Chapter 151Amelia Reyes moved silently through the narrow passage behind the east wing wall, her fingers brushing against the cold stone. The faint humming of the mansion’s security nodes reached her ears—too rhythmic, too stable.Her breath caught. Something’s changed.She crouched beside a grated panel that overlooked one of the inner halls near the server vault. Her eyes narrowed as she spotted an unfamiliar shimmer of blue—an indicator light on the newly reinstalled sensor grid. That light hadn’t been there before. Not when she checked two nights ago.Her heartbeat quickened.Amelia pressed a device to her earpiece and filtered into the encrypted feed she'd been tapping. Silence.Static.Then—a flicker.A soft tone pinged in her ear: “Breach Detected: Network Sweep Active.”Her blood turned cold.No...They were scanning. Tracing hidden signals. Something must’ve triggered it—maybe Zia, or worse, Harper’s team finally triangulated one of her encrypted relays.She stumbled backwar

The safe house remained cloaked in eerie quiet, save for the constant hum of surveillance equipment and the muffled footsteps of rotating security personnel. In a back room heavily fortified and dimly lit, Harper sat across from Bryden, a monitor glowing between them with shifting schematics—maps, bunker layouts, and encrypted diagrams all fed from Romanov’s intelligence banks and Zain’s tapped channels.Bryden looked worn. Though no longer in handcuffs, the weight of betrayal and abandonment etched deep lines across his youthful face. His eyes flickered from the monitor to Harper.“He’ll activate the Black Protocol,” he said, voice taut. “If he feels even the slightest tremor of collapse, Zain will wipe every asset tied to him—Stavos, the financial shell corps, server backups, even loyalists. He’ll turn the entire board to ash if it means no one walks away with anything.”Harper leaned forward. “We figured he might, but tell me how. What triggers it?”“There’s a kill-switch, metaphor

The hum beneath the Romanov estate turned into a distant vibration—low, menacing, rhythmic. At first, it was barely noticeable. But as the seconds ticked by, it intensified, causing the reinforced lights in the eastern control corridor to flicker once… twice… then stabilize in a dim red glow.Silvana’s hand froze over the keyboard. Her breath caught.“Harper, what is Crimson?” Aiden demanded, stepping forward, eyes darting toward the live monitor where the alert still blinked:“PROTOCOL CRIMSON: INITIATED”Harper’s voice was terse over comms.Crimson isn’t a purge—it’s sabotage. It’s Zain’s fallback protocol meant to collapse physical infrastructure connected to compromised data lines. If he believes a facility is lost, he triggers Crimson to destabilize and erase it—physically.Silvana’s pupils dilated.Are you telling me he just set off a failsafe beneath our feet?A beat. “Yes.”Deep in the substructure of the Romanov estate, old ventilation shafts began to groan. Behind sealed se

The night air in Zain’s fallback bunker was sharp and metallic. Beneath the earth’s crust, where light didn’t reach and the walls felt like a tomb, the last fragments of his empire tried to hold form. Zain stood in front of the flickering holographic table, jaw locked, eyes scanning the tactical reports that streamed in from the activated Protocol Shadow units. Lines of red blips blinked and vanished. One by one. Base after base. Node after node. Failure. Again. “Shadow team Delta gone silent. No trace.” “Echo unit terminated on insertion. Mansion defenses were already primed, like they knew” Zain didn’t wait for the last operator’s full sentence. He slammed his fist into the control panel, and sparks shot out with a hiss. The holo-map glitched and dimmed. “They knew, damn it! They were waiting.” Harper. Silvana. Aiden. Somehow, they were always one step ahead. The Cold Units from Helsinki had been expected to sweep through Romanov’s last strongholds, cutting thro

The smoke curled through the halls of St. Aurelia’s like a serpent acrid, choking, and stinging the eyes. Alarms blared. Emergency sprinklers sprayed in vain, mixing ash and water into thick trails running down the marble floors. The students were being escorted out in a chaotic tide of panic and confusion, but Aiden Romanov moved with singular purpose.Silvana was in his arms, her face pale, her hands gripping tightly to her lower abdomen.“I’m fine,” she murmured.“You’re bleeding,” Aiden said, his voice raw, the weight of the moment threatening to crush him. “We’re not taking any chances. Not with you. Not with the baby.”Zia ran beside them, coughing, frightened but composed. “Is Mom… going to be okay?”“She will be,” Aiden promised, but his eyes betrayed fear.Outside, Harper’s armored vehicle screeched to a halt at the curb. Bryden, bruised and limping from his earlier override at the comm tower, helped usher them in.“Was that really a second wave?” Aiden asked as they secured