Lara lay on her back, eyes shut, sheets twisted around her legs like restraints. Despite the fact that Aurelian Village was located in a quieter place, still the city outside her window was a strong presence that never really slept—sirens wailed sowhere in the distance, neon light bleeding through the blinds in restless streaks.
But it wasn’t the noise keeping her awake.
It was a mory.
Last night she’d crashed the second her body hit the mattress, exhaustion dragging her under like a stone in deep water.
Tonight, sleep refused her. The past two days looped in her mind like a glitching video feed.
Yannis’ hypnosis.
The cold precision of his voice. The images he pulled from the dark corners of her mind. He hadn’t planted anything. He’d uncovered it.
She had lived before. She was certain of it now. Not in so vague, spiritual sense—but vividly, violently real. She had walked the marble halls of Azurverda when it was still an empire. She had known power. Known blood. Known betrayal.
She had beco a Kromwel by marriage. The children she bore were Kromwels.
And that was the problem.
Because when she searched history, the Kromwels didn’t exist.
Not in public records. Not in academic archives. Not even in conspiracy threads that usually grabbed onto any scrap of myth and inflated it into legend.
It was as if soone had surgically removed her bloodline from ti itself.
What happened back then? Who erased them?
Lara exhaled sharply and threw the covers aside.
If sleep wouldn’t co, answers would have to.
She flicked on the light. The plush room snapped into clarity—white walls, wooden shelves, the glow of her dual-monitor setup in the corner. Her real sanctuary.
"Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places," she muttered.
She slid into her chair and powered up.
Within seconds, she was beneath the surface of the web—past the polished promises of search engines, past governnt archives, past corporate firewalls—down into the undercurrent where secrets rotted and thrived. Her fingers flew across the keyboard with muscle mory precision.
She tried different keywords:
Ancient Azurverda
Preimperial bloodlines
Kromwel
An article buried deep in an encrypted forum, half-forgotten and barely cited. Short. Cautious. Almost afraid of its own existence. It spoke of rumors—whispers of a royal bloodline called the Kromwels who ruled Azurverda before foreign powers dismantled the empire in the eighteenth century. It hinted at betrayal from within.
The author went by one na: Themis.
Lara leaned closer to the screen, eyes narrowing.
Anonymous, but not invisible.
She began tracing digital footprints—IP masks, ti stamps, linguistic patterns. Whoever Themis was, they were careful. Skilled. But not flawless.
Lara typed different variations of the keyword, but got no result.
She switched identities.
She was Nyx.
Under that na, she was a ghost in the system. A myth in hacker circles. Efficient. Untraceable and dangerous.
She was about to dig deeper into the identity of Themis when a notification flashed across her encrypted dashboard.
A task request.
From Citadel Inc.
Her lips curved faintly.
Weeks ago, she’d cracked their defense system just to prove she could. Instead of pressing charges, they’d offered her freelance contracts—off-the-books jobs that required soone who could think like a criminal and move like one, too.
She opened the file.
Target: The Phantom.
Objective: Identify and track.
Her posture straightened instantly.
The Phantom was more rumor than man—a digital saboteur who breached high-security networks and disappeared without a trace. No confird identity. No pattern. Just chaos.
She skimd the order summary once. Twice.
Then she hit Accept.
The encrypted chat logs poured into her system.
She scanned them rapidly—and then stilled.
"Oh?" she murmured. "An impostor"
Soone had already claid to be The Phantom. The man who saved the Zuvel heiress and her nanny.
Her eyes sharpened, predatory now. Fingers began moving, fast and fluid, like a pianist in the middle of a war song. Code cascaded down her screens. Firewalls folded. Hidden tadata surfaced. For two solid hours, she peeled back layers of lies.
Until—
"There you are." A smirk touched her lips.
She had him. Not the real Phantom.
But the fraud wearing his na, one of the top hackers in the country.
She shut the laptop slowly.
The room fell quiet again, the hum of electronics fading into the background.
She didn’t go back to bed.
Instead, she sat there in the dim light, fingers tapping rhythmically against the desk. Thinking. Calculating.
If the real Phantom didn’t step forward soon, the underground would fill with pretenders. Chaos thrived in power vacuums. Legends had to show themselves—or be replaced.
And Lara knew sothing else with bone-deep certainty.
The Phantom should be made real.
...
Lara eventually returned to bed, but the mattress felt unfamiliar now—too soft, too still. The ceiling above her blurred as a streak of light from the eaves sliced through the blinds, carving shadows across her face.
Sleep hovered close.
But never landed.
Her mind betrayed her again—drifting, not to empires or hackers or bloodlines erased from history...but to Ares,
To the way his voice dropped when he said her na in the restaurant.
To Shay’s study. The charged silence. The way his eyes lingered just a second too long.
Lara exhaled slowly through her nose.
She wasn’t naïve.
She had worn a crown.
Back when she ruled as empress, n twice Ares’ power had tried to claim her. Princes from neighboring kingdoms had traveled across deserts and seas, bearing silk, gold, treaties, and hidden intentions.
So had tried charm—poetry whispered in moonlit gardens, fingers brushing hers "by accident." Others had tried pressure—alliances disguised as proposals, subtle threats woven into diplomacy.
Soft thods. Hard thods.
She had seen them all.
And she had crushed them all.
Because she had loved only one man back then—Alaric. And no one had ever been able to wedge themselves between them.
But Ares...
Ares was different. She could not read him.
He didn’t chase her. He didn’t flatter her. He didn’t corner her.
He was sending mixed signals.
That was what unsettled her.
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