The wind screamed as the jet carved its way over the jagged spine of the Andes. Below, the mountains stretched like broken teeth, capped in white, ancient and merciless. Ethan sat rigid in his seat, jaw locked, eyes hollow with fury. He didn’t look at the snow. He saw graves. Mendoza wasn’t just another city on the map. It was a burial ground waiting to be filled, and tonight he intended to decide who went under.Beside him, Wren methodically checked her weapons, the clicks and snaps of her gear strangely steadying in the turbulence. Camille’s voice carried low over an encrypted satellite line, her French accent sharp as a blade as she spoke with their South American contact. Across from Ethan, Cain sat in silence, his expression unreadable, as though preparing himself for a funeral he had long known might be his own.“When we land,” Ethan said finally, breaking the drone of the engines, “we split into three teams. Cain and I go into the vault. Wren and Camille, you secure the perimet

The vault shook with violence. Dust rained from the ceiling as another detonation rocked the stairwell. The screams of mercenaries, the bursts of automatic fire, the ricochet of bullets against stone—chaos churned above, and it was only seconds away from spilling into the chamber below. Ethan’s ribs still burned from Helena’s shot, his blood soaking through his shirt, but the real fire was in his palm. The Crown Cipher pulsed like molten iron etched into his flesh, every beat of his heart amplifying its glow. It whispered to him. Not in words but in impressions—threads of information, shadows of secrets buried for decades. Wren’s voice crackled in his ear, tight with pain. “Ethan… they’ve broken through the east flank. Camille and I can’t hold them much longer!” “Fall back to the secondary tunnel!” Ethan snapped, his own voice sharper than he realized. “Seal it if you have to.” Cain staggered against the obsidian wall, blood dripping from his hand where he had opened the throne

The opera house lay in ruins. Dust hung thick in the air, broken marble and splintered velvet scattered across the floor like relics of a fallen kingdom.Ethan staggered upright, his palm blistered, the sigil glowing faintly through torn skin. The shard was gone. His heart raced, mind still reeling from visions of fire and crowns, of his mother screaming as masked figures dragged her into darkness.And Helena—She was gone too.Only her voice lingered in his skull. You wear the crown, Ethan. But I carry the key. And now, neither of us can escape the other.---Cain burst through the collapsed doorway, rifle raised. Camille and Wren flanked him, both bloodied from the firefight outside.“Ethan!” Wren rushed forward, dropping to her knees at his side. Her hand brushed his chest, her eyes fierce with worry. “What the hell happened in here?”Ethan couldn’t answer. His throat was raw, his mind a storm. The Cipher still burned, but beneath it, he felt something new—like a second pulse, out

Ethan’s eyelids flickered open, the fluorescent haze of the ruined club assaulting his senses. His hand ached where the Crown Cipher sigil burned across his palm, veins of light pulsing like molten wire. The black drive still trembled in his grasp, tethered to Helena’s whispers and the shard she had planted within him.He sat up, trying to clear his head, but every thought was invaded by echoes: fragments of his mother’s laughter, her screams, Helena’s taunting voice, and Cain’s cryptic warnings. Each memory felt as if it were bleeding into the next, unrelenting, uncontainable.Wren knelt beside him, her rifle still raised. “Ethan, focus. Breathe. You’re… you’re still here.”He clenched his jaw, staring at the sigil. The Crown Cipher flared violently, searing pain shooting through his nerves. “She’s in my mind,” he said, voice low and ragged. “Every memory, every thought… she’s inside me.”Wren placed a hand on his shoulder. “Then we fight her there. That’s what the Nine taught us—con

The sun had barely risen over Vienna when Ethan slipped out of the safehouse. The city was quiet, deceptively serene, its cobblestone streets slick from an early morning drizzle. He moved with purpose, the ledger clutched in one hand, the sigil on his other hand pulsing faintly under his skin like a heartbeat.Wren followed a few paces behind, her eyes scanning every alleyway and rooftop. “We can’t underestimate her,” she said, voice low. “She’s not just Helena Cross. She’s the ghost of the Vault. Every step she takes, she leaves a trap. You’ve seen what she can do with the shard inside you.”Ethan didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. He could feel the Crown Cipher reacting, a tether to every piece of Vault data they had recovered. Helena had spread her influence across Europe like a network of venomous spiders—careful, precise, deadly. But she had also left trails, subtle patterns that only someone trained in the Nine’s cryptography could decipher.Camille was already in Paris, tracing