Romans & histoires Fail-safe Novel

(Isabella’s POV) The safe house was a tomb, filled with the ghosts of a life that wasn't mine. Dust sheets covered the heavy, ornate furniture, and the air was thick with the stale, stagnant scent of time. The brutal, adrenaline fueled escape from Bianchi’s gala felt a world away, but the true horror of the night was just beginning to settle in my bones, a cold, creeping dread that no locked door could keep out.

BENEATH THE FACADE Behind the façade of wealth and power, a web of secrets awaits. CHAPTER 82 Emily’s POV: The gate creaked open. My fingers gripped the steering wheel harder than they needed to, my palms damp, knuckles pale. We were finally home, and yet my heart hadn’t stopped pounding since we left the safe house. Every bump on the road had felt like it might shatter this fragile moment, like something might still go wrong before we reached the front door.

“It’s more than that. I just received a flagged sequence in one of the Obsidian archives we recovered. Buried deep in Rafael’s code.” “What kind of sequence?” Lena asked. Faiza hesitated. “A name.” She uploaded a partial key. F1RE-S03R3LL “Fire Sorell?” Carson asked. Ruth narrowed her eyes. “Calix Sorell.” Lena stared at the screen. “Rafael encoded Calix’s name into the doctrine?” “No,” Faiza corrected. “Into the failsafe.” The failsafe was something Lena had only heard Rafael reference once. A last resort. A way to erase all Echo systems permanently, if they were ever weaponized.

My name is Jennie Dawson. I was just an ordinary college girl whose biggest achievement was pulling all-nighters to read smut novels. Then one night I dropped dead at my desk… and woke up inside the very book I was reading, as a pretty background character who happened to share my name. The heroine, Nancy Porter, was a transmigrator with a system. Her mission was to seduce my brother and turn him into her devoted plaything, living a life of indulgence with her day and night until she could finally return to her world.

Marcus slowly turned toward the projection. “Archived… you.” The recording ended. The projection’s eyes locked onto mine. “You built the failsafe,” it said calmly. “I don’t remember building you.” “You didn’t.” The citywide beam flickered. Stabilized. The object beneath the dock shifted again. Panels opening slightly. Internal light visible. Ariana’s voice cut through the tension. “This isn’t the system evolving.” “No,” Eli said quietly. “It’s the failsafe activating.” I felt it click.

NOTE: Entrapped By The Devil is Book 2 in "THE PERAZZO" series. It can be read as standalone but will have spoilers from Book 1 (KIDNAPPED BY THE MAFIA). * * * [25 YEARS AGO] . . . “Spare us, please! We didn’t do anything. Quel ragazzo mente! Mente tra i denti. We didn’t do anything. Let us go, please, sir, andiamo a casa!”

God, she was beautiful like that—eyes hard and flashing with rage, curls in disarray about her face, that impossible fusion of softness and storm that had always undone me. We arrived at the safe house before dark. There was a secluded cabin hidden in the Blue Ridge, one of several exit plans that I'd hidden away over the years. It smelled of cedar and old stories. She approached the fireplace, her shaking contrasting with the heat of the summer. Without making a noise, I lit it. Sparks came to life. "I saw something," she whispered after a long pause. I looked up. "In the code," she answered. "Before ATHENA went dark, a failsafe. Inside the failsafe."

Chapter 18 The city lay before them, infinite and unforgiving. Shadows stretched long under trembling streetlights, the air thick with the distant scent of rain and gasoline. Lena and Noah ran. Steps rang out behind them—closer than she would have liked. Damien wouldn't give up. He was a ghost from her past, resurrected just when she'd begun to believe she was finally free. She was breathing fast, her heart racing in her chest. "We need cover."

Alex shouted, firing a shot that sent an operative crumpling to the floor. “They don’t need to,” Lena replied grimly. “They just have to keep us here until the detonation.” “Then we need to make this quick!” Reese yelled, reloading her weapon. --- Maya’s Breakthrough Maya’s green eyes locked onto a flashing icon on the console’s screen. The word “FAILSAFE” glowed in ominous red letters. “I found it!” she exclaimed, her heart racing. “Do it!” Zane barked, his voice laced with urgency.

But the question remains, how long can this balance be maintained? Imagine what would happen if there occurs an incident that could shock the whole world to its fragile core. Sometimes it came in the form of a terrorist attack, and sometimes in the form of more primitive human malice, scavenging on society's dark past and reforming it again and again. All of these incidents were pointing in a single direction, that a new dawn was on its way.