All Chapters of Velvet and vengeance: stripped by the enemy : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

The Poisoned PrinceJace's POVYou know the new fag that just resurfaced was more like a clowny act or further mockery.Elio Vargas he called himself…he's just an old fashioned forgotten King that's trying to find a common ground in the new world now.I've made my research on him and he was a charismatic Spanish aristocrat, rumored to be The Widow's newest lover, tge bitch that had the dazzling dick she knelt to. His invitation to a parley in Madrid was covered in terms of a "truce," a temporary end of the hostilities to "re-establish communication." It was a magnificent trap, beautifully set. Lucian, despite his suspicion, knew refusing would make him look weak and unwilling to negotiate, an crime he'd rather for than have it dent his image. He accepted, bringing only Dimitri and myself without giving us any chance to speak for it. Ever since the letter came, in fact, since we returned from the ghost market, none of us have barely spoken to each other. We've just been cold fellows

The Double Cross Jace's POVThe silence that followed our escape from Madrid was the most damning evidence of all. Dimitri returned exactly two hours and seven minutes later, emerging from a hidden maintenance tunnel near our rendezvous point. He was calm, his face wiped clean of the tunnel dirt, his clothes perfectly in order, but his eyes were spoke differently and cold.“The trail is gone,” he reported flatly, addressing Lucian. “The surveillance footage on five key streets was wiped. The communication logs between the precinct and the national guard are scrambled. They have no physical evidence, only the witnesses from the banquet hall. The police are now looking for a ghost. Vanguard is publicly implicated, but operationally untouchable.” He stated calmly, trying to catch his breath.It was too good. Too clean. The kind of work that takes hours, not minutes, unless you had people in place, or knew exactly how the system would react. The police trail hadn’t just vanished; it ha

The Mother of Winter Jace's POV Dimitri didn't just tell me The Widow's name; he opened a small, cold window into his past, showing me fragments of the terrifying legacy he was trying to outrun. His memories weren’t biased, they were pained and brutal accounts of his mother's meticulous, rise to power during the vacuum left by Lucian’s early expansions. He showed me, through his pained recollections, how she had moved from an anonymous wife into a power broker. She orchestrated coups in three small nations, not through bombs, but by systematically confusing the opposing political factions, then revealing their corruption simultaneously, letting the chaos consume them both. She bankrupted entire families not with physical threats, but with brilliant, cold-blooded short-selling and financial terrorism, creating a silent crime of wealth. She murdered rivals, not in street fights, but in sophisticated "accidents"—a faulty plane part, a sudden neurological disease, a misinterpreted

Cold Embers Jace's POVThe mission to Marseille was supposed to be a clean success, a clean destruction of The Widow’s financial headquarters in the region. I had planned it carefully, taking note of every known possibility, every escape route, and every potential countermeasure. But war is a mix of preparation and chance, and in this case, chance won, so sad.A small security oversight, a single misidentified frequency, led to our failure. The Widow’s forces had anticipated the strike. Our team walked into the war ground we had prepared, but it was too late when we found out that we had just locked ourselves in a brutal, kill zone. We lost dozens of lives in the span of thirty minutes. Men I had lectured, men I had promised safety, they were all gone.The guilt was overwhelming and the weight crashed down on me at once. I was now a writer of death, and my methods had failed. I went through the motions of the analysis, my voice cold and heavy with pain, but inside, I was crumbling

Fire and Frost Jace's POVThe war erupted with a terrifying violence that showed The Widow’s meticulous planning. She didn't launch one strike, she launched a dozen. Exploding across the continent, multiple Vanguard facilities were hit simultaneously—shipping yards in Rotterdam, a data center in Frankfurt, and a currency clearing house in Zurich. The scale was designed to overwhelm our capacity to respond.We were bleeding assets and personnel faster than I could track them. The map in the command center, normally a show of Vanguard dominance, was now a horror show of flashing red indicators. The Widow’s forces were moving with the speed and precision of a brutal machine, exploiting every vulnerability I had missed.The collapse of my carefully constructed alliances was the most devastating blow. Fearing The Widow’s relentless power, the neutral remnants I had tried to sway were scrambling to sign non-aggression pacts with her, sacrificing Vanguard intelligence for their own surviva