All Chapters of Not Your Typical Live-In Son-In-Law: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The message arrived without encryption.No masking, no delay.A plain-text transmission, routed through ten obsolete satellites, printed in a single line across a disposable terminal in the Lancaster war room:“He was never meant to be your enemy. Only your replacement.” – C.Silence followed.Sophie stared at the monitor. “It’s not a bluff. The code is clean. No virus, no trap.”Robert muttered, “Then it’s bait.”Julian said nothing.He stood in the corner of the room, eyes locked on the line, his mind still and unblinking.Charlotte stepped beside him.“What do you think he wants?”Julian’s voice was quiet.“He wants a conversation.”Two hours later, Crane’s face appeared on the screen in a secure channel.It wasn’t a broadcast.It was a call.One-to-one.Julian sat alone in the chair, the lights dimmed, the rest of the family watching silently through an adjacent room behind a soundproof wall.Crane looked older.His silver hair was pulled back, his suit immaculate, expression unre

He didn’t speak for almost twelve hours.When Elias returned to the Lancaster estate, he said nothing to the guards who opened the eastern gate. Nothing to the med techs who tried to scan his injuries. Nothing to Sophie, who tracked his footsteps across the south wing and tried twice to intercept him.He just walked.Each step slower than the last.Blood soaked the side of his ribs. His right arm hung at an angle that wasn’t natural. The coat he’d worn into the Verona facility was gone—burned or discarded somewhere between explosion and extraction.He looked smaller.Not weaker.Just… reduced.Like a sculpture after a storm.Charlotte found him in the garden, standing alone in the winter rain, half his shirt ripped open, eyes distant.“I heard what happened.”Elias didn’t look at her.“You shouldn't have gone alone,” she added.He exhaled softly. Rain traced his cheek like tears that wouldn’t fall.“I had to see it.”She stepped closer. “What did you see?”He blinked once.“Versions o

It started with a ping.Soft. Unobtrusive. So faint it almost escaped notice.But Shade didn’t miss it.She was in the west alcove, recalibrating one of the estate’s dormant surveillance nodes when a thread in her back-end console turned gold—a color no script should use.A Canary Ping.Old tech. Pre-network. A silent alarm she’d designed years ago as part of a zero-contact deadman system. It was never supposed to go off unless…Unless one of her ghost nodes was triggered by someone who shouldn’t exist anymore.She dropped the wrench, pulled up the sequence.Coordinates: Central Europe. Relay origin: Satellite S02-B. Routing ID: Shadow Circuit: Outpost 7. Message Body: 1 line of code.“Birdsong acknowledged. Host not alone.”Shade froze.Then opened the packet header.Encrypted inside the message body was something else.Something impossible.A hex string she recognized.Not by structure.By design.Julian entered the control room three minutes later, towel still around his neck fr

The Lancaster compound in Andorra was never meant to house guests.It was a fortress. A fallback position. Built into the mountain, invisible from air, fireproofed, encrypted, and cold by design. No comfort. Just containment.Now it held seven survivors from Grigori’s Bluff—five clones from the boy’s cell, the boy himself, and a final arrival: the silent girl found in the lower chamber after Crane’s death.She hadn't spoken yet.Not once.“Give them quarters,” Elias said. “Not cells.”Robert stared at him across the ops table. “We don’t know what they are.”“They’re people.”“We don’t know that either.”Elias didn’t blink.“I do.”Charlotte, standing behind him, interjected:“We put them in cages, we become Crane. End of discussion.”Robert didn’t argue.But he didn’t agree either.He just turned away.Three hours later, the newcomers were scanned, tested, and assigned to separate rooms—on the east wing, far from the main control hub.Sophie oversaw biometric logging.None of them had

The message came through an untraceable whisper stream. No source tag. No metadata. Just three words:“Bring a shovel.”Elias read it twice.Then once more.Charlotte leaned on the doorway of his room, arms crossed.“Let me come.”Elias was already packing. Small bag. Minimal gear. A sidearm, barely visible.“You’re not supposed to know.”She arched an eyebrow. “So I was never going to find out?”“I didn’t say that.”“Then say what you mean.”He zipped the bag closed.“He asked for me. Only me.”Charlotte stepped closer.“Elias… he’s unpredictable.”“No,” Elias said quietly. “He’s consistent. He always moves toward what hurts.”Julian approved the silent departure on one condition.“You carry a live beacon. One word, and we send a team.”Elias nodded.But didn’t promise to use it.The coordinates led to the Argonne Forest—France.Dense trees. Frozen soil. Forgotten war trails and ancient bones. Shade’s surveillance sweeps showed no heat signatures, no comm activity, no traps.Elias to