All Chapters of Her mother's lover : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Scarlett’s POVDamien.He looked wrong in Prague out of context, like a soldier in a cathedral. He had my mother’s men pinned in the way of someone who had been inside too many of their rooms. He wore the same expression: tired, raw around the edges. When his eyes found me they went cold, not the kind of cold that kills feelings but the kind that freezes them into shapes you can no longer recognize.For one careless second I almost smiled. He folded there, as if the world asking him to choose had finally broken his back. He had done what he said he wouldn’t do: he had stepped into the tangle of my life.The room smelled like whiskey and old promises. Maria’s presence was not a scent or a rustle; it was a tension, an expectation. She wasn’t there yet, but I could feel the way the air braced itself, like a body about to take a blow.“Kade,” I heard him say, smoothly. “She’s arrived.”Kade’s gaze cut to me, assessing, as if a new toy had been presented. He smiled at me too bright, too su

Scarlett’s POVThe night after I chose, Prague looked different. The same cobbled streets, the same cathedral spires, but now every shadow felt like an answer I’d asked for and was afraid to receive. I had said the word—wield—and it dangled in the air like a summons. Choice is loud when it’s new. It insists on being heard.Loren’s apartment became my classroom. It was not like the safehouses or the cold rooms where men shouted and threats hung like paintings. His space was efficient: a long table, a bank of monitors, a kettle that steamed like an old metronome. He moved without flourishing. There was no swagger to him, no flirting with danger—only procedure. People like Loren don’t dramatize power. They sterilize it.“You wanted a tool,” he said the first morning, pouring tea as if we were old colleagues and not two people who’d just agreed to let the same world keep its wounds. “I will teach you the language. Orion is architecture. You will learn its grammar; then you will write sent

SCARLETT That night, alone in the room Loren lent me, I pushed Orion harder. I built a simulation: a map of Kade’s network strewn against the lives that fed it. I made the model run scenarios if I disrupted here, what moved there; if I exposed this ledger, whose lives would shift; if I rerouted this payment, who would retaliate.The machine replied with cold efficiency. It did not care who lived or died. It cared about optimization, outcomes, probabilities.When the simulation finished, Orion appended a line I hadn’t asked for.> Orion: Note: collateral predicted. Threshold crossing in 3 hours if continued.I stared at it until the letters blurred. Threshold. The word lodged like a splinter.Loren sat beside me, calm and steady. “Sometimes the machine tells you what you are too hungry to see: that you will have to rebuild what you break,” he said. “Being the heir is messy. You cannot be heir if you cannot accept the clean and the unclean.”“Then teach me how to clean,” I said, voice

Scarlett’s POVThe machine asked me a question like a man holding a knife to the throat of some unborn future: Risk threshold: accept?There was no lie in the prompt. Only a clean, cold arithmetic of outcomes. Echo-2 did not beg. It offered probabilities, consequences, and a tiny, terrible promise: certainty where humans could only guess.I looked at the monitors until the light behind my eyes turned grey. The city below Prague breathed in and out like it always did oblivious, stubborn. Somewhere a late tram crashed. Somewhere a mother shushed a child. Somewhere, men who had built entire livelihoods on secrets were asleep, their ledgers open on lacquered desks.Loren sat across from me like a judge who had already set the sentence. “Decide,” he said. The room smelled faintly of boiled tea and old paper. “Decide what kind of person you will be when your enemies are disassembled.”It was a question less philosophical than surgical; the stakes were surgical. The choices Echo-2 presented

SCARLETT “You think you can pit us against each other?” I snapped. “That you can stand back and watch us bleed?”“No,” Maria said, and it chilled the marrow of me. “I think I can watch you remember. Remember why we did what we did. Remember who carved your bones to fit the world.”Kade smiled as if he’d been handed a painted canvas. “Too much nostalgia,” he said. “I prefer efficiency.”“I prefer memory,” Maria answered. Her eyes met mine then, and in them I saw not the mother I’d wanted and loathed but the strategist who had always been five moves ahead. “Scarlett chose.”Choose. The same word as before, but heavier now because the bridge beneath us felt smaller. I felt the pull of Loren's offer in Prague, Echo-2 humming strategies back to me, Kade’s mercantile calm, Maria’s venomous ability to wrap truth in cruelty. Choose who would shape me. Choose whether I was a weapon or a queen. Choose who lived and who died.“Will you walk away if I refuse?” I asked Kade. “If I say no?”He loo