The storm outside hadn't let up. But inside the Black Swan Theatre, time stood still.
Isabella stared at the torn ribbon in her hand.
The name written on the faded parchment sent cold through her veins.
"Nicolai Vex."
Alexander's godfather.
The man who sat at their dinner table.
The man who funded the restoration of the Order's churches after the Great Purge.
The man who had paid for her engagement ring.
She barely felt her knees buckle.
"You look pale, my darling," Madame Lys said gently, approaching the coffin. "Is it so shocking to learn monsters live in velvet and gold?"
Isabella said nothing. Her silence was sharper than a scream.
Lys tilted her head, watching her.
"That's why the Order never feared you. Because you're still surprised by betrayal."
Isabella raised her eyes.
"I'm not surprised." Her voice was low. "I'm furious."
She turned to the coffin, brushing her hand over the glass one last time.
Then she drew her gun and aimed it — not at Lys — but at the lighting grid above the stage.
One shot.
A crash of sparks.
Darkness fell.
Ten minutes earlier…
Alexander had arrived outside the theatre, hidden in a stolen car, dressed like a delivery driver.
He waited for the sound — the one he and Isabella had agreed on.
One gunshot. That meant the performance was over.
He heard it.
But not the kind he expected.
Then came the power surge, and every light in the street went out.
"She's in," he muttered, pulling his jacket tighter. "And she's not alone."
He kicked open the back of the theatre, meeting two masked guards who didn't even have time to scream.
Inside, smoke rose.
And above it, her voice rang like fire:
"VELVET BURNS."
It was the phrase Evelyn used in her final report.
And tonight, it meant war.
Back on the stage, Isabella moved like her sister once did — precise, fluid, devastating.
She slammed Lys to the floor with the hilt of her weapon, disarmed her, and aimed the gun at her temple.
But something stopped her.
Not mercy. Not hesitation.
Clarity.
"This is too easy," Isabella muttered.
Because Lys was smiling.
And somewhere beneath them, deeper in the theatre, another stage was opening.
One Alexander hadn't reached.
One Evelyn had died trying to expose.
They found it thirty minutes later.
A hidden chamber, sealed behind decades of old props and steel.
Inside it: files, recordings, experiments.
Children.
Or… what was left of them.
The Order had not just trained assassins.
They had tried to create them.
Alexander stared at the tapes, horror blooming in his chest.
"These were… trials."
"Genetic trauma manipulation," Isabella whispered, scanning the charts. "They weren't just teaching pain. They were engineering obedience."
And Evelyn had been part of the first wave.
So had Madame Lys.
So had… Nicolai Vex.
Alexander sat heavily, the truth cracking something inside him.
"They were building monsters to keep the world quiet," he said.
"No," Isabella said, clutching the last file to her chest.
"They were building monsters to keep girls like us in cages."
By morning, the theatre burned.
Lys was gone.
But the city now whispered about the fire, the ruins, the masked woman in a wedding dress who lit the match and walked away.
And at sunrise, Isabella and Alexander stood side by side at Evelyn's hidden grave — one they dug themselves in the garden behind the estate.
"She deserves more than this," he whispered.
"She'll get it," Isabella replied. "She started a war they tried to bury."
Alexander looked at her.
"And you?"
She looked back at him.
"I'm going to finish it."