All Chapters of Howl of the Forgotten: Chapter 91
- Chapter 100
134 chapters
The Locked Room in Her Mind
Annabelle spent the rest of the morning pacing the length of the estate’s west hallway, unable to sit, unable to focus. Her past—whatever it truly was—pressed against her skull like a fist demanding entry. Every step she took echoed with questions she had no answers to.Ashton watched her from the far end of the corridor, arms folded, but giving her space. Jason and Bernard, however, were studying the files again, checking for patterns, codes, missing pieces. No one spoke much. The weight of the discovery from Chapter 91 clung to each of them like a cold mist.Annabelle finally stopped and leaned against the window, staring out at the quiet grounds.“What did he do to me?” she whispered to her reflection.“Why don’t I remember?”The reflection offered no answers, only a faint tremor around her eyes—fear she couldn’t hide.Behind her, Jason approached, his steps slow and deliberate.“Annabelle,” he said gently, “you’re not going to solve this by punishing yourself.”She turned slightly
The Facility in the Woods
Night fell like a slow descent into another world. The estate’s lights were cut one by one as the team prepared, leaving the grounds draped in purposeful darkness. No words were wasted. No movements were careless. Each person knew the gravity of this night—Annabelle most of all.She dressed in black tactical gear Jason provided. It felt strange on her body, like clothing for a person she had never been but was somehow expected to become. Ashton checked her vest twice before checking it again. Bernard inspected every piece of equipment: flashlights, signal jammers, portable blind-spots, encrypted radios, silent boots.When everything was finally ready, the four of them moved like shadows toward the armored SUV waiting at the back of the estate.Ashton opened the door for her.“You sit between me and Jason,” he said.His tone wasn’t a request. It was protection manifest.She nodded and got in.Bernard took the front passenger seat. Ashton drove. Jason sat on her right, scanning the wood
The Control Room of Echoes
The corridor stretched ahead like the spine of something ancient and unwilling to die. Each footstep they took stirred echoes that didn’t belong to the present—echoes Annabelle felt in her bones long before she heard them.The deeper they moved into the facility, the more the air changed. The cold sharpened. The silence thickened. Even Ashton, who was rarely shaken by anything, tightened his grip on his weapon.“Stay close,” he murmured without looking back.His voice sounded different here—less certain, more alert.Bernard consulted the small blueprint he had reconstructed.“Control room should be just around that corner. Once we’re in, I can access the logs.”Annabelle swallowed hard.“The logs won’t be enough,” she whispered. “There were things they didn’t write down. Things they hid. Things they did without recording.”Jason glanced at her, eyes narrowing thoughtfully.“What kind of things?”Annabelle hesitated.“I don’t know yet. But… the memories are waking up. And they don’t fe
Marcus’s Message
The video flickered on the cracked control room monitor, casting a pale glow across Annabelle’s tense face. Marcus’s shadowed figure leaned against a table, arms crossed, voice calm, deliberate, and almost chilling in its familiarity.“Annabelle Grey,” he said, slow, precise. “I see you’ve returned. I hoped you would. Curiosity always brings the best results… and the worst pain.”Annabelle felt her stomach tighten. The voice—the cadence—it was a memory she hadn’t realized was hers to keep. Something in her chest ached with recognition, though the details remained stubbornly locked.Ashton stepped in front of her, weapon raised, jaw tight. “Stay calm,” he muttered, voice low but firm. “It’s a recording. He’s not here… yet.”Marcus continued, ignoring the presence of the three:“You’ve been hidden for years, trained, broken, and rebuilt without your knowledge. The fragments of your memory… the instincts I planted… all of it leads to one purpose: the key.”Annabelle’s hand went to her te
Awakening the Weapon
The control room was thick with tension. The stale air seemed to vibrate with the echoes of Annabelle’s recovered memories, each one striking like a pulse, each one sharpening her senses. The fragments of training, the conditioning, the cold routines imposed upon her—they no longer frightened her. They made her precise, aware, lethal in ways she hadn’t understood until now.Ashton stood beside her, silent and watchful. Jason adjusted the portable scanners, eyes flicking from the faint glow of the monitors to the shadowed corners of the room. Bernard had taken up position near the back, scanning the windows and doorways, ensuring no unseen threat would disrupt their focus.Annabelle stepped forward toward the central chair—the one that had been her prison and the center of Marcus’s experiments. She reached out, touching the cold metal surface, and the memory struck again: the feeling of being restrained, the sharp electric hum, the whispered commands in a voice not her own.But now, th
The First Strike
The night outside the facility was absolute. No moon, no stars, just the dark canopy of forest pressing in around them. The SUV’s tires crunched softly over the gravel as they exited, each sound swallowed quickly by the shadows. Annabelle sat between Ashton and Jason, her mind calm, every nerve alight with anticipation. Bernard rode shotgun, scanning the perimeter through night-vision goggles, every instinct alert.“This is it,” Ashton murmured, his hand brushing hers briefly, a silent anchor. “No mistakes.”Annabelle nodded, her heart steady. Unlike before, there was no fear—only calculated focus. She had reviewed every memory, every training sequence, every pattern Marcus had forced into her mind, and now she wielded it like a blade.The target was a remote compound, Marcus’s forward command post. Satellite images reconstructed by Bernard and Jason showed the guards’ rotations, the blind spots, and entry points. Marcus always believed in control, but he had underestimated her.Jason
The Breach Within
The moment Marcus rose from his chair, the entire room seemed to constrict. Annabelle felt the old pressure in her mind—the invisible grip he once used to bend her will. The walls hummed with a low-frequency pulse she recognized instantly. It wasn’t sound; it was conditioning.A final trap.Marcus smiled thinly, as if greeting a mistake he had predicted long ago.“You’ve walked right into it, Annabelle. The room is encoded to your neural signature.”Ashton took a step forward, weapon raised, but Annabelle lifted a hand.“Don’t. He wants a reaction. This room is wired for triggers.”Her voice was steady, but the hum pressed deeper into her skull, awakening old reflexes—kneel, submit, obey—commands buried like splinters. Her breath tightened. For a moment, her vision blurred.Marcus saw the flicker.“There it is,” he murmured. “The obedience they could never purge.”Jason bristled, fury in his posture. Bernard scanned the walls, looking for panels, wiring, anything to disrupt.“This pla
The Interrogation Protocol
The room they moved Marcus into was not a torture chamber—not a dungeon, not a dark cell—but a clean, stripped-down operations bay in an abandoned monitoring hub. The walls were bare concrete. The lights were harsh and unflinching. There were no shadows, no corners where fear could hide.Annabelle preferred it that way. Shadows were where Marcus had always thrived.Here, he stood naked beneath the truth.Bernard secured Marcus to a reinforced steel chair—wrists bound, ankles locked, torso strapped against a pressure harness designed to restrict movement without breaking bones. Ashton checked every buckle twice. Jason calibrated the scanning rig, a hybrid device they’d assembled from reclaimed equipment: biometric sensors, cognitive-pattern readers, pulse analyzers.Marcus was silent through all of it.Too silent.Annabelle watched him closely. Even chained, even stripped of his advantage, he carried the same eerie composure. It wasn’t ego. It wasn’t denial. It was the mindset of a man
The Map of Ghosted Minds
The air in the operations bay thickened with a new tension—the kind that came when a plan became bigger than strategy, bigger than vengeance. They weren’t just dismantling a system anymore. They were about to rescue people trapped inside a machine that would kill them for trying to escape.Annabelle kept her gaze fixed on Marcus.“Start talking. The Hive’s location. The operator nest. Every access point.”Marcus exhaled slowly, as though the weight of what she demanded finally pressed against his ribs.“You won’t reach it,” he said quietly. “Even if I gave you coordinates, the Hive exists in layers. To enter the core, you must understand the architecture. And you…”His eyes flickered to her scars, her stance, her history.“…you hate the architecture.”Annabelle didn’t blink.“I survived it. That’s different.”Bernard tapped a command on his console.“Marcus, I need you to understand something. The deep-scan reads your hesitation as obstruction. If you continue, we push the neural prob
The Quiet Before the Next Storm
The night settled over the estate like a heavy velvet curtain, thick enough to muffle even the softest whisper of wind. Annabelle sat by the window in the dim gold glow of a single lamp, her fingers curled around a warm cup she’d long forgotten to sip from. It wasn’t tea she needed. It was air… peace… clarity. But the room felt too still, too crowded with thoughts that refused to leave her alone.She could still feel echoes of everything she had survived—choices that had bruised her, truths that had broken her, and love that had rebuilt her in fragile but stubborn ways. Life had not stopped moving, even when she wished it would. And tonight, as silence wrapped around her shoulders, she realized something: calm was beginning to feel foreign, almost suspicious.She heard soft footsteps behind her, steady and familiar. Ashton.He didn’t speak at first. He simply slid his arms around her from behind, resting his chin lightly on her shoulder. His warmth pressed into her back, grounding her