldn’t.Her phone buzzed.No ringtone. Just a silent vibration, an alert she’d buried in a failsafe folder labeled RAD-32, a code known only to one person.Her handler.She tapped the message open with a finger that trembled.Incoming File:“Nutcracker Variation – Archive Cut – 11.04.17”The file was corrupted. Intentional. No ballet performance had ever been filmed on that date.She opened it anyway.No video. Just static. Then A voice. Mechanical. Deeper than she remembered, distorted through filters.“You broke protocol, Wrenleigh. We made a deal.”Her mouth went dry. Dorian, seated across the aisle, noticed her stillness

The apartment in Berlin was quiet except for the war playing out on the screen.Isolde sat on the edge of a weathered chaise, her fingers wrapped tightly around a mug of untouched tea. Across the room, Penelope’s phone buzzed nonstop alerts, news outlets, encrypted messages flooding in.CNN. Al Jazeera. BILD. BBC.Every broadcast began the same:“Breaking tonight a massive leak implicates an international private society known as Velvet…”Names scrolled down the ticker. Men Isolde had only seen in passing at the club. Faces unmasked. Dates, bank transfers, performance footage.Vivienne watched in silence from the arm of the couch, knees drawn up, one hand wrapped around the shawl she refused to discard.Dorian stood near the window, a cigarette burning slow between his fingers. He hadn’t spoken in ten minutes. Just stared as the world he’d built crumbled with precise elegance.“Is this…” Isolde finally said, “What does collapse look like?”Dorian turned, exhaling smoke like a verdict.

Isolde stood at the window of the lakeside safehouse, watching smoke rise in the distance not from Paris, not anymore, but from her memory. The lake outside shimmered beneath the pale, frozen morning. In her hands: a tablet displaying live news coverage. Every major channel was airing the same thing.VELVET BURNS: ELITE SEX CLUB IMPLICATED IN GLOBAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING RING.Photos of the Paris theatre engulfed in flames, close-up clips of masks scattered like fallen leaves, and blurred images of familiar faces she’d seen inside the club, now displayed like war criminals. Names whispered before were now printed in bold type: Dominic Wade. Kara Langston. Quentin Arlowe.Dorian paced behind her, his phone pressed to his ear. His jaw was clenched tight, that particular kind of fury that came from too many secrets unraveling at once.“Scrub it all,” he snapped into the phone. “Burn the backups. Deep-six the Zurich server. No traces, understand?”He paused, listened, then added: “We don’t kn

The villa perched above Lake Geneva like a secret in plain sight: glass walls, Scandinavian wood, the silence of wealth pretending to be nature. Inside, the world was suspended.Dorian lay on a modular bed framed by white linen and wire monitors, shirtless beneath the bandage cinched to his ribs. His breath was shallow but steady, his eyes closed but never fully relaxed. Not anymore.Isolde watched from the doorway, arms crossed tight. She hadn’t changed out of her clothes from the escape of blood-spotted sleeves, mud-drenched boots. Her body had made it out of Velvet. Her mind hadn’t.She turned at the sound of soft footfalls behind her.Vivienne.Hair tied back. Hoodie zipped. No makeup, no perfume, just silence in girl-shaped form. She stopped at the threshold, eyes flicking to Dorian, then to Isolde.“You should sleep,” Isolde said.Vivienne shrugged. “Can’t.”Her voice had changed in the last week. Not broken. Not defiant. Just… emptied.They walked together out onto the glass te