All Chapters of THE MAN THEY TRIED TO ERASE: Chapter 141
- Chapter 150
164 chapters
140
The safehouse Henry secured after Finn’s forced removal from Callahan Tower was nothing more than an abandoned data-cache bunker buried beneath an old tram station—a place that smelled faintly of iron, dust, and forgotten years. But to Finn, who had just endured the most public destruction of his life, the bunker felt like the only place on earth where the world couldn’t shove a camera in his face or spit accusations at his feet.The place was dark and cramped, lined with faded circuitry that once fed obsolete transport systems, and now hummed with the low, ambient noise of portable equipment Henry and Nadia had hauled in. The silence inside was heavy and unnatural, broken only by the faint echo of the riots outside and the occasional crackle of static from Rowan’s temporary signal dampeners.Finn sat on a narrow bench near the back wall, elbows on his knees, staring at the cracked concrete floor as if it held the answer to every question he had spent his entire life trying to outrun.
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Finn paced in restless lines behind Rowan’s chair, unable to contain the surge of adrenaline and dread thrumming through his body; he had just lost his company, his reputation was being shredded across the city, and Elias Crowne’s influence pulsed in the shadows like poison waiting for its moment to strike. If there was ever a moment to dig into their enemies’ forbidden files, it was now—and Rowan was the only person Finn trusted to go deep enough into the dark without losing himself completely.Rowan hunched over the terminal, fingers flying across the keyboard at a pace that blurred into a constant stream of motion. The monitors around him shimmered with layers of code Finn had never seen—jagged, shifting structures, encrypted strings twisting into unnatural shapes, fragments of Luxon’s abandoned protocols flickering red as Rowan pushed deeper into locked archives. Every few minutes the system responded with a soft, angry hiss, as if aware of his intrusion. Nadia watched the proces
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These records should have been outdated, irrelevant, forgotten. Yet Nadia treated them with the caution of someone defusing an explosive device, because something about the seals, the signatures, and the layered encryption made her pulse race with unease. Finn paced behind her, restless energy rolling off him in sharp waves; Rowan monitored several dark-network channels, hoping to detect any Luxon attempt to track their movements; Henry checked the perimeter sensors again and again, no longer trusting even analog systems to keep them safe.Finally, Nadia found it.A thin folder, unmarked except for a single symbol etched faintly on the lower right corner—a symbol that didn’t belong to any Callahan department but still haunted Finn’s nightmares: the angular crown emblem of the asylum.Her breath caught. “Finn.”His steps stopped mid-stride. He turned toward her slowly, eyes narrowing when he saw the mark. “Where did you find that?”“Deep in the offline audit logs,” Nadia said, sliding
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The coordinates Ruth left behind led Finn, Nadia, Henry, and Rowan to the outskirts of the city where the industrial district dissolved into abandoned terrain—half-finished construction sites, broken warehouses, and forgotten underground structures swallowed by time.The sky hung low, the clouds bruised and heavy with unshed rain, as if the entire world were holding its breath while Finn followed the only trail Ruth had ever kept hidden even from him. They parked beneath a rusted overpass, its concrete skeleton cracked by years of neglect, and Finn stepped out of the vehicle with a tension that clung to him like a shadow—every step pulling him closer to truths Ruth had died protecting.Rowan inspected the device linked to Ruth’s will. “The coordinates are accurate,” he muttered, sweeping his scanner across the debris. “But whatever she hid didn’t show up on any public or private map. This vault is completely off-grid.”Henry crouched near an old drainage panel embedded in the ground,
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The silence inside Ruth’s hidden vault had barely settled around them before the first tremor struck—a faint vibration that slithered through the metal beams overhead and crawled down the walls like a warning whispered by the earth itself. Finn froze with the folder still clutched in his hand, his breath catching as the vibrations deepened into something unmistakably rhythmic: not shifting ground, not failing machinery, but footsteps. Many footsteps. Boots—heavy, coordinated, approaching with the relentless precision of men who moved only when commanded by someone they feared more than death.Henry’s eyes snapped toward the tunnel entrance. “We’re not alone.”Rowan’s hand flew to the portable interference module he’d placed earlier. “Luxon signatures—multiple. They’re jamming the perimeter. They found us.”Nadia drew her blade with a fluid, practiced motion. “Shawn.”Finn’s pulse spiked. “How did he track us here?”Rowan typed furiously on the portable device, face tightening. “He pig
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The safehouse was silent when they returned—too silent, as though the walls themselves sensed the weight of what Finn carried pressed against his chest in the secured pouch. The city’s distant sirens bled through the cracks in the concrete, muffled and distorted.The bunker lights flickered softly, casting long shadows across the dusty floor and illuminating the exhaustion etched into every one of them. Henry, bruised and bleeding, lay propped on an old storage crate while Nadia tended to the wound along his ribs.Rowan worked at the far end of the room, desperately trying to re-route their signal dampeners after the chaos in the vault. But Finn didn’t register any of them. He stood in the center of the bunker, hands trembling as he pulled out the documents Ruth had died to hide. His skin felt too tight. His chest felt too small. His thoughts spun in spirals so fast he could barely keep his footing.Nadia noticed immediately. She stepped toward him, gently placing one hand on his fore
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The Callahan Tower gleamed like a shard of polished steel beneath the slate-gray morning sky, but the illusion of corporate order ended the moment one stepped inside. Panic rippled through every floor like invisible static.Executives whispered in hallways. Assistants carried shredded documents to off-site disposal units. Security teams doubled their rotations, yet every one of them knew the truth: the company was no longer guided by Finn Callahan’s steady leadership. It was bleeding into chaos under new hands—hands not chosen through merit but through coercion, fear, and manipulation.On the forty-seventh floor, Hans sat at the long obsidian conference table with the posture of someone who believed victory was already locked in his bones. His gold watch glinted under the ceiling lights, his silk tie pristine, his smile sharp enough to cut glass. He pressed his fingertips together, examining the digital projections floating above the table. Stock fluctuations. Media polls. Internal mo
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The safehouse had transformed. The moment Daniella’s warning came through, Finn forced every ounce of blood, pain, grief, and fury into a new purpose: building an operational center capable of hunting an invisible enemy.The cracked floor was now a nest of cables, processors, hard-light projectors, discarded servers, and blinking analog machinery humming with unstable energy. Rowan had claimed the entire left wall with maps, old Luxon schematics, identity charts, encrypted data, and countless shifting windows displaying lines of code that seemed almost alive.The bunker buzzed with an electric tension, the kind that precedes storms powerful enough to rewrite the world. Finn moved across the space like someone newly reborn from the ashes of his own grief—focused, relentless, sharpened to a blade’s edge. The letters from Ruth, the weight of his lineage, the revelation of Elias’s cruelty—everything in him had finally pivoted into a steady, unbreakable resolve that radiated through the bu
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Dawn had not yet broken over the horizon when Finn, Nadia, Henry, and Rowan settled into the bunker’s dim interior once more, the stale air thick with exhaustion and the metallic scent of old wiring. But beneath the fatigue lay something else: a current of urgency that refused to soften. Elias was tightening his net. Shawn was prowling the city like a rabid dog. Daniella’s panic signaled deeper fractures inside Callahan Group. And Finn’s own bloodline—the truth Ruth died for—still hung unanswered in the air like a suspended blade. Henry sat against the reinforced wall, bandaged heavily across his ribs and shoulder, breaths shallow but steady. Pain etched deep lines across his face, but beneath the agony burned quiet determination. His survival had become a statement: he would not fall until Finn got what he needed.Nadia knelt beside him, adjusting the compress under his ribs with careful precision. Henry winced but didn’t flinch away. “You’re healing,” she murmured. “Slow, but steady
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The countryside stretched before them like a forgotten scar across the earth—endless fields of brittle grass, gnarled trees bowed by relentless wind, and abandoned farmhouses slowly collapsing into themselves. The sky above was pale and heavy with approaching storm clouds, casting the rural landscape in a muted gray that felt almost otherworldly.Finn drove the battered vehicle down the narrow, cracked road with an intensity that made Nadia glance at him repeatedly, gauging his state of mind. He hadn’t spoken much since leaving the bunker, though every shift of his jaw and every tightening of his grip on the wheel told her everything she needed to know: he would not leave this land without answers. Not after a lifetime of lies, stolen origins, and shadows wearing his name.Nadia checked her device again, scanning the coordinates Henry had provided. “We’re close,” she said. “The signal ends about three hundred meters ahead. Old property line. Looks like the house is still standing.”Fi