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 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

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 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 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