The soft hum of the Lin estate's security grid buzzed in Veronica's ears as she stared at the screen in the IT chamber beneath the garden greenhouse.
Cameras. Pressure sensors. Motion tracking. None of it mattered anymore.
Someone had bypassed them all.
And the worst part?
It wasn't brute force.
It was elegant. Precise. Like the old school signatures of the Syndicate's elite. Or worse—Mirror's.
Veronica leaned back, stretching her arms with a sigh that felt like gravel. Her knuckles ached from hours of code cracking, but she had nothing. Lucas had incinerated the trace.
And still, the name echoed: Black Sun Summit.
She rubbed her temples. "How did they know that title still had weight…?"
A soft knock interrupted her spiral.
It was Iris, holding out a steaming cup of black tea with one hand and a recording device in the other.
"I bugged the garden team," she said with no fanfare. "Every cart, every apron, and the fountain sensors."
Veronica blinked at her. "You what?"
"I had a hunch," Iris said, sitting beside her and blowing on her tea. "You said the security relay was tripped last Tuesday, but nothing was missing. No alerts. I think someone inside is feeding information out."
Veronica didn't hesitate. She took the recorder and pulled the files into her personal decryption tablet. Within seconds, sound bloomed in the room—fragments of conversation, rustling leaves, wheels on stone paths.
She skipped through quickly.
Most of it was mundane: gossip, flirtation, complaints about allergies.
Until—click.
Static.
Then—footsteps.
A shuffle.
And a voice.
Male. Low. Nervous.
"…I told you, she's starting to get suspicious."
A pause.
Another voice, female, older.
Calm. Cultured. "Then handle it. She cannot remember. Not yet. Not until the vote passes."
Veronica froze.
Iris mouthed silently: Who is that?
Veronica didn't answer. She was too busy tracing the second voice. It was familiar. Not in tone, but in cadence. The way it held its consonants. The way it dropped the ends of its phrases. Subtle classism baked into the syllables.
Another board member.
And the man?
"…Uncle Xu," Veronica whispered. "Xu Jianhong."
The one her father had trusted for decades. The one who had held her hand during her mother's funeral.
The recording continued.
"We've buried the records," Jianhong said. "But if she starts asking questions—"
"Then distract her," the woman said coolly. "Give her a new enemy. She's young. Angry. She'll chase what glitters."
Veronica's stomach twisted.
A new enemy?
Who had they been feeding her?
Was this why her investigations had hit so many false leads lately?
A soft ping echoed from the tablet.
Veronica's fingers darted over the screen, isolating the metadata from the audio. Location: northwest quadrant of the estate. Timestamp: two nights ago. Just after 3 a.m.
Iris leaned closer. "You think they know you're not the real Amy?"
Veronica's gaze darkened.
"They think they know who Amy was."
The recorder clicked again.
And then—one final line, just as the call was ending:
"Make sure Amy never remembers."
Veronica's breath caught.
The voice was steady.
Absolute.
But it wasn't just a command.
It was a warning.
A threat.
She turned sharply to Iris. "We need to sweep the estate again. Not just for bugs—deep archives. Birth records. Adoption seals. Amy's school files. Everything."
"You think it's about her identity?"
"I think it's about mine." Veronica stood, fire in her eyes. "And I think someone in this house knows the truth already."
"But why suppress it now?" Iris asked. "Why would anyone care if you remembered—unless Amy wasn't just a pawn?"
Veronica didn't answer right away.
Her mind raced, flipping through memories not entirely her own—Amy's dreams, her fractured diary entries, the strange messages embedded in the embroidery of her childhood quilts.
"I used to think she was just a soft-hearted girl who got eaten alive by this world," she murmured. "But what if she wasn't? What if she chose to die? To let me in?"
Iris stood slowly. "You're saying… Amy wanted this?"
Veronica nodded.
And that terrified her.
Because it meant Amy had known something.
Something big enough to sacrifice her body and name for vengeance.
And it wasn't just about ex-fiancés or toxic best friends.
This went deeper.
Older.
Someone had tried to erase Amy's real history.
Just like someone had tried to erase Mirror's.
And now both ghosts were screaming at the surface.
"Veronica," Iris said cautiously, "if they really did this to Amy, if they're suppressing her past—what happens if you do remember it all?"
Veronica looked down at her hands.
For a second, she saw blood.
Then stitches.
Then a crown of iron she hadn't worn in two lives.
She didn't answer.
But the truth was already burning in her gut.
If Amy had been royalty in a different way—if she'd carried a legacy meant to stay buried—then this wasn't just a resurrection story anymore.
This was a hostile takeover.
And Veronica Lin wasn't the only queen on the board.
---
Meanwhile…
Lucas stood alone in the courtyard under the pale glow of the lantern trees.
His phone buzzed once.
Encrypted.
He didn't pick up.
Not yet.
He glanced back toward the main wing, where Veronica's window was still lit. She hadn't stopped moving since he burned that file.
His jaw clenched.
The message hadn't been a bluff.
And the name "Mirror" wasn't the only landmine buried in that voice.
He knew who it belonged to now.
Knew it down to the breath patterns and subharmonic frequencies.
Because he'd trained with that voice.
Because once, that voice had whispered his name just before torturing a Syndicate lieutenant to death.
The caller wasn't Mirror.
She was someone worse.
Someone Veronica thought she'd killed in her first life.
Someone only Lucas had seen escape the fire.
And now?
She was back.
With files. With names. With old gods behind her.
Lucas pressed the call button.
A deep voice answered immediately. "Confirmation?"
"She's active," Lucas said flatly. "Ghost Queen Protocol has been breached."
"…Understood. Do we initiate contingency?"
Lucas stared at the stars.
"No," he said quietly. "Not yet."
There was a long pause.
"She won't forgive you when she finds out," the voice said at last.
Lucas's lips curled into something almost like a smile.
"She'll forgive me," he replied. "She won't forget."
The line went dead.
And far beneath the Lin estate, where Veronica had just discovered her first real trail—
Another recording began to play on a loop.
A child's lullaby.
Distorted.
Creeping.
And behind it—
A whisper that was not her own voice.
But sounded just like Amy.
___
"What Amy Left Behind"
Veronica uncovers Amy's encrypted diary, and what she finds forces her to question everything—including whether Amy was the true mastermind all along.
The final diary entry ends with, "If you're reading this, then the Black Sun chose you too."