Page 94 of Whispers in the Dark
“I’ll spin up a silent trace team. No press, no chatter. We find him before this blows wide.”
“Good. I’m back-tracing every tower he could’ve hit on the way out. If there’s even a whisper of a signal, I’ll find it.” He ended the call and gripped the wheel. Hard.
Beside him, Ruth placed a hand on his thigh. Her touch grounded him for half a second—but everything else was cold. Hollow. The kind of silence that screamed.
Noah drove, breath tight, mind burning through every scenario. This wasn’t panic. Wasn’t paranoia. It was instinct.
Alex Marcel didn’t disappear. He was taken.
Thirty-One
Time didn’t exist here.No windows. No clocks. No sound beyond the hum of lights, the whir of recycled air, the click of boots when they wanted him to know someone was coming. The chair was the only constant—bolted to the floor, metal, back straight, impossible to rest in. His arms had long since gone numb from the cuffs behind him. His lip was split. His right eye swollen. The blood on his chest was dry. From his nose, his mouth, maybe from somewhere deeper.
They didn’t ask questions anymore but fed him thoughts. Tried to reshape his reality.
"You’re not Alex Marcel," the voice would say, different each time. One male. One female. One distorted through a speaker like a machine trying to sound human.
"You are not an assistant U.S. attorney. There is no task force. You were embedded by foreign handlers. You were conditioned."
It came like a rhythm. Repetition. Carefully timed doses of confusion and chemical manipulation. The lights never went off. Sometimes they brightened without warning, slicing his skull. Other times, the room fell into perfect, complete darkness for a time until the sensory void itself felt like a weapon.
And the voice kept returning. "You’ve been compromised. You’re compromised."
They flashed images. Photos. Names scrambled. Falsified files with his signature on them—falsified legal briefs, backdated cases, fake operation logs that looked real. Betrayals of people he worked with. Like he’d been working against the U.S. Attorney the entire time.
"You were never their friend," the voice said. "You were always ours."
He told himself it was a lie. At first, he resisted. Laughed. Bit back at them with sarcasm and silence. But time chipped away at everything.
They played him Charlotte’s voice—he thought it was Charlotte. A recording, maybe. Maybe AI. Maybe her under duress. He couldn’t tell anymore.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to fight this. Just come back. Just say it. Say who you are.”
He clung to names like lifelines. Alex. Charlotte. Brad. Noah. Ethan. But sometimes they blurred. Faces melted in his mind. He forgot details. Who said what. He had no idea what day it was. The last time he ate. The last time he emptied his bladder or bowel. If he had ever left the room at all.
The latest session was the worst thus far.
They flooded his system with something new—something that made his limbs feel foreign. Like his own hands were on delay. Like he was observing someone else being broken.
“You’re Gideon Ward’s failure,” the voice said calmly. “You were built for structure. He broke you. We're here to rebuild you."
That one stuck.
He didn’t even know what it meant. But the mention of Ward—it cut deeper than the rest.
Because part of him, some tiny part buried under the exhaustion and the haze, knew, if they were invoking Gideon Ward, then this was never just about information. This was about his identity. And they weren’t trying to extract who? What was his name? They were trying to erase him.
Alex didn’t sleep anymore, not really. He drifted between pain and haze, between light too bright and silence too thick. The line between waking and unconsciousness blurred until he couldn’t tell which version of himself was real.
He thought—hoped—they’d broken him already. But no. That was the thing about professional erasure: it didn’t look like pain. It looked like control. Precision.
They took his name first.
"You're not him," the voice told him again. Calm. Always calm. The kind of calm that made his skin crawl.
They stopped using his name in every interaction. No moniker. No ID. Just “him” or sometimes “the subject.” They rewrote his timeline. Fed him fake news. Showed him photos of people he didn’t recognize and said they were his colleagues. Said he’d been planted. Activated. That his memories were false. Constructed to keep him useful.
They took his voice next. They stopped asking him questions and started feeding him scripts. “You were recruited in college at nineteen. You were trained in the Black Hills. Your identity was built. The name ‘Alex Marcel’ was assigned. You worked your way into the task force. You were activated when Gideon went to prison and Elias went dark.”
