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 back.]

"I'm a biker, not a spy," I snarled, gripping the edge of a surgical tray. "I don't know how to be a damn socialite!"

[You’ll learn. Or you’ll truly die. And believe me, Ivy, the void is much colder than this room.]

My heart hammered against the new, fragile ribs. This was a nightmare. I was a wolfless girl from the slums, a low-tier runner who just wanted to survive. Now I was wearing the skin of a ghost.

I looked at my hands. The calluses were gone. The grease under my fingernails was replaced by a perfect French manicure. I felt like a fraud. A puppet.

"Why me?" I asked.

[Because you have nothing left to lose. And because you hate men like him just as much as I do.]

A heavy, hydraulic hiss echoed through the room. The reinforced steel doors at the far end of the lab began to slide open.

"Act," the voice commanded. "Don't let him see the rat under the silk."

I froze, pulling the thin sheet around my shoulders. My pulse was a frantic rhythm in my ears.

A man stepped through the steam of the pressurized doorway. Dante Moretti. He looked exactly like the tabloids, but the aura he put off was suffocating. It was heavy, dominant—the kind of presence that made your knees want to hit the floor.

He didn't look shocked. He didn't rush over to hug his "resurrected" wife. He didn't even blink. He just checked a digital watch on his wrist and walked toward me, his expensive shoes clicking rhythmically on the tile.

He stopped three feet away. The scent of sandalwood and cold iron hit me. He looked at my face—Vivian’s face—with the clinical boredom of a man inspecting a refurbished car.

"Ohh... Dante?" I tried to mimic the softness I'd heard in old vids of her. My voice trembled.

He reached out, his gloved fingers catching my chin. He tilted my head back, his grip firm enough to bruise. He wasn't looking for love in my eyes. He was looking for a malfunction.

"Welcome back, Number Twelve," he said. His voice was a low, smooth rasp that sent a shiver of pure terror down my spine.

"Number... what?" I stammered.

Dante let go of my chin, wiping his glove as if I’d soiled it. He turned his back on me, heading toward the exit.

"The others lasted a week before their brains fried," he said over his shoulder. "Try not to die so quickly this time. I have a gala on Friday, and I need a wife who doesn't drool."

The doors hissed shut behind him, leaving me in the silence of the lab with a ghost screaming for blood in my head.