The Scion's Shadow
By @john1208
The rain fell hard at the funeral of Vesna Dalca’s only friend, but all she wanted was to go home and sleep. Six years ago, her jealous step-sister drugged her at a gala, resulting in a hazy one-night stand with ruthless industrialist Korvan Vance. Now a disgraced outcast, the lethargic genius lives quietly in the slums with her scrap-metal mastiff, Slag, and her greatest secret: her son, Ilya. Vesna's low-effort survival shatters when the six-year-old engineering prodigy earns a mandatory placement at the Orosz Institute - a brutalist academy funded by Korvan himself. A suffocating game of cat-and-mouse begins. Vesna agonizes over constant near-misses as the oligarch stalks the campus, inches away from recognizing the boy with his exact steel-grey eyes. The tension explodes when Ilya bypasses the highest security tier on Korvan’s broken armored transport and repairs its core. Realizing he has an heir, Korvan's indifference morphs into terrifying, obsessive protection. He blackmails Vesna into moving into his heavily fortified estate, holding her hostage to keep the boy safe. But in a dark, cold war devoid of romance, Vesna discovers her most trusted medical confidant has been manipulating them all along. Can she shake her apathy in time to save her son from a deadly conspiracy?
5
The Obsidian Blueprint
By @john1208
I held Baya’s trembling hand as the hospice monitor flatlined, her final raspy words chilling me to the bone: "You don't remember what you did... but he is coming." I thought I was just a timid spatial designer struggling to keep my chronically ill younger sister, Nemi, alive. Five years ago, I sold one night to the terrifying industrialist Tarkis Vendra to pay Nemi's medical bills. I ran, hiding the son that resulted from that desperate bargain. But when my four-year-old, Orik, breaches the impenetrable firewalls of Vendra Corp, Tarkis doesn't just find us - he leverages Orik's cyber-treason to force me into his compound as his lead architect. Now I am a prisoner in the very cliffside mansion I am building. There is no romance here; Tarkis looks at us with cold, calculating ownership. Yet, as I uncover encrypted schematics hidden deep in the mansion's servers, a horrifying truth emerges. Tarkis didn't hunt me down by chance. My past self planted Orik's code. I laid the breadcrumbs. I built this trap. But why would I willingly lock myself in a cage with a monster?
2