All Chapters of THE GHOST PROTOCOL : Chapter 11
- Chapter 20
160 chapters
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE ROOM WITH NO DOORS
It crawled back into Adrian’s consciousness like a slow infection, burning along his ribs and tightening around his lungs. He surfaced through the darkness with a raw gasp, and for a moment, he didn’t know if he was alive or trapped inside another nightmare.A single light flickered above him.Not sunlight.Cold, white, artificial.He tried to move, but chains tightened around his wrists and ankles. They weren’t heavy. They were worse. They were precise. Metal cuffs strapped with biomedical locks dug into his skin, tracking every twitch of his nerves.A sterile hum filled the air. Machines. Not the kind found in a hospital. The kind found in places the world never admits exist.Adrian forced his eyes to focus.Concrete walls. Reinforced ceilings. No windows. No identifiable markings.He was in a black site.A real one.Not military.Not the government.Not anything human.His breath steadied as he tested the restraints again. No give. Whoever had captured him knew exactly who they wer
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE SISTER IN THE SMOKE
For a moment, the entire world froze.Adrian didn’t breathe.Didn’t blink.Didn’t move.The smoke curled around her like a ghost’s shroud, exposing half of her face, the same face he spent years trying to remember without breaking.Mara Kaine.His sister.Dead and buried.Dead because of the ambush.Dead because of him.Dead because Marcus sold them out.Except she wasn’t dead.She stood ten feet away, steady, balanced, and with her rifle raised without a tremor. Her eyes, once warm, sharp, and full of fire, were now cold enough to carve bone.She wasn’t shaking.Adrian was.Cole coughed blood into Adrian’s arm, dragging him back into the moment. “She’s… she’s not… herself…” he choked.Mara didn’t even glance at Cole. Her gaze locked on Adrian as if Cole didn’t exist.“Step forward,” she said quietly. “Without the weapon.”Adrian slowly lowered Cole against the cracked wall. Cole groaned in pain, clutching his chest, but Adrian couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t look anywhere except Mara’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE MAN MADE OF SHADOWS
Darkness didn’t settle.It slammed.A living, suffocating force that swallowed every corner of the ruined chamber. For one heartbeat the world was black silk stretched across Adrian’s eyes. Then the sound returned, metal scraping, boots moving, the raw sucking breath of men trying not to die.Someone fired again. Muzzle flash carved a split-second image into the dark.Mara.Rifle raised.Torn between Adrian and the silhouette of their father.Then it was black again.Adrian didn’t waste breath on fear. He dropped low, shifted his weight, and moved. His instincts did the work, the conditioning Marcus spoke about, the instincts Ross trained into him, the buried thing Cipher wanted to wake. He didn’t think, didn’t choose.He hunted.A boot scuffed near his right. Not Mara’s. Too heavy. Too sloppy.Adrian struck blindly.Knuckles cracked against bone. Someone grunted. A rifle clattered to the floor.He snatched it.The emergency lights sputtered once, barely reclaiming life. A thin red gl
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE THING WE CALLED COLE
The creature stepped fully into the tunnel lights, and the world around Adrian seemed to tighten like a noose. It had Cole’s face, the same jawline, the same scar under the eye from their first mission, and the same quiet calm Cole always carried before a firefight. But that was where the resemblance ended.Its body was wrong.Too large. Too broad. Too fluid in the shadows. Muscles shifted under its skin like something was crawling inside it. The eyes glowed a dim, unnatural blue. Not human. Not alive. A puppet wearing a corpse’s memory.Adrian couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t look away. His ribs felt trapped in his own chest.Mara’s fingers dug into his arm. “It is not him. Not even close.”The creature tilted its head, mimicking Cole’s old habit of analyzing threats. Adrian felt his pulse slam in his ears. It was mocking the memory. Cipher built this thing to crawl under the skin of the past and tear it open.“Mara,” Adrian whispered, “did you know they made this?”Her throat bobbed. “I knew
CHAPTER FIFTEEN:THE MONSTER WEARING COLE’S FACE
The tunnel lights stuttered, flickering between darkness and a harsh white glow that made everything look unreal. Adrian stared at the creature stepping toward them, his lungs freezing mid breath. Cole’s face looked almost perfect. Same jawline. Same haunted eyes. But the body was all wrong. The shoulders were too wide, the arms stretched with bulging sinew, and the skin across its chest rippled like something alive moved underneath it.It didn’t breathe like a human.It hissed, chest rising in sharp jerks as if imitating the act.Mara took a step back, her hand trembling just enough for Adrian to notice. She had seen horrors in Cipher’s labs, but this creature shook her. That alone told Adrian how bad this was.The thing tilted its head, studying them with interest. Its lips tried to shape a smile, but the expression stretched unnaturally, tearing slightly at the corners. No blood leaked out. Just a thin, colorless fluid.Mara gripped Adrian’s wrist. We have to go. Move now.The beas
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE WAKING
White.Not light.Not heat.Just white, total, crushing, suffocating white.Adrian tried to breathe, but his lungs refused to move. His body felt suspended, weightless, like he had been torn out of himself and left drifting in the space between a thought and a scream.Then the pain returned.Sharp. Electric. Crawling through every nerve.A second scream, his own, tore through the void.Adrian.A voice. Echoing. Familiar.Adrian, wake up.Mara?No, the voice wasn’t hers. It wasn’t human.The white cracked like glass.A sound rushed back, metal collapsing, alarms blaring, monsters roaring. The memory hit him like a punch. Cole’s distorted face. The creature closing in. Mara’s hand on his arm. And,His father.Holding the detonator.Saying I’m waking you up.The white shattered completely.Adrian fell.His body slammed against cold metal flooring.He gasped hard, coughing, chest rising in sharp spasms as sensation returned like fire. His vision blurred, then slowly cleared.Where,He was
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:THE ECHOES OF WHAT SHOULD NOT EXIST
Air slammed back into Adrian’s lungs like he had been drowning.His body jerked, coughing violently, vision snapping into focus in fragments, shadows, broken lights, and the sound of Mara’s ragged breathing somewhere close. Cold metal pressed against his palms. The ground vibrated as if the whole world was shaking beneath him.He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious.Seconds.Minutes.Hours?Pain crept up the back of his skull, sharp and electrical, like the neural detonator was still inside him, still firing. He blinked until his vision stopped blurring.The corridor was gone.So was the creature.So was the fake General Kaine.Instead, Adrian found himself lying on the grated floor of a massive chamber, circular, dim, built of steel and humming machinery. Giant cylindrical pods lined the walls, each one flickering with pale blue light. None were fully active, but all were… beating.Beating like hearts.Mara knelt beside him, one hand pressed against his chest as if checking wh
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:THE GHOST IN ADRIAN’S HEAD
The darkness didn’t lift all at once.It peeled back slowly, thin layers of shadow tearing away until Adrian became aware of a low hum vibrating through his bones. He wasn’t standing. He wasn’t lying down either. He was suspended… floating… weightless, as if gravity had forgotten he existed.Then the voices returned.Whispers. Glimpses. Echoes of people he knew. People he lost. People he thought dead.And one voice that cut through the rest like a blade.“Adrian. Focus.”His father.But not truly.Not anymore.Adrian’s eyes snapped open.He was inside a chamber. No doors. No windows. Just white curved walls pulsing with faint light, like the inside of a living machine. He felt wires attached to his skin, thin metallic strands burrowing into his arms, his back, the base of his neck.A neural prison.A Cipher mind cage.He tried to move, but every muscle rebelled with sharp electricity, locking him in place. Panic clawed at his ribs, hot, raw. He didn’t let it show. Panic never saved an
CHAPTER NINETEEN:THE BLOOD THAT KNOWS YOUR NAME
Adrian never trusted silence.Not after Cipher.Not after the tunnels.Not after watching the world inside his head crack open like glass dropped on concrete.But this silence, this empty, humming, suffocating quiet, felt like something was waiting.Watching.Listening.He sat on the metal floor of the abandoned substation Mara had dragged him into hours earlier. The lights flickered overhead, the kind of sickly yellow glow that made shadows look alive. His skull still throbbed from the neural blast, every pulse sending a sharp sting behind his eyes.Mara paced in front of him for the fifth time, boots splashing through shallow puddles. She kept pretending she wasn’t watching him, but she was. He could feel her eyes on him every time he blinked.She was scared.Of Cipher.Of the creature.Of whatever that fake version of General Kaine had done to him.But more than anything, she was scared of what Adrian might become now.“What did you see in the blast?” Mara asked quietly.Adrian rub
CHAPTER TWENTY:THE GIRL IN THE GLASS ROOM
The medbay lights hummed softly, a gentle white glow that didn’t match the rattling storm inside Adrian’s head. He stood with his palms flat on the steel counter, breathing in slow, ragged pulls while Mara paced the room for what had to be the hundredth time.She hadn’t said a word in the last five minutes.That scared him more than the monster wearing Cole’s face.More than the detonator General Kaine had triggered.She only paced when she didn’t trust her own thoughts.The room felt too quiet. Too clean. Too still. The kind of stillness that belonged to a grave.Adrian lifted his head. The faint tremor in his hands had not stopped since he woke up.The detonator… the blast of blue light… the silhouette of his father calling him son. His mind still couldn’t tell what part had been real and what part had been a Cipher illusion.Mara finally stopped moving and faced him. Her hair fell over half her face, and she didn’t bother brushing it back.You were out for three hours, she said. Th