Chapter 91
Lara woke with a sharp inhale.
Her sheets were twisted around her legs. Her pulse thudded violently against her ribs. For a second, she didn’t know where she was.
It wasn’t the usual scenes she dreamt about. No throne rooms. No crowns. No blood-soaked battlefields.
This time, the nightmare had been strange. About a baby.
She pressed her fingers to her temple, trying to hold onto it — to force the fragments back into place.
But there was nothing.
The images dissolved like smoke the moment she opened her eyes.
All that remained was a lingering heavy dread.
Her gaze drifted to the wall. To the photograph.
The one-year-old girl smiled back at her, two front teeth showing — frozen in time, bright-eyed, untouched by whatever fate had erased her.
Lara sat up slowly. The room was still washed in the pale gold of early dawn. The mansion was silent.
She picked up her phone.
For a long moment, she just stared at the screen.
She didn’t want to do this. Didn’t want to touch the family’s taboo. Digging into the past never ended cleanly.
But the dream — the blank space where memory should have been — unsettled her more than any nightmare of war.
She unlocked the device.
Her fingers moved with practiced precision.
Within minutes, Lara was gone. Kronos took her place.
She used another identity. Nyx worked on published missions and got paid, while Kronos handled the shady ones, without reward.
The alias slid over her like armor — cold, efficient, detached.
She accessed a hidden browser, encrypted layers stacking one over another. Passwords. Codes. Proxies. Secret servers accessed. False IP trails scatter like breadcrumbs in reverse.
The dark web opened.
She navigated deeper — past illegal marketplaces, past encrypted forums, past forgotten data vaults.
Then she shifted targets. Government archives that were restricted and classified.
She bypassed the first firewall, then the second.
Then the third — a military-grade barrier meant to deter intruders.
Her fingers paused for half a breath.
Then she continued.
Code unfolded on her screen in rapid streams. She slipped through digital corridors like a ghost, leaving no footprint behind.
And then she found it!
2005 Archives.
Her heartbeat slowed. She clicked.
The title surfaced first.
The 2005 Azure Mutiny — Casualty Report
Ten dead. Five women. Two babies. Three security guards.
Her throat tightened.
She scrolled.
One of the babies was listed by name.
Artemio Fuegerra II.
Her fingers froze. Was he Aretmio Fuegerra’s son?
The document detailed the event clinically, detached, factual.
Madeline Norse had attended the second birthday celebration of Chloe Fueguerra’s son, taking the twins, Lucas and Layla, with her.
Location: Azure Private Resort, south of Lanura.
Time: 16:35 hours — approximately when over two hundred armed defectors stormed the premises.
They were the Armed Forces of Azuverda and heavily armed.
They seized control of the resort and broadcast political demands, accusing the government of systemic corruption within the military.
Lara clicked on the images and downloaded the grainy footage.
Then she watched.
She saw the men in fatigues, the smoke, the guests screaming, and the children crying.
Lara’s breath turned shallow.
The report continued.
The Army, Navy, and Marines launched a joint rescue operation.
Hostages were freed. But the crossfire was chaotic.
There was collateral damage.
Among them, the wife and son of Captain Artemio Fueguerra — deceased.
Multiple civilians — deceased.
Injuries reported, including the wife of Major Leonard Norse and her son, Lucas.
Lara swallowed.
Then came the final line.
One-year-old Lara Norse was taken hostage by escaping mutineers.
She scrolled, but there was nothing more except one last statement.
The subject was never recovered. After seven years of no confirmed sightings, she was legally declared deceased.
Declared deceased.
Her phone trembled in her hand.
Seven years.
Seven years before they buried the baby’s name on paper, before they accepted she was gone forever.
Before the corner room on the second floor became a shrine instead of a bedroom.
In those seven years, Leonard Norse never stopped looking but failed to find her.
Her mind reeled. Did Lara Norse really die?
Fragments of the past came to her like the rushing water when the floodgates were opened.
The four-year-old she, asking a man why she didn’t have baby photos like the others.
“Our old house was burned. We could only save you and nothing else p>
She stared again at the baby’s photo on the wall.
After waking from a nightmare, the resemblance in their facial features became even more pronounced.
So, that’s why Madeline had insisted on calling her Lara instead of Larissa.
Was it also the reason why she was allowed in the room, which had remained untouched for years?
And then Leonard Norse sometimes looked at her with something that felt heavier than godfatherly affection.
Her pulse pounded louder now.
Was she chosen because she resembled the dead child?
Or—
Was she the child who never died? Her breath caught at the thought.
No. That was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
The nightmare. The baby. The blank space in her memory.
She re-read the report, absorbing every word as if something hidden between the lines might confess the truth.
No body recovered. Taken hostage. Never found. Declared dead.
Not confirmed dead.
Declared, a legal conclusion, not a forensic one.
Lara’s reflection stared back at her from the dark screen — pale, shaken, eyes burning with questions she had never dared to ask.
If the Norse daughter died p>
Why did she feel like she was standing in her own abandoned room?
And why did the past feel less like history p>
And more like a memory trying to claw its way back?
Kronos moved again.
She wiped the session cache, rerouted her proxy trail, corrupted the access logs she had slipped through, and planted a harmless decoy breach in a separate server cluster at the other side of the globe, thousands of miles away from the Norse mansion.
Within seconds, every digital footprint she had left dissolved into nothing.
By the time she logged off, it was as if she had never existed there at all.
The room returned to silence.
Only the faint hum of the air conditioning and the distant rustle of trees outside her window reminded her she was still in the present.
She leaned back slowly against the headboard thinking —