2025-04-23 22:38:32Gregory didn’t move.
The attic light buzzed faintly overhead, casting long, crooked shadows across the room. Marcus stood in the doorway, one hand behind his back, his mouth curled into a smirk that didn’t reach his eyes.
“What do you want?” Gregory asked, voice tight.
Marcus stepped forward slowly. “You’ve been busy.”
Gregory shifted slightly, keeping the envelope and burner phone hidden under the thin mattress. “If you’re here to threaten me, save it. I’ve had a long night.”
“Oh, I don’t need to threaten you.” Marcus pulled his hand from behind his back and revealed… a thick, folded folder.
He tossed it on the floor in front of Gregory.
“Recognize this?”
Gregory stared at it, not moving.
“I saw you in Dad’s office,” Marcus said casually, pacing. “You’re not as sneaky as you think. I was watching from the camera in the hallway. The one above the bookshelf.”
Gregory’s stomach turned. They'd been watching him even then.
“So what?” he replied. “You all knew I was more than a housekeeper.”
Marcus crouched down, eyes level with Gregory’s. “Yeah. We knew. But now you know too. That’s the problem.”
Gregory remained silent.
“You think Caldwell will just embrace you with open arms?” Marcus sneered. “You think a dying billionaire wants to hand his empire over to a glorified janitor who grew up in a roach-infested attic?”
“Truth doesn’t care where I grew up,” Gregory said.
Marcus smiled wider. “Maybe. But money does. Power does. Perception does.”
He stood up and stepped toward the door. “We were willing to let the DNA test play out. But now that you’re digging, meeting people in docks like some low-budget spy…”
Gregory stiffened.
So they had followed him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Marcus chuckled. “Don’t insult me. We saw you with Jalen.”
Gregory’s mind raced. If they knew Jalen helped me…
“Is he alive?” Gregory asked slowly.
Marcus gave a small shrug. “Hard to say. People disappear all the time.”
That hit like a gut punch.
Gregory clenched his fists under the mattress. He couldn't react. Not yet.
Marcus looked around the attic with a mixture of disgust and amusement. “You know what the best part is? If you disappear, no one will care. You’re not in any system. No friends. No family. No one to miss you.”
He turned to leave. “You’ve got two choices, Gregory. Back off. Stay quiet. Live out your days polishing silverware.”
He paused at the door.
“Or push this—and disappear like your friend.”
Then he was gone.
The door shut with a click.
And Gregory was left in silence.
The next morning was unbearable.
The Rosewell family acted like nothing had happened. Mr. Rosewell read the paper at breakfast. The daughters laughed in the parlor. Seth and Marcus lounged by the pool.
But every glance Gregory received was a silent threat.
Every smile—fake.
Every silence—dangerous.
Only Samuel seemed genuinely worried. He pulled Gregory aside near the garden after lunch.
“You look like you haven’t slept.”
Gregory didn’t lie. “I haven’t.”
Samuel looked around. “They’re up to something. Marcus has been in and out of Dad’s office all morning. I heard him mention a name—‘Jalen’—to one of his friends.”
Gregory nodded slowly. “I think they hurt him.”
Samuel swallowed. “You need to get out of here.”
“I can’t. Not yet. I have a chance to meet Caldwell. But I have to wait until tomorrow night. There’s a window—once it closes, it’s over.”
Samuel hesitated. “Then let me help you.”
Gregory blinked. “Why?”
Samuel looked away. “Because this family is poison. And you… you’ve always been decent to me. Even when the rest of them treated you like dirt.”
Gregory placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll need a distraction tomorrow night. Something to pull eyes off me.”
Samuel gave a small nod. “Consider it done.”
That night, Gregory didn’t sleep again.
He lay fully clothed, alert, ready. Every creak of the house made his pulse spike. Every footstep made him reach for the burner phone.
Then—a buzz.
A message.
Unknown Number:
They’re going to move on you before the window opens. Get out now. Trust no one.Gregory sat up fast.
He grabbed the file, burner phone, and slipped on his shoes.
He crept down the hallway, but halfway down the stairs—
Voices.
Below, in the living room.
“…tonight,” Seth was saying. “He’s got something. Marcus said he’s hiding files. If he gets out, we’re finished.”
Mr. Rosewell’s voice was low and deadly. “Then don’t let him leave.”
Gregory turned and bolted—up the stairs, through the servant’s corridor, out the side window onto the trellis, sliding down into the backyard.
He landed hard, rolled to his feet—and froze.
A black SUV sat parked in the alley behind the house.
Engine running.
Driver in the shadows.
As Gregory backed up slowly—
The car doors opened.
Two men stepped out.
Not security.
Not police.
Professionals.
The kind you didn’t run from—you didn’t survive from.
Gregory’s heart pounded.
He turned and ran, vanishing into the maze of neighboring backyards, one thought echoing in his mind:
They’re not going to wait until tomorrow.
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CHAPTER 315: THE RAVEN LEGION
The first shell slammed into the outer wall with a violence that turned concrete into dust. The second shook the entire underground level, ripping cables from the ceiling and flinging them like angry snakes.Emergency lights burst. Fire alarms shrieked. The facility, already wounded, began to die around them.Amelia stumbled but stayed on her feet, gripping her weapon. “Those aren’t standard rounds,” she shouted over the chaos. “They’re testing structural weaknesses!”“They’re not trying to destroy the facility,” Gregory said, eyes focused, mind racing. “They’re trying to flush us out.”Host Zero stood in the center of the room, perfectly calm while the world collapsed around him. “You see them as enemies,” he told Gregory. “That amuses me. They see me as salvation.”“Delusional cult thinks the same about every false god,” Gregory shot back.Outside, engines roared in layers. Heavy transport carriers. Armored vans. Drones splitting the air like mechanical hornets.“The Raven Legion,”
CHAPTER 314: THE DARK FACILITY
Darkness swallowed the chamber in one savage gulp. For half a second, the world no longer existed, no walls, no floor, no enemies, no allies, only a vacuum of black, punctuated by the shriek of emergency sirens choking themselves to death.Then Gregory felt the cold concrete beneath him, the copper taste of blood on his tongue, the dull ache radiating through his ribs. And the sound. Breathing. Not his. Not Amelia’s.Something else. Slow. Even. Unafraid. Host Zero was still standing. He didn’t need light. He already knew where everything was.“Stay still,” Blake’s voice crackled in his ear. “Thermal imaging’s all over the place. He’s moving like he doesn’t care if we see him.”“He doesn’t,” Gregory muttered, pushing himself upright. “He wants us to know he’s here.”A low chuckle echoed through the dark. “You always understood me better than the others,” Host Zero said pleasantly. “Even as a child, your threat assessments were beyond your age. You saw weaknesses before anyone else.”“T
CHAPTER 312: THE HUNT FOR HOST ZERO
The jet tore through the night sky like a blade through cloth, its engines humming under Gregory’s feet. Below him, Eastern Europe stretched out in darkness, cities flickering like signs of life on a dying circuit board.Gregory stood in the cabin, headset on, eyes fixed on the two split-screen feeds in front of him.Blake’s bodycam showed a decaying industrial compound. Snow drifted across rusted metal gates. His strike team moved in tight formation, weapons raised, breath fogging the air.Amelia and Crane navigated a labyrinth of sandstone corridors beneath an old research annex. Sweat glistened on Amelia’s brow despite the low light. Crane’s portable scanner pulsed in his hand.Two locations. One real. One a trap. And every instinct in Gregory’s bones told him they were already walking into his father’s game. “Status,” Gregory said, steady and clipped.Blake’s voice crackled through the left feed. “Compound is quiet. Too quiet. Motion sensors haven’t triggered once. I don’t like it
CHAPTER 311: RESURRECTION PROTOCOL
The jet-black clouds over Prague hadn’t lifted by the time Gregory, Amelia, and Blake touched down in Berlin. Crane’s secure-lab bunker sat beneath a decommissioned intelligence outpost, one of the few places left where Gregory trusted the walls not to listen.The moment they entered the operations bay, Crane shoved a tablet into Gregory’s hands. His face looked like it had aged ten years in a night. “You need to see this,” Crane said. “Now.”Gregory scanned the screen, and froze. A biometric profile glowed in red. Vitals. Neural rhythms. Cognitive mapping signatures. All linked to a single ID tag: CALDWELL_GEN_01.Amelia covered her mouth. “That’s the same algorithm signature embedded in your scans.”Blake’s brow furrowed. “But that shouldn’t be possible. The vault is gone. The mainframe’s fried. How the hell do we still have activity?”Crane swallowed hard. “Because it’s not in the mainframe anymore.”He tapped another window. A live feed appeared. A man strapped to a medical gurney
CHAPTER 310: THE GHOST MARKET
The technician who opened the courier envelope never saw the sunrise. By dawn, the small East London warehouse was nothing but twisted metal and ash.When news reached Caldwell Tower, Gregory was already at his desk. He didn’t flinch when Blake slammed the report down. “Another leak,” Blake said. “Same pattern as before. The drive you locked up, a copy somehow got out.”Gregory’s jaw tightened. “It didn’t ‘get out.’ Someone took it.”Amelia stood by the window, arms folded. “Then we’re not just fighting your father’s ghost anymore. Someone out there thinks they can profit off it.”Gregory turned to Crane’s live feed on the screen. The intelligence director’s face was pale, even through static.“The chatter’s real. The black-market networks are calling it Project ECHO. They think it’s a full digital clone of Richard Caldwell’s mind.”Gregory’s voice was flat. “They’re wrong.”Crane hesitated. “Are they? Because governments, cartels, and defense contractors are already bidding for it li
CHAPTER 309: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE MACHINE
The rain came down hard over London, hammering the mirrored walls of Caldwell Tower. From his office, Gregory watched the storm swallow the skyline, a storm that felt like a reflection of his own mind.The voice inside him had gone quiet since last night. Too quiet. That silence was worse than the noise. Blake burst through the door, soaked and furious. “You need to see this.”He threw a tablet onto the desk. On the screen: simultaneous security alerts from half a dozen global agencies, missile silos on standby, satellites shifting orbit, banking systems freezing without command.Amelia followed, breathless. “They all trace back here, Gregory. Every route leads to the Caldwell mainframe.”Gregory frowned. “That’s impossible. I locked those systems down myself.”Blake shook his head. “No, you opened them. Look at the timestamps. They match your login.”Gregory stared at the data. The logs were genuine, his credentials, his encryption key, his biometric signature. “I didn’t do this.”Am
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