DANTE- The Billionaire’s Ghost Vixen

Chapter 1: The Vixen Protocol

The rain wasn't water. It was industrial sludge, thick and smelling of copper and gasoline. It pooled around my face, stinging the raw scrapes on my cheek. Every breath felt like swallowing broken glass.

Move, Ivy. Get up.

My fingers clawed at the asphalt, but my legs were dead weight. A "setup" was too clean a word for this. This was an execution. The gang, my "brothers," had left me to bleed out behind a dumpster like a bag of trash. All for a handful of credits and a territorial favor.

Darkness didn't fall; it rose from the ground. My heart gave one final, stuttering kick against my ribs.

Is this it? Dying in the dirt over a lie?

[Host compatibility: 99.8%]

The voice wasn't human. It was cold, vibrating inside my skull like a tuning fork.

[Initiating Vixen Protocol. Reconstructing biological lattice.]

"Wait," I wheezed, the word lost in a bubble of blood.

A searing heat exploded in my chest. It wasn't the burn of a bullet; it was the feeling of a thousand needles sewing my soul back into my skin. My vision whirled into a blinding, sterile white.

The air smelled of ozone and expensive bleach.

I bolted upright, gasping. My lungs filled with crisp, filtered air. No rain. No gasoline. I was on a metal slab, covered in a sheet that felt like silk but looked like plastic.

"What the hell?" I croaked. My voice was different. Higher. Silky.

I scrambled off the table, my feet hitting the floor. The ground was freezing. I stumbled toward a wall of polished obsidian—a mirror.

The scream caught in my throat.

The woman in the reflection wasn't me. I was Ivy—scarred, tan, with a nose that had been broken twice. The woman in the mirror was a goddamn masterpiece. Pale, porcelain skin. Eyes the color of expensive whiskey. Hair like spilled ink.

"Vivian Moretti," I whispered.

I knew that face. Everyone in the city knew that face. She was the Diamond of the North, the socialite who’d been buried in a closed-casket ceremony three years ago.

[Correct,] the voice echoed in my brain. [You are inhabiting the V-Series vessel. I am the consciousness remains of the original. We are the Vixen now.]

"Shut up! Get out of my head!" I slapped my palms against my ears, spinning around the high-tech lab. "What did you do to me? Where is my body?"

[Your body is ash, Ivy. You were dead. I offered a tether. In exchange, we have work to do.]

A holographic screen flickered to life in the air. A man’s face appeared. Sharp jawline. Eyes as cold as a mountain lake. Dante Moretti. My "husband." The man who had allegedly mourned his wife for years while expanding his empire through blood.

[He didn’t love me,] the voice hissed, dripping with a very human venom. [He harvested me. He broke me down for parts and power. Now, we drain him. We take it all