Chapter 2

There was no body at Damien's funeral.

Only a deep black bespoke suit he used to wear — folded into sharp, precise creases and placed inside an expensive rosewood box.

Victoria didn't cry. She wore the bright red slip dress Damien had always hated, paired with four-inch heels, and stood in front of that crowd of board members — a pack of old foxes with unreadable expressions — watching them dab at their eyes with all the sincerity of a performance.

"Our condolences, Mrs. Sinclair."

"Damien was taken far too soon. Abyss Tech is a heavy burden. Can you really carry it on your own?"

Victoria watched their mouths open and close. All she could hear was a sharp, piercing ring in her ears.

Damien was dead.

The man who had always pulled her close, who had dictated when she slept, what supplements she took, even what colors she wore — that overbearing, controlling man was gone forever, swallowed by the depths of the Mariana Trench, without even a body left behind.

The moment the funeral ended, Victoria went back to the "Prison Island."

That was what she called the private fortress Damien had built with his own hands on the outskirts of the city — a fully fortified smart villa.

Not a single window in the entire building could be opened manually. All security, temperature control, and life-support systems were under the complete authority of Achilles, the top-tier AI hub developed by Abyss Tech.

The front door locked shut behind her with a heavy, mechanical thud.

Victoria kicked off her heels and stood barefoot on the cold obsidian floor.

"Achilles." Her voice echoed through the vast, high-ceilinged living room, carrying a tremor she couldn't quite hide.

"I'm here, madam." A flat, emotionless mechanical voice responded.

Victoria closed her eyes, drew a slow breath, then snapped them open. "Disengage maximum system protection. Unlock the classified data channel. Connect to the external high-capacity drives."

"Warning: Unlocking the classified channel carries extreme security risks. Verification of Damien Sinclair's personal biometric identity is required."

Victoria let out a cold laugh and reached into her bag, pulling out a smart ring stained with dried blood. It was the only thing the rescue team had ever pulled from the water.

She pressed the ring against the sensor pad on the main control panel.

"Beep — Identity verified. Protection disengaged. Channel open."

Victoria dragged out over a dozen high-capacity military-grade hard drives. Data cables coiled like black snakes — one end plugged into the drives, the other into the core interface of the main system.

Inside those drives was Damien. All of him.

From the first line of code he ever wrote at sixteen, to the last voice message he sent her before he went under at thirty.

His call logs. His heart rate patterns. His daily routines, his mannerisms, the way he looked when he lost his temper — every trace of his life was in there.

Like an obsessive, desperate surgeon stitching together something that should never be rebuilt, Victoria poured all of it — data so massive it would have destroyed any ordinary machine — straight into Achilles' processing core.

"Replace the original system voice. Replicate all his habits and moods. Run the human simulation program to restore his full personality."

Victoria's fingers flew across the virtual keyboard. Her nails cracked and bled. She didn't notice.

On the holographic screen, the progress bar crept forward. 1%... 3%...12%...

The lights throughout the villa flickered violently. The server fans roared like a dying beast letting out its final, guttural cry.

Victoria stared at the screen, her eyes shot through with red.

"Faster… a little faster…" She gritted her teeth, a desperate, trapped-animal murmur rising from her throat.

Three days. Three nights.

Victoria hadn't eaten a single bite or closed her eyes once. She sat anchored at the main console, watching cold streams of data weave, collide, and reassemble across the screens.

Then, finally — the fourth dawn.

The roaring hum cut out all at once.

The progress bar on the holographic screen froze at 100%.

The living room fell into dead silence. Only the soft blue pulse of the console's breathing light moved through the darkness, slowly fading in and out.

Victoria's body gave out. She slumped back against her chair, every muscle gone slack.

She parted her cracked, bleeding lips. Her voice came out so hoarse it was barely a sound: "…Damien?"

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

Then, like ripples spreading across water, the motion-sensor light strips blinked on throughout the house — all of them dialing up to the softest, warmest shade of amber.

A faint scent of cedarwood drifted through the air. The same scent Damien had always worn.

And then, through the speakers, came the lightest exhale — almost a sigh.

"No shoes again. Are you asking for trouble?"

Low and unhurried, with that familiar edge of arrogance in the tail of every word. Exactly like him. Exactly.

Victoria's tears broke loose all at once.