The Vatican dome shimmered in the morning light, framed by the rising sun and cloaked security teams that hadn't slept since the Blackfire breach. Rome was no longer a city of prayers it had become a chessboard for the powerful.
Elias Thorne, now a titan in both wealth and whispered fear, prepared for his next move.
But in this game, the next piece was neither a rook nor a pawn.
It was a dove and a dagger wrapped in silk.
Her name was Cassia Duarte, a peace envoy from the South American Central Alliance.
But no one sent peace envoys to Elias Thorne.
Especially not ones who arrived with hand-written letters sealed in wax and watched every word they said like they were laced with arsenic.
Elias studied her from across the table.
She was calm,Too calm.
"You've come a long way," he said.
She replied with a smile. "Sometimes peace must travel farther than war."
He leaned back.
"And sometimes peace wears a mask."
Meanwhile, Magritte followed a lead in the Roman catacombs.
Something had been haunting the air since Esmé's data breach a name that kept surfacing in whispers, Landon Crick, Dead, Supposedly.
But Magritte found a message etched into an ossuary wall. "He walks again. The knife was never enough."
The next hallway exploded in fire and dust.
She survived, barely. But now she knew, Landon had survived. And someone wanted her quiet.
Cassia met Elias again. This time, in private.
He pressed her.
"What do you want?"
"I want to keep South America from collapsing under your stock manipulations."
"And what do you offer?"
"Myself."
He raised an eyebrow. "Meaning?"
She leaned forward.
"A marriage. Political. Strategic. You get the alliance. I get the peace."
He stared,Then laughed.
"You think I'd marry a dove?"
She didn't blink. "I'm not a dove, Mr. Thorne. I'm the dagger they chose to send with feathers."
Jude was cracking open another layer of Esmé's recovered archive.
He found something odd,
A digital diary.
Written in code, Not by Esmé. Not by Elias.
But by Mr. Dime.The version of Elias before the return. The man who had bled in silence for 25 years, trapped in a borrowed life.
And the last entry was haunting, "I don't know who I am anymore. But if I survive this, I'll make them all remember my name. Even if it's the last thing I do."
During a formal dinner in the Vatican Gardens, an attack was launched.
Gunmen disguised as clergy. Snipers in nearby bell towers.
Explosives beneath the marble tiles.
The target wasn't Elias. It was Cassia.
But why?
Elias grabbed her and rolled under the fountain basin as bullets rained down. Jude and Magritte led a counter-ambush from the shadows.
When the dust cleared, 14 men were dead.
Cassia, shaken, whispered, "They never wanted peace."
Elias looked her in the eyes. "Neither did I."
Later, in a safe house beneath the Colosseum, Elias poured a glass of 1940s scotch.
He offered it to Cassia.
"So," he said, "what's the real game?"
She sipped. "There's a faction in my country that fears what you'll become."
"Too late."
"They think if I can soften you…"
He interrupted. "You can't."
Cassia touched his arm gently. "Maybe I can remind you."
"Of what?"
"That the man inside the mask once had a heart."
He didn't reply.
But he didn't pull away either.
The next day, Cassia vanished. No trace. No signal.
Just a single feather on the windowsill of Elias' suite.
Jude found a note under it, "She's gone to find the fire before it consumes you both."
Elias stood in silence.
Then turned to Esmé.
"Track her. Protect her."
Esmé tilted her head. "Protect the dagger?"
"No," Elias said. "Protect the dove."
Never Dead.
It started with a whisper. A misheard name. A glitch in an intercepted audio stream from a Blackfire satellite relay.
But it wasn't a name Elias expected to hear.
"Landon Crick is not dead."
Jude stormed into Elias' war room, the screens flickering with firewalls, maps, and financial pulses of every city Thorne controlled.
"We have a situation," Jude announced.
"Don't we always?" Elias replied dryly.
Jude threw a decrypted file on the table.
"He's alive."
Elias didn't move.
He didn't blink. Just stared.
Jude clarified. "Landon. He's not a myth. Not a ghost. He's alive, and he's rallying."
Elias finally said, "Then why hasn't he come for me yet?"
Jude answered with certainty. "He doesn't want your empire, Elias."
"Then what does he want?"
"Your ruin."
Magritte had been tracking underground movements in southern France.
She wasn't just chasing rumors now she had a name, a location, and a message scrawled in code on the back of a burned hotel ledger.
"Return the ring. Return the blood."
She decoded it with Esmé's help.
The coordinates led to an abandoned estate outside Marseille.
Inside, hidden beneath floorboards, was a sealed envelope addressed to her real name Magritte Calloway, something no one in the present had ever known.
Inside the envelope?
A photograph of her with Landon… from fifteen years ago.
But Magritte had never met Landon.
Or had she?
Cassia Duarte reappeared in Venezuela.
Disguised, cloaked in silence, surrounded by mercenaries sworn to the resistance.
She met with an old friend, Commander Yara De Cote, who now led the underground factions.
"I failed," Cassia said.
"No," Yara replied. "You made him feel."
"But I let them target me. I exposed myself."
Yara smiled. "And you lived. Which means the game is still on."
Then Yara handed her something wrapped in velvet.
Cassia unwrapped it slowly.
It was a ring,Elias Thorne's father's signet ring.
Cassia's hands trembled. "Where did you get this?"
Yara answered, "From the man who never died."
Elias was alone again in the Hall of Echoes the vault of memories Esmé had created from recovered data.
He walked through the projections like ghosts.
Mr. Dime's past.
The cold corridors of Draxon.
The betrayal.
The silence, Then… a shift.
A sudden flash of memory he never recalled before.
A voice.
A scream, A fire on the ship. Hands dragging him into the water.
Landon's hands. He gasped, He remembered, Landon had saved him.
But also abandoned him.
The betrayal ran deeper than he'd known.
And now it was rising again.
Elias received an encrypted message.
A single line of text, "We buried the past. But it claws through the soil, Elias. Meet me."
Attached was a location: a monastery in Montenegro.
He looked at the text for a long time.
Then deleted it, But Jude saw it.
"You're going," Jude said, Elias replied, "Of course I'm going."
In Montenegro, inside the snow-laced monastery, the door creaked open.
A man stood waiting, Tall. Silver-eyed. Scarred, Landon Crick.
Elias entered alone.
They stared, Thirty years of silence held between their breaths.
"You should've died," Elias whispered.
"You did," Landon replied.
Elias nodded once. Then said, "Why now?"
Landon answered, "Because you became me."
"And you want it back?"
"No," Landon said softly. "I want you to stop."A pause.
"I can't."
Landon's gaze didn't waver. "Then I'll have to become the villain they always thought I was."
The night ended with silence.No gunfire,No threats.
Just a truth, Two men who had lived through fire.
One who built an empire.
One who left it behind, Now, they would both return.
And the world wouldn't survive their war.