All Chapters of VELVET BLOOD OATH: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Elara Vale had learned to feel eyes before she ever saw them. It started as a quiet pressure in her chest — the sense that the air behind her had weight. She would stop walking, pretending to check her phone, and the feeling would fade. When she moved again, it returned. She told herself it was imagination. People were always watching in this city. Cameras. Windows. Strangers. But this was different. This felt intentional. In the morning everything began, Elara left her apartment at exactly 6:40 a.m., just like every weekday. Same grey hoodie. Same worn shoes. Same bus stop. She did not notice the black car. But the black car noticed her. It waited across the street, engine low, windows dark. Inside, a man with silver rings on his fingers spoke into a quiet device. “She’s on the move.” Another voice answered, calm and controlled. “Do nothing. Just follow.” Elara stood at the bus stop, arms folded against the cold. She watched the city wake around her — shutters l

Elara learned quickly that time inside the house did not behave the way it did outside. There were clocks, but they were decorative. There were windows, but most of them did not open. There were schedules, but no one told her what day it was. The first rule of the house was simple: Nothing is explained unless it must be. Nyra became her guide—not a guard, not a friend, something in between. “You can walk in these halls,” Nyra said one morning, handing Elara a folded map of the lower floors. “Not the east wing. Not the underground levels. Not the tower.” “That’s most of the house.” “Yes.” Elara traced the lines on the map. “Why keep me if you’re afraid of me?” Nyra shook her head. “They’re not afraid of you. They’re afraid of what happens if you leave.” That was worse. Elara began walking every day. She learned the rhythm of footsteps, the sound of distant doors, the way the house breathed—yes, breathed—through vents and hidden halls. Some servants avoided her. Some stared

Alarms echoed like a heartbeat that had lost its rhythm.Elara ran through halls that no longer felt like a maze but a memory—every turn she had walked before now guiding her away from both cages and promises. Voices clashed somewhere below. Doors slammed. Orders were shouted, controlled but urgent.She didn’t know where she was going.She only knew she wasn’t going back.A hand caught her wrist.She spun, breath sharp.Cassian.“Don’t,” she warned.“I’m not stopping you,” he said. “I’m keeping you alive.”They moved together, not as allies, not as enemies—just two people tied to the same disaster.“Nyx is inside the grounds,” Cassian said as they descended a side stair. “This wasn’t a full invasion. It’s a test.”“A test of what?”“Of how tightly we hold you.”Elara yanked her hand free. “I’m not a rope.”“No,” he said. “You’re the knot.”They reached a long corridor that ended in a steel door. Cassian pressed his palm to a hidden scanner. It opened with a quiet hiss.Inside was a na

The city did not fall.It trembled.Not with explosions or fire, but with rumors that moved faster than fear. Screens in cafés flickered with half-erased headlines. Radios whispered names that had not been spoken aloud in years. People who had never cared about syndicates suddenly cared very much.Questions are contagious.Elara felt it in the air—like the city was waking from a long, uneasy sleep.She and Cassian stayed hidden in the old library while Nyra moved between safe places, listening.“People are arguing in public,” Nyra said, breathless. “Not shouting—thinking. That’s worse for people like Silas and Nyx.”Cassian nodded. “Empires survive noise. They die from doubt.”Elara looked at her mother’s pendant in her palm. “I didn’t want this to be about destruction.”Cassian met her eyes. “It’s about direction. Destruction only happens when people refuse to change.”They couldn’t stay hidden forever.That night, they moved.Nyra led them into the undercity—a network of tunnels and

Elara had learned something crucial: control could be more dangerous than bullets.She had faced men who killed for a word, fathers who ruled empires with silence, syndicates that thought loyalty could be bought with fear. But the quiet, the subtle manipulation of the mind, that was something different. That was a prison without walls.And Nyx Calder was a master of it.Three days after their encounter on the bridge, Elara found herself in a small, abandoned building on the edge of the city. Cassian had insisted on bringing her here—a safe place to rest, to think, to breathe without cameras, watchers, or alarms.The walls were bare, the air smelled faintly of mildew and dust, but it felt… free. At least, as free as a city still reeling from the revelation of truth could feel.Elara sat on a cracked wooden chair, her fingers tracing the edge of Seraphine’s journal. She didn’t open it. She didn’t need to. The pages had already taught her what she had to know: history repeated itself whe