All Chapters of OUR LITTLE SECRET : Chapter 41 - Chapter 45

Ophelia didn’t sleep that night.Not because she couldn’t—but because she didn’t want to.She lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, fingers curled tightly around the edge of her blanket. Her thoughts looped, rewinding again and again to that one flickering moment. That blurred figure. That single glowing word.Echo.A name.A warning.A forgotten ghost.By morning, she was already in Mira’s office.“You’re absolutely sure?” Mira asked, her tone clipped.“As sure as I was the day Lyra glitched,” Ophelia replied.Carl leaned forward, arms folded. “You said the Echo program was shut down years ago.”“It was,” Mira confirmed. “The Echo Initiative was part of a classified tier of experiments. The idea was to train a single Bloodborn to replicate others’ abilities perfectly—without exposure limits.”“Wait,” Nadine cut in. “That’s impossible. Mimics can barely hold one ability at a time. The neural strain alone—”“This one didn’t mimic,” Mira said slowly. “He absorbed.”Everyon

For the first time since she arrived at Velgrave, Ophelia couldn’t stop replaying her own past.Not the version she’d memorized.But the holes.The parts that didn’t make sense.She remembered her mother being cold.She remembered being transferred between “safe houses.”She remembered a man with gloves who used to press two fingers to her temple and say, “Just a little longer, sweetheart.”But she never remembered his name.Never remembered his face.“Decoy,” she whispered under her breath as she stood at the academy library archives.It echoed.Like it was meant to.She dug through old files under the identity registry section—a part of the Bloodborn system that Mira said hadn’t been touched in years.She found her own entry.Ophelia Wolfe. Born 17th of March. Classified: Grade A — Memory Class. Ability: Memory manipulation.But something was off.There was no birth record attached.Only a single line typed in the background clearance:“Synthetic implantation cleara

The girl hadn’t moved since they brought her in.She sat on the floor of the diagnostic chamber, knees tucked under her chin, hands glowing faintly like bioluminescent fireflies. Her silver hair fell over her eyes, veiling the eerie calm in her face.Nadine’s scans were inconclusive.“She’s not fully conscious,” she told Mira. “It’s like… a fragment of her mind is here, and the rest is inside something else.”“Another system?” Carl asked.“No,” Nadine said. “A network.”Ophelia stared at the girl.Her voice had echoed in her mind for hours now.“I am the memory of what you tried to erase.”It haunted her.It sounded like something Ophelia herself would say.Too sharp. Too calculated. Too aware of what pain meant.“She’s a failsafe,” Mira explained. “Her code is partially linked to yours, Ophelia.”“How?” Ophelia asked.Mira pressed her lips together. “Because she was grown from the same strand. You’re not just her ‘key’—you’re her source.”Carl’s head snapped toward them.