ASHES DON’T LIEThe night stretched endless, a black expanse stitched with the faint shimmer of dying stars. Adrian drove without direction for hours, his headlights cutting through the mist-slicked highway like thin blades of light. Every mile carried him farther from the city — from the boardrooms, the headlines, the ruin he had set in motion. Yet no matter how far he went, the ghosts followed.By the time he reached the outskirts, dawn was only a smear of gray on the horizon. The place waited for him at the end of a narrow dirt road — the house that once belonged to his father. Or what was left of it.The fire years ago had taken everything. The structure still stood, but only barely — a skeleton of charred beams and fractured walls. Moss had begun to creep over the ruins, softening the memory of violence with time’s quiet patience. The air smelled of wet earth and decay.He stepped out of the car and stood in the silence, the cold wind wrapping around him like a warning. His breath

WHAT REMAINS BETWEEN USMorning came slow, gray, and heavy with the kind of stillness that made the air itself feel fragile. The city outside Elena’s window began to stir — faint horns, the low hum of the waking streets — but inside her apartment, time seemed reluctant to move forward.Elena stood by the counter, her hands wrapped around a mug of untouched coffee. Steam curled upward, soft and ghostlike, then vanished into nothing. Adrian was sitting at the table behind her, his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed somewhere distant — maybe on her reflection in the glass, maybe on his own regret.Neither had spoken since the night before. They’d said enough to change everything, yet too little to know what would come next.Elena finally turned, her voice barely above a whisper. “Do you ever think about how it could’ve been?”He looked up, startled by the softness of her tone. “How what could’ve been?”“Us.” The word fell between them like something sacred and broken all at once. “If we

THE GHOST IN THE SYSTEMThe storm hadn’t stopped. It clawed at the city with restless fingers, the wind shrieking against the penthouse windows as if the sky itself wanted in. Adrian sat at the edge of the desk, the dim lamplight carving lines of exhaustion across his face. His hands were steady, but his eyes—they betrayed him. They carried the weight of betrayal, blood, and questions that refused to die.Elena stood a few feet away, arms folded tightly around herself, her clothes still damp from the chaos. She watched him in silence as he connected the black drive Dominic had given him to his encrypted terminal. The screen came alive with static, then symbols—lines of code she didn’t understand, but which made Adrian’s expression tighten.“What is it?” she whispered.He didn’t answer immediately. His fingers moved swiftly over the keyboard, breaking through firewalls and security layers that should’ve been impossible to bypass. Every click echoed like a countdown.Finally, the screen

THE TWIN WARThe lab smelled of metal and ozone and the strange, antiseptic perfume of ideas gone violent. It was the kind of place that felt clean to the point of cruelty, as if someone had scrubbed the human from the room and left only the instruments. Adrian moved through it like a man who had once owned entire empires and now watched his hands tremble while they touched the edges of things he had not meant to be.Dominic stood across from him beneath the harsh fluorescence, water still beading on his coat, hair plastered dark to his forehead. There was a wound beneath his left eye that smeared the skin with an angry color; a cut at his lip showed he was not invulnerable, but the arc of that smile — the private, knowing crescent he reserved for the moments when everything tilted in his favor — had not been washed away by rain or bruises.Clara watched from a bank of monitors, folded arms and the look of a scientist who has watched her children be born and then turned into machines.

THE LAST CONFESSIONThe world felt quieter now.Not peaceful just quieter, like something enormous had fallen and the echoes hadn’t quite faded. The Directorate was fractured. Files had leaked to the press, frozen accounts had triggered investigations across three continents, and suddenly everyone who had once been untouchable was scrambling to erase footprints that could no longer be erased.But inside the Ministry’s upper floor—what was left of it—Adrian stood in the pale light of morning, a man still learning what it meant to live after war.He hadn’t spoken much since the night of the blackout. The blood on his hands—both literal and otherwise—was still fresh in his mind. His twin, his clone, his shadow… whatever that version of him had been, it wasn’t just an experiment gone wrong. It was a reflection of who he might’ve become if mercy had never entered his heart.And now that reflection was gone.Elena entered quietly, carrying two mugs of coffee, the kind that still steamed and