All Chapters of Blood Ties And Silk Chains: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

The city outside hummed with unnatural quiet. The air was heavy, a silence that came not from peace but from fear, the kind of silence that grew when people knew something was wrong but couldn’t put it into words.Inside the penthouse, Varian’s war room stretched like the brain of a machine—screens, maps, red pins crawling across districts, silent operators taking calls in clipped bursts.But there were no headlines. No reporters on the trail, no police briefings. The chaos was being scrubbed from the surface, every ripple drowned beneath steel.Varian made sure of it.“No press, no leaks,” he said, pacing behind the long table where Ines sat with her laptop. “Not a whisper. They get their headlines, we lose the shadow. We can’t afford that.”Liora, arms wrapped around Wren’s blanket, spoke for the first time in an hour. “So you just bury it? A child stolen out of a hospital, and the city acts like it never happened?”“Yes.” Varian’s tone left no margin.Her voice sharpened. “She isn’

The hum deepened into a growl, reverberating through the hollow bones of The Glassworks. Metal ribs overhead shuddered like a dying animal, and the red strobes bled across the factory walls faster now, painting everything in frantic slices of color. Their shadows fractured, stretched, and vanished again with every pulse.The voice on the speakers had gone silent, replaced by the rising whine of machinery—a pitch climbing with mechanical inevitability. A timer, Liora realized. Not just an alarm. Something winding tighter with every second. Something winding toward detonation.“Charges,” Bram barked, slamming the butt of his rifle against a girder. His words came out clipped, urgent. “They wired the whole place.”“Then we’re on a clock,” Varian answered. His tone was flat, calm to the point of deadly, but his eyes betrayed him—sharp and sweeping, calculating exits, measuring threats, cataloging every steel beam and catwalk. And then, finally, they landed on the trembling child strapped

The flare burned low at the junction, bleeding red light into the choking corridor. Pipes rattled overhead. The countdown throbbed through the walls, a metallic voice spitting seconds like nails.Two minutes.The guard stood square in the glow, shoulders relaxed, pistol steady, thumb poised over a dead man’s switch. His smirk was a line of calm amid the chaos. “One step closer, Veynar, and we all go down.”Liora’s arms tightened around Wren. The child stirred weakly against her, fever-bright and fragile. Her pulse beat frantic against Liora’s chest.Varian didn’t slow. He moved forward like inevitability, shadows sliding with him. His pistol remained raised, unwavering, but his voice came quiet. “You pull that trigger, you bury your own men, too. You think they’ll forgive you?”The guard’s smirk widened. “Orders are orders.”“One man doesn’t make orders.” Varian’s tone was cold enough to freeze steel. “Which means you’re expendable. So—why should I believe you’ll throw your life away?

The coffin arrived at the Marcelli estate just after midnight.It was an old manor perched on the edge of the river, guarded by wrought-iron gates and men with polished shoes and machine pistols under their coats. But the box that rolled up the gravel drive in the back of an unmarked van wasn’t dressed in ceremony. It was crude, raw pine, strapped with iron hinges, the kind of thing you might bury someone in when you didn’t care about prayers or flowers.The guards were the first to notice the holes—drilled neatly in the lid like a child’s attempt at kindness. The second thing they noticed was the sound.Faint, muffled, human.By the time the coffin was dragged into the Marcelli dining hall, word had already spread down the length of their table. Crystal glasses had been cleared, dishes abandoned. When the lid creaked open, the recorder clicked louder.“Marcelli family,” Varian’s voice drawled, low and measured. “Consider this my first and only courtesy.”The recorder whirred faintly

The room was too still.Hospitals always seemed like that to Liora—designed to carry a hush so deep it turned every small sound into something amplified. The beeping of Wren’s monitors, the hiss of oxygen cycling through unseen pipes, the shuffle of a nurse’s sneakers down the hall—all of it seemed louder than it should.But tonight, that quiet held a different weight.Varian sat in the chair closest to Wren’s bed, posture like a statue carved and left to weather. His jacket was slung over the armrest, his shirt rolled at the sleeves. He hadn’t stretched out, hadn’t tried to recline; he’d simply planted himself at her side like a sentinel and stayed there.Sleep found him only in fragments. His head tilted back against the wall, jaw tight, as if even unconscious he refused to surrender. Shadows from the monitor’s glow sculpted his face in angles—hard cheekbones, the scar at his temple, the lines carved too deep for a man his age.Liora stood in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself