All Chapters of The Billionaire's Hidden Vows: Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

The light in the studio was brittle—the kind of winter light that didn’t spill so much as slice, cutting through the frost-clouded windows in slanted blades. It caught in the motes of dust that hung suspended, giving the air a faint shimmer, as if the entire room were trapped inside a snow globe that someone had forgotten to shake.Eva sat cross-legged on the scuffed wooden floor, her small frame folded in on itself, her knees like sharp wings beneath the paint-stained cotton of her dress. Her fingers were streaked in umber and soot-black, her brush moving in fits and starts. The strokes were erratic, almost frenzied—but not careless. There was intent here, a private rhythm, as though the painting wasn’t being made for anyone in this world.Savannah stood in the doorway, her shoulder leaning against the frame. The air smelled of linseed oil and old varnish, but beneath that she caught something else—something metallic and clean, the scent of frost breaking on cold steel. It crawled al

The cryo-facility did not simply feel cold.It felt ancient.The air was thin, stripped of scent, as though even time had been filtered out of it. Frost crawled thick over the walls, catching and refracting the low, unnatural blue light so that every ridge glittered like a knife-edge. Delaney’s footprints from hours ago remained perfectly intact, each one cupped in a fragile glaze of ice, as if the room had preserved her intrusion the way a tomb preserves the first trespass.Savannah’s breath appeared in front of her face in slow, ghost-like curls. The sound of it seemed too loud here, as though the frost could hear. And then—she saw her.At first, her mind rejected what it knew, clinging to rational labels—reflection, hallucination, mirror-trick—but the illusion would not hold. This was no cousin, no variant born of genetic drift. It was her. The same features, the same bone structure, even the same faint scar at the brow… and yet stripped of the softness that years and human experie

The storm had not passed—it had only grown quieter, crouching in the darkness like a predator waiting to pounce. Outside the penthouse windows, the city swam in the blurred sheen of rain, each neon light stretched into ribbons by the wet glass. Savannah stood in the living room, bare feet pressing into the rug, her reflection a ghost hovering in the pane.Behind her, Colton’s presence was a tide—silent but impossible to ignore. She felt him before she heard him, the steady draw of his breath, the unhurried way he moved as if the room belonged to him entirely, as if she were only a flicker inside it.“You’re trembling,” he said, voice low, almost conversational. Yet every syllable coiled tight around her like a loop of wire.“I’m not,” she lied.The reflection betrayed her, the faint quiver in her shoulders, the way her hands curled and uncurled. She wanted to ask if he knew—if he had always known—about the way her body reacted to him, the way her fear and longing seemed to share the s

The laboratory’s light was dim—more shadow than illumination—casting jagged ribbons across the floor where the blinds had been drawn halfway, as if the sun outside didn’t dare enter all the way. Screens hovered in a half-sleep state, their green cursors blinking like tired eyes struggling to stay awake.The air felt over-filtered, too clean, carrying a faint antiseptic tang that clung to the back of the throat.Delaney stood at the far end of the console, her fingertips resting against the glass surface—not in idle thought, but as if she were feeling for the faintest sign of life. She kept her gaze fixed on the sleeping data lines scrolling across the screen.“We can’t keep patching her,” she said, her tone a controlled flatness that made the words feel heavier than they were. “The fractures are too deep. If we rebuild E0 from the ground up—reboot it—we can stabilize everything. We use Echo’s neural lattice to reconstruct the original architecture.”She didn’t turn toward Rhett. Her v

The hallway seemed longer than it should have been. Savannah knew this stretch of the penthouse well—its champagne-colored marble, the gilt-framed mirrors, the tall windows that looked down upon the dark city—but tonight, the proportions felt wrong.Her heels struck the floor in a measured rhythm.Click. Click. Click.Yet with every few steps, the sound doubled, as though someone else followed behind her, just out of sight.She stopped once, glanced over her shoulder. Empty.But the mirrors told a different story—her reflection was already mid-step, one pace ahead, as if it had not paused when she did.A faint metallic taste lingered on her tongue, though she couldn’t remember eating anything. The air was warmer here than in the rest of the penthouse, scented faintly of magnolia blossoms. Not fresh flowers—no, this was the thick, honeyed aroma of blooms that had been shut away too long, their sweetness turning toward decay.She thought of Magnolia.And the memory did not feel like a m