Bound by the Mark of Lies (BL)
Chapter 402 - 396: Escape from the cage.

Chapter 402: Chapter 396: Escape from the cage.

He found his old suite at the end of the eastern hall, tucked behind a pair of double doors lacquered in deep green. The handles were cool beneath his palm, and for a heartbeat he hesitated, breath shallow, as if expecting the room beyond to be wrong, altered, a lie.

But when the doors swung inward, it was exactly as he remembered.

The air smelled faintly of sandalwood and wax, the kind of scent that clung to old books and heavy curtains. The wide bed stood made with the same embroidered coverlet his mother had chosen, the carved posts gleaming with polish. His desk was there, stacked neatly with papers and a blotter stained with ink. The narrow wardrobe door stood half‑open, revealing folded coats and the dark sweep of uniforms he hadn’t worn in years.

It was almost enough to make his chest ache. Almost.

Gabriel set his jaw and stepped inside, shutting the doors behind him. If this shard wanted to trap him in memory, then he would use that memory to his own advantage. He would live as if everything were normal, stripping the shard of the power it craved: fear.

He moved to the adjoining washroom, fingers tracing the edge of the doorframe. Steam curled faintly in the air as he turned the brass taps, the old ether pump groaning before warm water surged into the marble basin. He undressed methodically, setting each layer aside on the old stool, and sank into the bath with a slow exhale. The heat seeped into his muscles, loosening the ache that Peter’s ether had left in his chest and throat.

The ceiling above was exactly as he recalled, cracked faintly near the center beam, the pattern of those hairline fractures like a map only he could read. He let the warmth wash over him and, for a few moments, simply breathed.

When he finally stepped out, drying off with the coarse towel that smelled faintly of cedar and lavender, he dressed in the nightshirt folded at the foot of the bed. The fabric was too soft, too familiar. He ignored the shiver that ran through him.

At the desk, his old phone lay where he’d left it years ago, a slim, black rectangle etched with faint scratches along the sides. He picked it up, feeling the weight of it in his palm. The screen flickered to life, time and date glaringly wrong, yet perfectly matching the shard’s illusion. No messages. No signal. Just the quiet hum of ether circuitry running on standby.

Beside it sat the old ether‑powered computer, a relic from before the wars. He flipped the brass latch, the screen flickering open with a muted chime. Files greeted him—essays, ward maps, letters unsent—all untouched, preserved like insects in amber.

Gabriel leaned back in the chair, fingers resting against the cool keys. He let his gaze sweep over the suite one last time, every familiar detail settling into place like pieces on a board.

Gabriel let his fingers hover above the brass‑rimmed keys, the low hum of the old ether computer settling into a rhythm that almost matched his own pulse.

He’d spent years in this room, years that the shard was now trying to weave back around him like silk and chains. If Olivier’s fragment had used their memories to construct this place, it meant the shard only knew what Olivier had known at the time.

And that, Gabriel thought with a cold flicker of satisfaction, was a crack wide enough to drive a blade through.

His mouth curved faintly, a humorless smile, as he straightened in the chair. ’If you think I was yours until the day I ran, then you don’t know half of what I’ve done.’

He reached to the side drawer and slid it open, fingers brushing the underside of the wooden lip until he found it, a faint etching only he would have thought to leave. A code he’d carved himself, a habit born from suspicion long before rebellion.

He tapped the sequence into the keyboard.

Once. Twice. A pause. Then a final string of numbers that only existed in his own ledgers, not in any of the files Olivier had ever seen.

The screen flickered, stuttered, and then shifted.

A hidden directory unfolded like a shadow peeling back. Pages of encrypted notes appeared, plans, contacts, warnings, everything he had built quietly behind Olivier’s back when he was still eighteen and too dangerous to underestimate.

Gabriel leaned closer, scanning the data. His heart beat steady now, sharper, as realization tightened through his chest. The shard hadn’t locked this away and hadn’t even known it existed. Olivier’s ghost hadn’t known when Gabriel began to plot.

Perfect.

He exhaled slowly, fingers moving over the keys with practiced ease, pulling up maps, names, and contingency plans he’d hidden from everyone. He wasn’t looking for escape, he doubted the shard would allow that, but information.

If this world followed his old records, he could find its cracks, test the edges, learn how to turn them against Olivier’s tether.

The hum of the ether computer deepened, light from the screen painting his face in pale gold.

You don’t know what I know, Gabriel thought, the cold spark in his chest flaring into something dangerous. And that is my advantage.

The sound of the hinges settled into silence, leaving only the steady hum of the ether computer and the faint pulse of lantern light along the walls. Gabriel’s fingers moved without hesitation, pulling open a window within the old interface, an encrypted relay that had no business existing in this shard‑woven memory, yet here it was, tucked beneath layers of his own design.

Lines of code bloomed across the screen, glyphs written in the shorthand he’d once used when communicating as Dominie. The old call sign for the Shadows appeared in the corner, a faint flicker of green as the system attempted to ping the network.

It shouldn’t work.

It couldn’t work.

But in this world, built from memory and deception, some pieces of truth had slipped through like threads in a fractured loom.

Gabriel leaned back slightly, his pulse thudding in his ears. If this interface responds... then the shard doesn’t control everything.

He typed faster, pulling old plans, triggering message trees that had once accelerated secret operations. If he could force the sequence of events that led to Olivier’s death, then maybe he could force the shard to spend its strength trying to stall him.

And if the shard bled itself out faster, the Empire’s wards would eat it sooner.

But as the commands lined up in the corner of the screen, as old names and mission codes flickered like ghosts from another life, a chill crawled slow and deliberate up his spine.

Because as much as the shard wore Olivier’s voice and Olivier’s hands, as much as it wrapped itself in power and memory, something else pulsed beneath it, something older, something hungrier.

Maybe it didn’t want him dead.

Maybe it didn’t want him free.

Maybe Olivier’s echo wanted him exactly like this: trapped in a cage of old halls and older fears, worn down until the mark at his neck meant nothing, until he belonged to no one but the shard itself.

Gabriel’s jaw tightened, his fingers pausing over the keys. The smile that curved his mouth now was sharper, darker, born of a resolve that had survived worse than this.

"If that’s what you want," he murmured into the empty room, voice low, "then you should have built a better cage."

And he sent the first command.