Beneath the Billionaire Mask - Chapter 86: Chapter 86
You are reading Beneath the Billionaire Mask, Chapter 86: Chapter 86. Read more chapters of Beneath the Billionaire Mask.
Undisclosed Location – 9:17 PM
The corridor pulsed with sterile light—too clean, too quiet. Elena’s boots echoed against the polished floor as she stepped into the room they called The Mirror.
It was a chamber buried in the belly of a decommissioned intelligence bunker. Julia had only heard whispers about it—an experimental psych-space designed by Cruz Sr. himself. A place where memory, identity, and manipulation could be tested in real-time.
Inside, there were no walls—only mirrors. Floor to ceiling. Every surface reflected back distorted, duplicated, sharpened versions of Elena: some bloodied, some blank-eyed, one smiling too wide to be real.
She stood still in the center.
Then a voice spoke.
“Welcome back, Subject Cruz.”
It wasn’t CR-01.
It wasn’t Julia.
It was herself. Another layer of her voice, filtered and hollowed like it had bled through decades.
“How do you feel… knowing you’ve always been watched?”
She turned slowly. Every reflection blinked except one.
That one smiled.
“Elena,” the reflection said. “You’re asking the wrong questions.”
“I’m not here for riddles.”
“No,” it whispered. “You’re here because you finally understand what your father built.”
Her fingers curled at her side. “He tried to stop it.”
The smile in the mirror deepened. “He started it. Project VIREX wasn’t about control—it was about evolution. And you, darling… are the prototype who broke the mold.”
The lights flickered.
And the other Elenas in the mirrors began to move—out of sync. Walking. Turning. Whispering things she couldn’t hear.
Elena’s pulse quickened. “Where’s CR-01?”
“Closer than you think,” said the voice. “And she’s already made contact with the others.”
Something cold swept over her spine.
“The others?”
The mirror cracked.
And the voice said, “There were never just twelve.”
The mirror cracked again—this time not metaphorically. A jagged line shot across the surface before it spiderwebbed outward with a metallic hiss, as if the glass itself had nerves. Elena stepped back, pulse hammering, eyes darting between reflections that no longer moved with her.
One version of herself bled from the eyes.
Another wore Adrian’s mask.
And one far in the corner had no face at all.
The voice returned, quieter now. Closer.
“You thought CR-01 was the anomaly. She wasn’t.”
A panel slid open behind her with a whisper of steel.
“She was the beginning.”
Elena whirled around—weapon drawn instinctively—but the hallway behind the panel was empty. Dark. Just a breath of cold air curling from within.
Then a footstep echoed from inside.
Not hers.
She raised her pistol. “Show yourself.”
A silhouette stepped into the edge of the light—slender, same height, same build. But there was a stillness to her that wasn’t human. Not quite.
And then she spoke.
“Hello, Elena,” she said in her voice—but stripped of emotion, raw and unfiltered. “I’ve been watching you longer than you know.”
Elena’s throat went dry. “You’re… CR-01?”
The woman tilted her head. “One of them.”
She stepped fully into the light now—and Elena froze.
Because it was her.
Identical, down to the faint scar above her collarbone from a childhood fall. But the eyes were wrong—too sharp, too calculating.
Elena kept her weapon trained. “Why show yourself now?”
“Because it’s time,” CR-01 replied. “The Sleepwalker Protocol has begun. And you need to decide which side of the mirror you’re on.”
“Elaborate,” Elena snapped.
But CR-01 only smiled.
“I don’t have to,” she said. “You’re already changing. Haven’t you noticed?”
The headaches. The moments of blackout. The whispers in Elena’s sleep she couldn’t remember.
She stepped back, lips parting—but her gun hand trembled.
“No,” she breathed. “That’s not possible.”
“It’s inevitable,” CR-01 said, taking another step forward. “You carry a fragment of VIREX. The same genetic key your father embedded to activate you if he failed. You weren’t supposed to survive the collapse of Project Nightfall—but you did. And now…”
She leaned in.
“…you’re waking up.”
The lights cut out.
Total darkness swallowed the chamber.
And somewhere behind her dozens of reflections began to laugh.
The darkness pressed in—thick, suffocating. Elena’s breath came fast, her back to cold glass. Her pistol trembled in her grip, ears straining for movement.
The laughter had stopped. Now, only silence.
Then a whisper—her own voice—echoed through the pitch black:
“You’re not losing control. You’re becoming what they made.”
She tried to push the thought away, but her mind was splintering—fractured by memories she couldn’t have lived, dreams too real to dismiss.
A red glow lit up behind the glass.
Not light—code.
Strings of encrypted characters ran down the mirror’s surface like blood. In the center, her name blinked in digital scarlet:
CRUZ, ELENA A.
STATUS: SLEEPWALKER SYNC – 87%
DIRECTIVE UNLOCKING IN T-MINUS 48 HOURS
“No…” she whispered, stepping back.
A console powered on behind her with a mechanical hum. The display read:
PROJECT: ECHO PROTOCOL
VOICE KEY REQUIRED
SUBJECT CR-01 ONLY
CR-01 stepped from the shadows again—expression blank, eyes glowing faintly under the light of the interface.
“I told you. You’re not here to destroy Blackwood,” she said. “You’re here to replace him.”
Elena’s pulse raced. “I’m not your weapon.”
“You were never meant to know,” CR-01 replied. “That was your flaw.”
She raised her hand—fingers twitching—and Elena felt something sharp pierce her spine, like a code waking up inside her.
CR-01’s voice softened.
“Welcome back, Elena.”
Elena screamed—but it was only in her mind.
The lights snapped on.
Adrian stood at the entrance, gun drawn, eyes locking on the impossible sight: two Elenas, one frozen in terror—one eerily calm.
He didn’t know who to shoot.
And that was the plan all along.
Adrian’s hand didn’t shake, but his breath did. In front of him stood the woman he’d fought for—bled for—and beside her, an identical version, eerily composed, shadowed by the glow of encrypted screens.
“Elena?” he said, gun swinging between them. “Talk to me.”
“I’m me!” one cried out—voice breaking, body trembling, eyes wide and desperate.
“No,” the other said with measured calm. “I’m Elena. The one who walked into your office. The one who knew your father’s real name. The one who never needed a reminder to fight.”
Adrian’s heart pounded like a war drum. He looked between them, searching for the flicker—the scar—something.
“Prove it,” he said.
Tears rolled down the face of the terrified Elena. “When I was seven, I broke my wrist climbing the red swing set in San Marcos Park. My father carried me five blocks in his arms, singing Volver to keep me from crying.”
The composed version tilted her head. “That’s true,” she said. “But it’s a memory implanted from Guillermo’s deep archive.”
Adrian’s voice turned cold. “Then tell me something the archive wouldn’t know.”
The calm Elena blinked. “You don’t actually hate jazz. You just pretend to because it reminds you of your mother.”
Adrian flinched.
“That’s not fair,” the real Elena whispered.
“I wasn’t made to be fair,” CR-01 said.
A high-pitched frequency began to pulse through the room. The lighting flickered—then bathed them all in a blue glow. Liana’s voice burst over the comms, panic-laced:
“Adrian, pull her out now! NODE 7 is syncing—her neural map is being overwritten!”
Adrian reached for the trembling Elena—but she suddenly screamed, clutching her head, knees buckling to the floor.
CR-01 didn’t move.
Elena gasped, “I can feel her… inside my head…”
Her voice warped—two frequencies overlaying.
Adrian surged forward, grabbing her face between his hands. “Look at me. Stay with me.”
She blinked—and for a second, both voices spoke at once:
“You’re the only thing that’s real.”
A spark flashed through the console. The mirrored glass behind CR-01 shattered. Code bled across the floor like oil.
And just as Adrian pulled Elena into his arms—
CR-01 smiled and said:
“Two days, Adrian. That’s how long before you lose her.”
Then she vanished into static.
The static sizzled in the air like ozone, dissipating with a hiss. Adrian held Elena tightly, her body slack but breathing—barely. The mirror wall, now fractured into splinters, reflected a thousand distorted versions of their embrace.
“Liana,” Adrian said into the comm, his voice rough, urgent. “She’s fading.”
“I see it,” came the reply, brittle with alarm. “Her vitals are erratic. Neural dissonance. She’s fighting two consciousnesses—hers, and the imprint from CR-01.”
Adrian scooped Elena into his arms. “I’m bringing her up.”
“You don’t have time. NODE 7 isn’t just syncing her brain—it’s running a full override. If she loses the link now, she won’t come back as either of them.”
The words hit like a gunshot.
Adrian stopped mid-stride. “Then what the hell do I do?”
A pause. “There’s a failsafe… hidden in Cruz’s biometric cipher. I didn’t want to activate it unless we had no choice. But if we input it now, it’ll shut down NODE 7—and kill the CR-01 process trying to overwrite her.”
“And what does it do to Elena?”
Liana hesitated. “I don’t know.”
Adrian looked down at Elena. Her eyes fluttered open, one glowing faintly blue.
“I… can hear her,” she whispered. “She wants out.”
“Then let her fight,” Adrian said, placing her gently on the floor. “I’ll handle the rest.”
He turned to the console, hacking into the root sequence. His fingers flew across the interface, bypassing security walls like they were made of paper. The failsafe appeared:
CRUZ_FAILSAFE_17: DEEP_PURGE
Activate?
Y / N
Adrian didn’t hesitate.
He pressed Y.
Instantly, the room darkened. Elena arched off the ground, a scream tearing from her throat—distorted, echoing, inhuman.
Adrian dropped beside her, gripping her hands. “Stay with me. Don’t let her take you.”
Elena’s breath came in gasps. Her pupils flickered—blue, then brown, then blue again.
And then—
Stillness.
She collapsed into his arms, silent.
“Liana?” Adrian called. “Talk to me.”
A heartbeat.
Then Liana’s voice, soft with awe. “It worked. NODE 7 just flatlined.”
Adrian looked down.
Elena’s eyes slowly opened. Brown. Clear.
“Hey,” she whispered. “You chose me.”
“Every time,” he said, voice breaking.
She pulled him closer, and for a long moment, they just breathed.
But in the shadows behind them, unseen—
A dormant screen sparked back to life.
PROJECT NIGHTFALL
STATUS: REACTIVATED
Bogotá Safehouse – Underground Lab – 9:02 AM
Elena sat wrapped in a thermal blanket, eyes unfocused but aware. Her skin still held a faint glow under the surface—like embers in the aftermath of a fire. Adrian hadn’t left her side.
“She’s stabilized,” Liana confirmed from the console. “No residual signals from CR-01. Neural activity’s back to baseline.”
“And her memories?” Adrian asked.
“She remembers… everything.”
Elena flinched slightly. “She didn’t just invade me. She was me. Same instincts, same pain. But no compassion. No choice. Just… programming.”
Liana met Adrian’s gaze. “CR-01 was never just a clone. She was a failsafe. Designed to overwrite Elena if she went rogue.”
“She was the Sleepwalker Protocol,” Elena murmured. “And she almost won.”
“But she didn’t,” Adrian said. “You did.”
Elena looked at him, eyes burning with determination. “Then let’s make sure no one ever builds another ‘me’ again.”
A soft chime echoed from the back console. Julia’s voice came through the encrypted comm channel.
“You both need to see this.”
Secure Channel – Julia’s Hub – Simultaneous
A black window opened, revealing red-lined code pulsing like a heartbeat. At the top, the words:
PROJECT: NIGHTFALL
Tier 1 Operative Reactivation: CONFIRMED
Location: Classified – Active
Liana leaned over. “Someone reawakened the core protocol. And it wasn’t us.”
Adrian’s jaw tightened. “I thought Cruz buried Nightfall permanently.”
“He did,” Julia said. “But it wasn’t just a black ops file. It was a sleeper army. Five agents. All enhanced. All dormant.”
A video feed popped onto the screen—blurry, infrared, timestamped less than an hour ago. A figure stepped out of a containment pod deep in the Andean mountains.
Broad frame. Military stance. No face visible.
Until the light shifted.
Elena’s breath caught.
“That’s… Marcus.”
Adrian’s voice was a whisper. “That’s not Marcus anymore.”
Julia’s voice hardened. “Then we’re officially out of time. Nightfall wasn’t just about data… it was about resurrection.”
Andean Range – Unknown Facility – 9:19 AM
Marcus Vale stood alone in the dark, metal clamps releasing from his wrists.
Another voice echoed from the shadows.
“You died once. Are you ready to burn the world that buried you?”
Marcus didn’t flinch. “Start the countdown.”
Behind him, four more stasis pods hummed to life—one of them labeled:
SUBJECT: BLACKWOOD_02
The corridor pulsed with sterile light—too clean, too quiet. Elena’s boots echoed against the polished floor as she stepped into the room they called The Mirror.
It was a chamber buried in the belly of a decommissioned intelligence bunker. Julia had only heard whispers about it—an experimental psych-space designed by Cruz Sr. himself. A place where memory, identity, and manipulation could be tested in real-time.
Inside, there were no walls—only mirrors. Floor to ceiling. Every surface reflected back distorted, duplicated, sharpened versions of Elena: some bloodied, some blank-eyed, one smiling too wide to be real.
She stood still in the center.
Then a voice spoke.
“Welcome back, Subject Cruz.”
It wasn’t CR-01.
It wasn’t Julia.
It was herself. Another layer of her voice, filtered and hollowed like it had bled through decades.
“How do you feel… knowing you’ve always been watched?”
She turned slowly. Every reflection blinked except one.
That one smiled.
“Elena,” the reflection said. “You’re asking the wrong questions.”
“I’m not here for riddles.”
“No,” it whispered. “You’re here because you finally understand what your father built.”
Her fingers curled at her side. “He tried to stop it.”
The smile in the mirror deepened. “He started it. Project VIREX wasn’t about control—it was about evolution. And you, darling… are the prototype who broke the mold.”
The lights flickered.
And the other Elenas in the mirrors began to move—out of sync. Walking. Turning. Whispering things she couldn’t hear.
Elena’s pulse quickened. “Where’s CR-01?”
“Closer than you think,” said the voice. “And she’s already made contact with the others.”
Something cold swept over her spine.
“The others?”
The mirror cracked.
And the voice said, “There were never just twelve.”
The mirror cracked again—this time not metaphorically. A jagged line shot across the surface before it spiderwebbed outward with a metallic hiss, as if the glass itself had nerves. Elena stepped back, pulse hammering, eyes darting between reflections that no longer moved with her.
One version of herself bled from the eyes.
Another wore Adrian’s mask.
And one far in the corner had no face at all.
The voice returned, quieter now. Closer.
“You thought CR-01 was the anomaly. She wasn’t.”
A panel slid open behind her with a whisper of steel.
“She was the beginning.”
Elena whirled around—weapon drawn instinctively—but the hallway behind the panel was empty. Dark. Just a breath of cold air curling from within.
Then a footstep echoed from inside.
Not hers.
She raised her pistol. “Show yourself.”
A silhouette stepped into the edge of the light—slender, same height, same build. But there was a stillness to her that wasn’t human. Not quite.
And then she spoke.
“Hello, Elena,” she said in her voice—but stripped of emotion, raw and unfiltered. “I’ve been watching you longer than you know.”
Elena’s throat went dry. “You’re… CR-01?”
The woman tilted her head. “One of them.”
She stepped fully into the light now—and Elena froze.
Because it was her.
Identical, down to the faint scar above her collarbone from a childhood fall. But the eyes were wrong—too sharp, too calculating.
Elena kept her weapon trained. “Why show yourself now?”
“Because it’s time,” CR-01 replied. “The Sleepwalker Protocol has begun. And you need to decide which side of the mirror you’re on.”
“Elaborate,” Elena snapped.
But CR-01 only smiled.
“I don’t have to,” she said. “You’re already changing. Haven’t you noticed?”
The headaches. The moments of blackout. The whispers in Elena’s sleep she couldn’t remember.
She stepped back, lips parting—but her gun hand trembled.
“No,” she breathed. “That’s not possible.”
“It’s inevitable,” CR-01 said, taking another step forward. “You carry a fragment of VIREX. The same genetic key your father embedded to activate you if he failed. You weren’t supposed to survive the collapse of Project Nightfall—but you did. And now…”
She leaned in.
“…you’re waking up.”
The lights cut out.
Total darkness swallowed the chamber.
And somewhere behind her dozens of reflections began to laugh.
The darkness pressed in—thick, suffocating. Elena’s breath came fast, her back to cold glass. Her pistol trembled in her grip, ears straining for movement.
The laughter had stopped. Now, only silence.
Then a whisper—her own voice—echoed through the pitch black:
“You’re not losing control. You’re becoming what they made.”
She tried to push the thought away, but her mind was splintering—fractured by memories she couldn’t have lived, dreams too real to dismiss.
A red glow lit up behind the glass.
Not light—code.
Strings of encrypted characters ran down the mirror’s surface like blood. In the center, her name blinked in digital scarlet:
CRUZ, ELENA A.
STATUS: SLEEPWALKER SYNC – 87%
DIRECTIVE UNLOCKING IN T-MINUS 48 HOURS
“No…” she whispered, stepping back.
A console powered on behind her with a mechanical hum. The display read:
PROJECT: ECHO PROTOCOL
VOICE KEY REQUIRED
SUBJECT CR-01 ONLY
CR-01 stepped from the shadows again—expression blank, eyes glowing faintly under the light of the interface.
“I told you. You’re not here to destroy Blackwood,” she said. “You’re here to replace him.”
Elena’s pulse raced. “I’m not your weapon.”
“You were never meant to know,” CR-01 replied. “That was your flaw.”
She raised her hand—fingers twitching—and Elena felt something sharp pierce her spine, like a code waking up inside her.
CR-01’s voice softened.
“Welcome back, Elena.”
Elena screamed—but it was only in her mind.
The lights snapped on.
Adrian stood at the entrance, gun drawn, eyes locking on the impossible sight: two Elenas, one frozen in terror—one eerily calm.
He didn’t know who to shoot.
And that was the plan all along.
Adrian’s hand didn’t shake, but his breath did. In front of him stood the woman he’d fought for—bled for—and beside her, an identical version, eerily composed, shadowed by the glow of encrypted screens.
“Elena?” he said, gun swinging between them. “Talk to me.”
“I’m me!” one cried out—voice breaking, body trembling, eyes wide and desperate.
“No,” the other said with measured calm. “I’m Elena. The one who walked into your office. The one who knew your father’s real name. The one who never needed a reminder to fight.”
Adrian’s heart pounded like a war drum. He looked between them, searching for the flicker—the scar—something.
“Prove it,” he said.
Tears rolled down the face of the terrified Elena. “When I was seven, I broke my wrist climbing the red swing set in San Marcos Park. My father carried me five blocks in his arms, singing Volver to keep me from crying.”
The composed version tilted her head. “That’s true,” she said. “But it’s a memory implanted from Guillermo’s deep archive.”
Adrian’s voice turned cold. “Then tell me something the archive wouldn’t know.”
The calm Elena blinked. “You don’t actually hate jazz. You just pretend to because it reminds you of your mother.”
Adrian flinched.
“That’s not fair,” the real Elena whispered.
“I wasn’t made to be fair,” CR-01 said.
A high-pitched frequency began to pulse through the room. The lighting flickered—then bathed them all in a blue glow. Liana’s voice burst over the comms, panic-laced:
“Adrian, pull her out now! NODE 7 is syncing—her neural map is being overwritten!”
Adrian reached for the trembling Elena—but she suddenly screamed, clutching her head, knees buckling to the floor.
CR-01 didn’t move.
Elena gasped, “I can feel her… inside my head…”
Her voice warped—two frequencies overlaying.
Adrian surged forward, grabbing her face between his hands. “Look at me. Stay with me.”
She blinked—and for a second, both voices spoke at once:
“You’re the only thing that’s real.”
A spark flashed through the console. The mirrored glass behind CR-01 shattered. Code bled across the floor like oil.
And just as Adrian pulled Elena into his arms—
CR-01 smiled and said:
“Two days, Adrian. That’s how long before you lose her.”
Then she vanished into static.
The static sizzled in the air like ozone, dissipating with a hiss. Adrian held Elena tightly, her body slack but breathing—barely. The mirror wall, now fractured into splinters, reflected a thousand distorted versions of their embrace.
“Liana,” Adrian said into the comm, his voice rough, urgent. “She’s fading.”
“I see it,” came the reply, brittle with alarm. “Her vitals are erratic. Neural dissonance. She’s fighting two consciousnesses—hers, and the imprint from CR-01.”
Adrian scooped Elena into his arms. “I’m bringing her up.”
“You don’t have time. NODE 7 isn’t just syncing her brain—it’s running a full override. If she loses the link now, she won’t come back as either of them.”
The words hit like a gunshot.
Adrian stopped mid-stride. “Then what the hell do I do?”
A pause. “There’s a failsafe… hidden in Cruz’s biometric cipher. I didn’t want to activate it unless we had no choice. But if we input it now, it’ll shut down NODE 7—and kill the CR-01 process trying to overwrite her.”
“And what does it do to Elena?”
Liana hesitated. “I don’t know.”
Adrian looked down at Elena. Her eyes fluttered open, one glowing faintly blue.
“I… can hear her,” she whispered. “She wants out.”
“Then let her fight,” Adrian said, placing her gently on the floor. “I’ll handle the rest.”
He turned to the console, hacking into the root sequence. His fingers flew across the interface, bypassing security walls like they were made of paper. The failsafe appeared:
CRUZ_FAILSAFE_17: DEEP_PURGE
Activate?
Y / N
Adrian didn’t hesitate.
He pressed Y.
Instantly, the room darkened. Elena arched off the ground, a scream tearing from her throat—distorted, echoing, inhuman.
Adrian dropped beside her, gripping her hands. “Stay with me. Don’t let her take you.”
Elena’s breath came in gasps. Her pupils flickered—blue, then brown, then blue again.
And then—
Stillness.
She collapsed into his arms, silent.
“Liana?” Adrian called. “Talk to me.”
A heartbeat.
Then Liana’s voice, soft with awe. “It worked. NODE 7 just flatlined.”
Adrian looked down.
Elena’s eyes slowly opened. Brown. Clear.
“Hey,” she whispered. “You chose me.”
“Every time,” he said, voice breaking.
She pulled him closer, and for a long moment, they just breathed.
But in the shadows behind them, unseen—
A dormant screen sparked back to life.
PROJECT NIGHTFALL
STATUS: REACTIVATED
Bogotá Safehouse – Underground Lab – 9:02 AM
Elena sat wrapped in a thermal blanket, eyes unfocused but aware. Her skin still held a faint glow under the surface—like embers in the aftermath of a fire. Adrian hadn’t left her side.
“She’s stabilized,” Liana confirmed from the console. “No residual signals from CR-01. Neural activity’s back to baseline.”
“And her memories?” Adrian asked.
“She remembers… everything.”
Elena flinched slightly. “She didn’t just invade me. She was me. Same instincts, same pain. But no compassion. No choice. Just… programming.”
Liana met Adrian’s gaze. “CR-01 was never just a clone. She was a failsafe. Designed to overwrite Elena if she went rogue.”
“She was the Sleepwalker Protocol,” Elena murmured. “And she almost won.”
“But she didn’t,” Adrian said. “You did.”
Elena looked at him, eyes burning with determination. “Then let’s make sure no one ever builds another ‘me’ again.”
A soft chime echoed from the back console. Julia’s voice came through the encrypted comm channel.
“You both need to see this.”
Secure Channel – Julia’s Hub – Simultaneous
A black window opened, revealing red-lined code pulsing like a heartbeat. At the top, the words:
PROJECT: NIGHTFALL
Tier 1 Operative Reactivation: CONFIRMED
Location: Classified – Active
Liana leaned over. “Someone reawakened the core protocol. And it wasn’t us.”
Adrian’s jaw tightened. “I thought Cruz buried Nightfall permanently.”
“He did,” Julia said. “But it wasn’t just a black ops file. It was a sleeper army. Five agents. All enhanced. All dormant.”
A video feed popped onto the screen—blurry, infrared, timestamped less than an hour ago. A figure stepped out of a containment pod deep in the Andean mountains.
Broad frame. Military stance. No face visible.
Until the light shifted.
Elena’s breath caught.
“That’s… Marcus.”
Adrian’s voice was a whisper. “That’s not Marcus anymore.”
Julia’s voice hardened. “Then we’re officially out of time. Nightfall wasn’t just about data… it was about resurrection.”
Andean Range – Unknown Facility – 9:19 AM
Marcus Vale stood alone in the dark, metal clamps releasing from his wrists.
Another voice echoed from the shadows.
“You died once. Are you ready to burn the world that buried you?”
Marcus didn’t flinch. “Start the countdown.”
Behind him, four more stasis pods hummed to life—one of them labeled:
SUBJECT: BLACKWOOD_02
End of Beneath the Billionaire Mask Chapter 86. Continue reading Chapter 87 or return to Beneath the Billionaire Mask book page.