OBSCURA

Name: OBSCURA
Rating: 5.0 (1 reviews)

nazifahyakubu71

Romance | Ongoing

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She's the girl no one sees, the one who wears a mask not for beauty, but for survival. Layla doesn't crave attention. She avoids it. But when a powerful billionaire with a dangerous curiosity crosses her path, her quiet world begins to unravel. Zayden Cross doesn't chase women, and he certainly doesn't chase ghosts. But there's something about the girl in the mask... something he can't let go. In a city where secrets are currency and desire is a weapon, one question remains: What happens when the man who always gets what he wants meets the woman who refuses to be known?

Thriller Mystery Modern Secret relationship CEO Attractive Kickass Heroine Hidden identities Unique occupation CEO

Chapter 5 Whispers Beneath the Mask

06-24 10:57

Chapter 1 The Girl Behind the Mask

They called her Obscura.

Not because she chose the name, but because no one knew her real one. She walked the cobblestone streets of Thornewall in silence, her face always hidden behind an ornate mask of black porcelain, delicate as glass but stronger than steel. The mask never shifted, never fogged in the winter cold, never seemed to weigh upon her. People said it was cursed, that it had fused with her skin, or that beneath it was nothing at all.

She came and went like smoke, appearing in alleys no one used, vanishing through doorways that weren't there the day before. She never spoke. Never ran. Never smiled. Just walked.

And watched.

No one knew where she slept, or if she slept at all. But at midnight, when the bells of St. Urien tolled twelve, she could be seen on the highest rooftops, staring across the sprawl of gaslit streets and twisting iron bridges. Watching. Waiting.

They feared her. They whispered. But they needed her, too.

Because when someone vanished without a trace, when strange sigils appeared in blood on church walls, when the constables dared not set foot into the Deepmarket or the Boneglass Quarter-people hoped Obscura was watching.

She was the ghost of justice. Or vengeance. Or memory. No one agreed.

Her real name, unknown to them all, was Virelith.

A name carved in no tombstone, written in no ledger. A name that drifted down from a language forgotten before the Empire was born. A name as old as the curse she bore.

She hadn't always worn the mask.

There had been a time, years ago, when she laughed, when she danced in snow beneath lanternlight. When she believed in people, in love, in redemption, but that had died in fire, long before Thornewall ever knew her.

And now she was something else. A sentinel without a past. A myth wrapped in flesh and iron and silk.

Virelith stood tonight on the roof of the Trillden Spire, cloak flaring in the wind. Her eyes-one grey as ash, one gold as flame-watched the alley below, where two constables rolled a body onto a stretcher. A man, mid-forties. Thin. Eyes removed. Mouth sewn shut.

Inside his pocket was a calling card:

I SEE YOU. - O.

She narrowed her eyes. It was the third one this week.

She knew the victim. Elias Morven. Scholar of dead tongues. Keeper of forgotten truths. A man who had helped her decode a fragment of the Nemyriad texts buried in the catacombs. A man who should never have spoken what he read.

Now he was dead. And someone had used her mark.

A counterfeit.

She slipped from the spire without a sound, boots touching down on tile, then gutter, then cobble, a flowing shadow among shadows. She moved through the warrens of Thornewall's sleeping districts until she reached the Graveroot Gate, sealed since the Plague Riots, but she knew the key: a twist of brick, a whisper of silver, and the gate creaked inward.

Beneath the city, the world was different. Warmer. Wetter. Older.

Here, bones whispered. Walls wept. The catacombs were alive with memory.

She walked with careful steps, each footfall echoing faintly across vaulted tunnels. The air was damp and heavy with mildew, the stones beneath her boots slick with age. Skulls peered out from stacked walls. Some had names carved into them. Others bore sigils scorched by forgotten magic.

Her fingers brushed one skull-Eldric's. A friend. Once. He had been foolish and brave and had died trying to save someone who didn't want to be saved. She left a single black feather on his brow.

She reached Elias's sanctum-an old crypt turned study-and found it ransacked. Shelves toppled, books burned, pages torn. But one thing remained untouched: the mirror.

Tall. Oval. Framed in obsidian.

She approached and stared into her reflection. The mask stared back.

Then, in the glass, her reflection moved.

She didn't.

It tilted its head. Slowly. Curiously. And then it smiled.

She staggered back.

The mirror cracked.

From the frame's edge, black mist began to seep.

A whisper curled into her ear from nowhere.

"The mask was never yours."

She turned fast, blades unsheathed, but the room was empty.

Only the mirror remained, and the mist curling from it like smoke from a dying fire.

She held out a silver charm and whispered a word that tasted like dust. The mist hissed, recoiled, and slithered back into the glass. The crack in the mirror remained.

She had seen that mist once before-fifteen years ago in the ruins of Quarnem, when her brother died screaming.

She sat then, beside the wreckage of Elias's sanctum, and sorted through the pages left unburnt. Scrawled notes in Elias's frantic hand. A map of the lower catacombs. Fragments of Nemyriad glyphs.

And a name.

Caldrithan.

She hadn't heard that name in a decade.

And never in connection with the mask.

A deep unease slithered through her veins. Caldrithan had once been a myth, even to her. A figure whispered about in the tongues of broken gods. The Maskmaker. The Collector of Faces.

Was that who had smiled at her in the mirror?

She rose. Her mission was no longer about vengeance. This was older. Deeper. Something was uncoiling beneath the city, and it wore her face.

She turned to leave, but a faint sound caught her ear.

A scraping. A dragging.

From the tunnel beyond.

She extinguished her lamp and pressed herself against the crypt wall.

A figure appeared.

Cloaked in tattered robes, face wrapped in bandages, it dragged a staff carved from femurs. Its presence sucked the warmth from the air.

It sniffed the air. A wet, gurgling sound.

"Virelith..." it hissed.

She didn't move.

"You wear his gift," it croaked. "But you are not his. Not yet."

She leapt, blades slashing, but the figure burst apart into a flurry of ash and moths.

Illusion.

But a message.

She was being hunted. Watched. Tested.

And the game had only begun.

By the time she emerged into the night again, a storm had swept across Thornewall. Rain lashed the rooftops, thunder growled low. She stood beneath the eaves of a dead apothecary and stared at the mirror fragment she'd taken from the crypt.

In its cracked reflection, her masked face stared back.

But just for a moment-only a blink-she saw another.

Not hers.

A girl without a mask.

Eyes like hers. Mouth like hers.

Crying.

She clenched the shard until her glove tore and her palm bled.

Whatever Caldrithan was planning, it had begun. And she would find him. Rip the secret from his bones. Burn his lies.

Because the truth of the mask was hers to uncover.

Not his.

And no one else would wear her face.

Not again.