All Chapters of Not Your Typical Live-In Son-In-Law: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

In the lowest wing of the Lancaster estate—beneath the guest quarters, past the wine cellar, and through a biometric steel door rarely opened more than twice a year—was a secure room known simply as The Vault.It wasn’t where money was kept. It wasn’t where contracts were locked away. It was where people were tested.Not through torture. Not through interrogation. Through intelligence patterning. Memory reconstruction. Predictive behavior analysis.The kind of vetting that couldn’t be cheated, bribed, or bypassed.And tonight, the woman known only as Horizon was in the chair.Sophie Lancaster stood behind a one-way mirror, arms folded, lips tight. She didn’t speak as the biometric scanner confirmed the subject’s ID and began the sequence.Beside her stood Eleanor Lancaster, flipping through a dossier twice as thick as the one Julian had received.“The Revala files match,” Eleanor said quietly. “She was embedded in Crane’s compliance cell for twenty-one months. Her real name is Mar

The plane touched down in Prague at 03:42 local time.A soft snowfall had begun in the hour before landing, blanketing the old city in a sheen of silver. The private hangar at Václav Havel International was quiet—Lancaster-leased, secured under false registry, untraceable.Julian stepped off first, dressed in a sharply cut charcoal coat, no tie. Charlotte followed behind, with Shade and Sophie in staggered arrival groups. No entourage. No visible coordination. To the world, they were four strangers arriving on unrelated flights.But they were hunting the same thing.The actor.And tonight, for the first time, Julian would come face-to-face with the counterfeit version of himself.The gala was hosted at the Černý Zámek, a centuries-old manor just south of the city. It was a rotating venue for off-record networking among private defense firms, intelligence veterans, and corporate “visionaries” whose funding sources never saw daylight.Tonight’s theme was “Disruptive Solutions in Conflic

The alarm didn’t sound.There was no breach warning, no warning at all—just a quiet ping in Sophie’s subnetwork, deep in a packet stream where no one should’ve been looking.It came at 3:17 a.m. One file access request. Heavily cloaked. Military-grade encryption masking an inbound trace.The file being targeted?J.WARD // MIL-CLASS-A-STG / SEAL-FLUX-02Julian’s classified military record.Sophie’s breath hitched when she saw the tag. She keyed in an override and split the transmission for analysis, watching as the encryption peeled away in microscopic layers—until a tag surfaced in the request header.Not a name.Not an agency.Just a string:K-RED // SCALPEL.She stared at the screen, unmoving.Then called one word into the intercom.“Julian.”They met in the secure annex by 3:28 a.m.Charlotte was already there, barefoot, robe tied loose, hair up, no makeup—her war face. She was holding a cup of untouched coffee. Eleanor arrived next, then Robert, then Shade. Julian stood at the c

The replica stood at the center of the empty training chamber, sweat dripping down his brow, knuckles bloodied.He had just broken the jaw of the combat instructor sent to spar him. Not out of impulse. Not rage. But because the man had called him the wrong name.“You're Julian Ward, right?”Wrong voice. Wrong tone. Wrong moment.And the replica’s fist connected before he realized he’d moved.Now the instructor was unconscious, teeth scattered across the mat.The replica—Julius Wardell, as Crane called him—stood breathing shallowly, hands shaking.He couldn’t explain why the name felt wrong.It wasn’t that he disliked it.It was that it didn’t fit.Mirra reviewed the combat room footage silently.She replayed the moment of the strike six times.Frame by frame.There was hesitation.Not in the body—but in the eyes.The replica had flinched after he threw the punch, not before.She turned to Crane, who hadn’t spoken yet.“You see it too,” she said.Crane nodded once. “Emotive lag.”“Se

He stood in the Lancaster foyer like a man entering a myth he didn’t believe in.Marble floors. Carved oak staircases. Light filtering in through a thirty-foot window. A place that looked like power and felt like history.It was too warm. Too still.The replica kept his hands by his sides, fingers twitching slightly from exhaustion, nerves… or memory.Not the programmed kind.The real kind.I have stood here before.But I haven’t.Charlotte was the first to step forward.She didn’t smile. Didn’t reach out.She just looked at him—eyes sharp, unreadable.He had expected suspicion.What he didn’t expect was the… weight of her gaze.Like she wasn’t looking at him.She was looking through him.And trying to see what lived beneath the surface.“Do you remember me?” she asked.He hesitated.Then shook his head.“Not you,” he said softly. “But… I remember the sound of your voice.”A pause.Then Charlotte replied, with a note of something almost kind:“That’s a start.”They didn’t let him upst