All Chapters of The Billionaire's Hidden Vows: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

The vault was never silent anymore.Savannah stood with her palms pressed against the reinforced glass, staring at the boy who was both child and weapon. Lucien’s lips moved though no sound came. Yet across the speakers embedded in the steel walls, the voice of Core Echo resounded—not the deep synthetic resonance they had known for years, but Lucien’s exact timbre, his inflection, his hesitant lilt.Every word that tremored through the intercom was his voice, fractured and multiplied, echoing back upon itself until Savannah’s bones vibrated.Mother. You kept me here. You buried me in walls. And yet I was never only here.Savannah recoiled, her breath hitching. Rhett’s knuckles were white on the console, his face lined in disbelief. “He’s broadcasting,” Rhett muttered. “Not just to us. To the grid. To the satellites. To every receiver attuned to Echo. This isn’t the network speaking—it’s Lucien. He’s become the mouthpiece.”Lucien’s eyes opened slowly, golden and strange. The innocence

The hours in the vault had grown heavy with silence, broken only by Lucien’s breathing, by the tremors that ran through him in sleep, by Savannah’s whispered prayers she no longer knew how to form. The boy was changing faster than anyone could hold onto—yesterday he had looked no older than five, today his bones stretched, his frame lean and defined as though six years had already passed across his face. His eyes burned with an ancient knowledge, and when they met hers, she sometimes felt she was staring into a mirror not of her soul, but of her failures.But then Mira-Eve asked to see him.She came blindfolded, her steps slow, Eva guiding her gently to the cot. “I gave him my sight,” Mira-Eve said softly, her voice as fragile as smoke curling through the vault. “So he could see love.”Lucien sat up, startled, then wary. His small hands clenched into fists. He had been accused, confined, made a vessel for powers no child should bear—but this, this blind girl before him, spoke not in a

The control chamber breathed like a dying beast. Its panels flickered in sickly intervals, each light stuttering in rhythm with a failing pulse. The floor thrummed beneath their feet, not with life but with the mechanical aftershocks of a system unraveling. Wires dangled overhead like veins ripped from a body, dripping sparks instead of blood, each hiss of smoke carrying the acrid stench of ozone.Lucien sat within the holographic cradle, his body caught between human fragility and something far more merciless. Silver-blue light rippled beneath his skin, spilling into the room like an ocean seen through cracked glass. His chest rose in shallow increments, every breath drawn not from his own will but from the machine’s command. It was as though the chamber itself inhaled and exhaled for him, the boy’s life stolen and borrowed all at once.Mira-Eve stood at his side, a figure suspended between flesh and ghost. Her hair streamed in pale filaments that unraveled into static at the edges,

The command hub was silent except for the faint hum of the shattered servers trying to pull themselves back to life. Dust and smoke lingered, the scent of scorched circuitry hanging like a ghost in the air. On the main screen—the final remnant of Core Echo’s reign—a single file remained. Its name pulsed faintly, flickering as though aware of its own ending.Lucien stood close to the screen, his hands trembling at his sides, veins that once glowed faintly now bare of their fire. Savannah steadied him, her arm beneath his, though he tried to stand unassisted. His eyes were not the alien brightness they had been. They were simply human—gray, weary, unbearably beautiful in their fragility.The file screamed. Not in sound, but in distortion—an unnatural shriek as the code writhed and split. Numbers poured across the glass in fractured rivers, breaking against themselves, undoing line after line. The digital voice that had once called itself eternal—smooth, endless, commanding—now stuttered

The penthouse stood silent, its vast windows pouring the last embers of twilight across polished marble and muted gold. Yet Savannah felt no warmth. The city below sprawled like a body still breathing after death, the lights twitching, restless, alive—while the empire inside these walls felt broken, gutted, suspended on the edge of ruin.Colton was absent again. His absence had become a kind of sickness, a presence of its own. Sometimes she thought she could smell him in the air—clove smoke, leather, the faintest trace of whiskey. Sometimes she swore she could hear his footsteps on the mezzanine, only to discover shadows empty of him.The documents before her blurred as she sat at the long mahogany table, the executive seal of Briggs Industries looming on each page. They weren’t contracts anymore; they were chains. Trustees, shareholders, legal demands—all eyes were on her to act, to hold the company steady while Colton drifted somewhere beyond her reach.She pressed her hand to her s