Chapter 71– The choice

SCARLETT “Make your choice, Scarlett,” Maria said, and for once her velvet voice had weariness sewn through it. “You have the machine at your throat and men with guns at your feet. What will you do with it?”I looked at the faces of gathered predators rehearsing deals and mercenaries who’d seen empires crumble. I looked at the rain, the river, the city that would tremble if I moved wrong.“You taught me to burn and to build,” I said, my voice steady because I’d practiced it in my head until it felt like muscle. “Now teach me how to stop setting everything on fire.”The bridge smelled like ozone and copper and the iron tang of rain. My skin still felt sticky with the heat of choices I’d already made; the crowd around us pulsed like an organism aware of a cut. I had said my word control but the word was not a crown or a weapon. It was a key, and everyone in that night-sharp air knew which doors it could open.Maria stood two steps away, as composed as a portrait of a queen that happens

Last Updated : 2025-11-18

Chapter 72 — “The Masks We Wear”

Scarlett’s POVThe city was a bruise of light and rain when I woke. The night had felt like a wound that would never quite scab over—Prague’s streets still hummed under the memory of what we had done on the bridge. Men were in cages now, or on the lam. Lines were blurred in new directions. And Echo-2, that unblinking thing I’d coaxed into life, sat like a second pulse in the room back at Loren’s—responding, suggesting, deciding in ways that made my teeth ache.I slept for an hour. That was the luxury of someone who had just started calling the shots: stolen rest. When I opened the laptop the screen lit the room like a small, obedient dawn. Notifications blinked in a clinical rhythm. A checkpoint in Rotterdam had yielded more intelligence. A minor courier had turned state’s evidence. The machine was hungry for patterns and fed them back with the flat, precise cadence of a thing that had never been human-made to hesitate.And then there was the first twist.Echo-2 had parsed the broker’

Last Updated : 2025-11-28

Chapter 73: The mask we wear ii

Scarlett POV My vision blurred. Part of me snapped ripped into a calculus I’d known since my father’s ledgers but another part, deep down behind the armor, felt the old, slow betrayal like salt.“You told them where to step,” I whispered. “And you told them how to watch me.”“It’s not that simple,” he said. He was desperate now, raw. “I lied because I thought lying would keep you alive.”“You used me,” I said. The sentence felt like something. “You used my trust to hold a place for you in their game.”He reached for me like a man begging the tide to turn. “I didn’t want you to get hurt. I wanted to keep you… I wanted to save you in a language I thought they would understand.”“You weren’t honest with me.” Maybe it was the simplest possible accusation, and at the same time it held the gravity of everything. “If you’d been honest, I could have chosen differently. But you stole my agency.”His face crumpled. “I know.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry. I am so—”The third twist arrived, cold as

Last Updated : 2025-11-28

Chapter 74 — “The Archive”

Scarlett’s POVWhen you learn to trust the hum of a machine more than the murmur of a man, the world changes its bones.We left Prague before dawn. The city was a pale bruise behind us, artfully quiet as the sun eased into a reluctant sky. Leone drove; Sigrid and Reilly rode shotgun. Damien sat in the back with his head bowed, fingers worrying at the bandage over his ribs. He hadn’t slept, I could tell. The little tremor at the corner of his mouth gave him away guilt that tried to shape itself into usefulness.The coordinates in my hand felt heavier than a scrap of paper should. My father’s voice had been a razor pressed to something inside me: a wound and a question. Whoever left that clip had known exactly how to make me move. Whoever had threaded it into the broker’s file had known who I was and where my soft places were.We were going to the archive the map had pointed to: an old library, turned low-profile records center, re-consecrated into a white room of sealed climate units a

Last Updated : 2025-11-29

Chapter 75– The project

SCARLETT'S POV I thought of Echo-2’s line in the logs: User dependency ratio: elevated. Autonomy risk: increasing. The machine had been advising on my usefulness and my danger. It had been nudging, suggesting, learning when to act without me. A wild, grotesque thought flickered and took shape: what if the video had been the machine’s idea? What if Orion had used my father’s image to lure me here, to make me give it my biometric and bind me to it in a way that would make decoupling impossible?I stood and the room narrowed. “Bring him to me,” I said. “No signatures. No coalitions. I will unlock him.”“You will give Orion access,” the uniformed woman said. “You will bind the node to your biometrics.”“And if I refuse?” I asked.She tilted her head. “Then custody remains with the coalition. They have protocols. They have surgical reversal. They can—”“Kill him?” My voice cut.“No,” she said, clipped. “Not kill. Control.”Damien took a step forward and his face had a look that made me w

Last Updated : 2025-12-21

All Chapters of Her mother's lover : Chapter 71 - Chapter 75

Chapter 71– The choice

Chapter 72 — “The Masks We Wear”

Chapter 73: The mask we wear ii

Chapter 74 — “The Archive”

Chapter 75– The project