"I know what it gives you." Vivian's amber eyes held his without flinching. "If I'm going to ask you to open your mind to me, then I'll put my life in your hands first. Fair exchange. You trust me with your memories. I trust you with my existence."Riley stepped forward from the table. "Vivian, you can't be serious. He could kill you with one tap.""Then he'd better not tap." Vivian looked at Kyle with those cold, steady amber eyes. "Accept it. Or admit you don't trust me either."Kyle looked at the notification. His thumb hovered over the accept button. Every survival instinct he had was screaming that this was a trap, a test, a manipulation. But the woman standing in front of him, soaking wet, trembling slightly from cold she would never acknowledge, had just handed him a weapon that could end her life, and done it in front of witnesses.He pressed accept.The terminal confirmed the transfer with a quiet chime. Vivian's shoulders loosened by a fraction that nobody would have noticed

"Blake Sterling." Kyle stood up from the chair so fast it scraped backward across the floor. "He did this. He controlled me. He walked me out of this house like a remote controlled toy, took me to the black market, used my hands to complete the trade that set up Vivian's sale, and brought me back before any of you noticed I was gone.""That's a very large accusation." Vivian's amber eyes burned from across the room, her wet clothes still dripping on the floor. "You're telling me the golden boy next door, the kind, gentle, basket carrying saint of the settlement, mind controlled you into selling me to an underground fighting ring?""He's not a saint!" Kyle's voice cracked louder. "He has a hidden room in his house. A locked office behind a door with no handle. A terminal running on a network that doesn't connect to anything in the settlement. I saw it in the memories, Hailey. Not my memories. The ghost layer underneath. The real memories that whoever controlled me tried to bury.""What

Kyle stood over the dark shaft in the storage room floor, the cold air rising against his face, and a thought hit him so hard his knees almost buckled.If Blake had tampered with one memory, there could be others. Dozens. Months worth. An entire history rewritten inside his skull without leaving a single fingerprint."Hailey." Kyle turned to her, his voice sharp. "When you scanned my memories just now, how far back did the tampering go?"Hailey's brown eyes tightened. Her hands were still faintly glowing from the trance session. "I only scanned seven days back. That's what Vivian asked for.""But could it go further?" Kyle stepped toward her. "Could someone have been altering my memories for weeks? Months?""Theoretically, yes." Hailey folded her hands together, her quiet voice carrying the weight of someone choosing every word carefully. "Mind manipulation on this level requires repeated physical contact with the subject. Regular sessions. If Blake had access to you frequently over a

Kyle crossed the hallway in three strides and threw open her door."What are you doing?" Vivian's voice hit him from behind, sharp and furious. She had followed him up the stairs, still dripping, still seething."I need to check your shelves." Kyle was already inside, scanning the small bookcase against the wall. "The old Kyle hid something in this house. Something physical. He would have put it somewhere Blake would never search, and Blake would never search the room of the woman he helped sell to the black market.""You are not going through my things!" Vivian grabbed for his arm, but Kyle ducked sideways and reached the bookcase first.His eyes swept the titles. Romance novels. Academic texts on beast biology. A botanical encyclopedia. Cultivation manuals. Nothing unusual. Nothing out of place. Nothing that a five star black serpent wouldn't naturally own.Then his gaze dropped to the bottom shelf. Shoved behind the academic texts, spine out, hidden from casual view by the larger b

Everything he had believed since the moment the system dropped him into this body was a lie. The cruel husband. The jealous villain. The man who beat his wives and sold Vivian and locked them outside in zombie territory. All of it could have been Blake, operating the original Kyle like a machine, building a monster out of a man who was screaming inside his own skull the entire time."He was innocent." Kyle's voice came out broken and hollow. "The original Kyle. He might have been innocent this whole time. Blake built the villain. Blake painted the picture. And every single person in this settlement, including the five of you, believed it because the performance was perfect."The paper fell from his fingers. His hands dropped to his knees. His shoulders started to shake, not from cold, not from fear, from something deeper and darker than either. The kind of despair that comes from realizing you are standing on a stage someone else built, reading lines someone else wrote, inside a life