The click of the phone settling back into its cradle was the loudest sound Noah Carter had ever heard. It wasn't a plastic-on-plastic sound; it was the sound of a vault door sealing, of a final, definitive period being placed at the end of a sentence he had spent weeks, months, bleeding to write. The dial tone had been a flat, electronic requiem, and now the silence that replaced it was a physical weight, pressing down on the sterile, abandoned hotel room, crushing the air from his lungs.
He stood, paralyzed, the receiver's ghost still pressed against his ear. The words echoed in the hollowed-out chamber of his mind, each one a precise, surgical incision.
You want Voss. Well, he is conquered now.
They weren't shouted or snarled. They were delivered with the calm, dispassionate clarity of a scientist stating an observed result. The voice… the voice was a key scraping against the lock of a terrible, recent memory. It was the voice from the alley. The man in black. The one who had offered water and a clean handkerchief and a discourse on falling stars as Noah's life bled out onto the rain-slicked concrete.
A low, guttural sound escaped Noah's throat, a hybrid of a laugh and a snarl. His lips pulled back from his teeth in a rictus of pure, uncomprehending fury. "What the fuck?" he whispered to the empty room, the words gritty and raw. "What in the absolute fuck is he trying to say?"
His mind, a machine built for logic and deduction, short-circuited. The gears, already strained from grief and paranoia, screamed against each other. Conquered. The word bounced around his skull, refusing to find a logical landing pad. Did it mean Voss was dead? Murdered by the speaker to tie up a loose end? Was he a hostage, subdued and imprisoned? Or was this all some grotesque, elaborate prank, a final twist of the knife from a mind that found its fun in the suffering of others? Every hypothesis felt simultaneously plausible and utterly insane. The familiar voice was the central, maddening paradox. The concerned citizen from the storm and the phantom on the phone were the same person, and that person had just declared their entire quest null and void.
Their motivations, so fiercely focused just moments ago, shattered like a pane of glass struck by a stone. The single, burning star of purpose that had guided them through the darkness—find Voss, find the man who killed John—had been extinguished. They were adrift again, back in the formless, terrifying void of square one, but this time, the void had a voice, and it was laughing at them.
"Isn't the voice familiar?"
Luna's question was a soft, hesitant intrusion into his internal maelstrom. She stood by the overturned desk chair, her arms wrapped around herself as if for warmth. Her face was pale, but her eyes were sharp, focused inward on the same haunting echo.
Noah didn't look at her. "We just lost our only concrete lead, Luna. The one thing we pulled from the fire. And you're doing voice analysis?" His voice was tight, frayed wire.
"Curious, that's all," she murmured, her gaze distant. "'He has been conquered.' It's such a strange choice of words. Not 'he's dead.' Not 'he's gone.' Conquered. Like a territory. A problem to be solved." She was picking at the thread, the way she used to pick at loose threads on John's school sweaters, a nervous, maternal habit. "Does it mean we were wrong? That we were chasing the wrong person all along? But no… he said the name. He knew we were looking for Voss. He was answering a question we hadn't even asked aloud."
"Remember the person we met?" she continued, her voice gaining a sliver of strength as the connection solidified in her mind. She turned to face him fully now. "In the alley. When you were shot. I'd bet everything it's the same voice. The same man."
That finally broke his paralysis. Noah whirled to face her, a fresh wave of anger burning through the shock. "Man, we just watched our only hope turn to dust, and you're talking about the goddamn voice! We already know what it means! Voss is dead. 'Conquered' is just a five-dollar word for a corpse. That… that thing on the phone just confessed to a murder." His interpretation was a brutal, straightforward slam of a door. It was the only way his mind could process the chaos—by forcing it into the simple, brutal box of a closed case.
Luna flinched at his tone but held her ground. "Voss… he died?" she asked, her voice small, testing the finality of the word.
"Do you have hearing problems all of a sudden?" he countered, the words lashing out.
"Uhh, no. Why would you ask that?" Her own frustration began to simmer, a defense against his onslaught.
"Because the man on the phone just spelled it out for us!" Noah's voice rose, echoing in the small, stale room. He gestured violently at the phone as if it were the speaker itself. "He said Voss is conquered! That means he's dead! Gone! Eliminated! What other possible meaning could there be? It's over!"
"It may have meant something else!" Luna's voice cracked, a desperate plea for a fragment of hope, for a crack in the door he was so determined to slam shut. "Something we're not seeing. It's not a word you use for a… a simple killing. It implies a struggle, a victory. A… a conclusion to a conflict we didn't even know was happening."
But the argument was a ghost, a pantomime of conflict over a corpse. They were circling the same, terrible truth from different angles. The shared, unspoken point that hung between them was heavier than any spoken word: they had failed. The hunt, the sacrifice, the bullet wound, the journey into the heart of the storm—it had all led to this anonymous room and a dead-end pronouncement from a ghost. The chances of ever uncovering the final, brutal truth about John's murder had not just diminished; they had, in that moment, felt utterly extinguished.
The fight drained out of Noah as suddenly as it had arrived, leaving behind a crushing fatigue. His shoulders slumped, the angry energy replaced by a leaden defeat. He ran a hand over his face, his palm scraping against the stubble on his jaw. "We need to go home," he said, the words hollow. "Back to Kansas. There's nothing for us here." He looked around the room, his gaze skipping over the license plate, the overturned chair, the tangled sheets—the stage props of their failure. "But we'll stay tonight. It's late. We'll leave in the morning. Okay?"
Luna simply nodded, the motion weary and resigned. She knew this version of Noah, the one that followed the temper tantrums—the deflated, emotionally spent man who retreated into a shell of pragmatic silence. To argue further was to risk a deeper, more permanent fracture. "Okay," she whispered.
The silence that descended upon them was a different entity from the one before the phone rang. That had been a silence of anticipation, charged with the electricity of the hunt. This was the silence of a vigil, thick with the ashes of defeat. They moved around each other with the quiet, careful movements of archaeologists in a tomb, unwilling to disturb the relics of their own shattered hopes.
Night draped itself over Dallas, its neon glow seeping like diluted blood around the edges of the blackout curtains. Luna lay on one side of the king-sized bed, the mattress feeling vast and cold. She was physically exhausted, but her mind was a runaway engine, replaying the voice, the words, the look on Noah's face. She could hear the faint, rhythmic sound of the shower from the ensuite bathroom. Noah had been in there for a long time. Fifteen minutes bled into twenty. The steady hiss of the water was a constant, but beneath it, she began to discern another sound.
A low, muffled murmur.
She lay still, straining to listen. It wasn't the sound of someone singing or talking on a phone. It was lower, more guttural, a private, anguished monologue. She couldn't make out the words, just the cadence of a desperate, one-sided conversation. Then, a phrase, sharp and clear, punched through the white noise of the shower and the door.
"…Voss is important, and Luna is a—"
The sentence was cut off, as if he'd clapped a hand over his own mouth. The rest was swallowed by the water's hiss.
A cold knot tightened in Luna's stomach. Luna is a— A what? A liability? A fool? A weight holding him back? The unfinished accusation hung in the air, more terrifying than any completed insult.
"Luna is what?" she called out, her voice sharper than she intended.
The murmuring from the bathroom ceased instantly. The only sound was the relentless spray of the shower. The sudden silence was more alarming than the noise had been.
"Noah?" she tried again, swinging her legs out of bed. The plush carpet felt alien under her feet. "Who were you talking to?"
No answer.
A primal fear, distinct from the fear of the Architect or of failure, gripped her—the fear of a fracture in the last fortress she had left. She crossed the room and tried the bathroom door. The knob turned easily in her hand; it wasn't locked.
The scene inside was a stark, private portrait of a man coming undone. The air was thick with steam, condensing on the cold mirrors and tile. Noah wasn't in the shower. He was standing beside it, leaning heavily against the wall, his forehead pressed to the cool, slick surface. He was fully clothed, his shirt and trousers soaked through and clinging to his frame, as if he'd stepped under the spray and forgotten to undress. His shoulders shook with silent, violent tremors. In his hand, he clutched a wad of damp toilet paper, which he was using to clumsily wipe at the tears and mucus streaming down his face.
The anger and suspicion in Luna's heart evaporated, replaced by a wave of devastating pity and shared pain. "Noah," she breathed, rushing to him. "Oh, Noah."
She wrapped her arms around his wet, trembling body, ignoring the water soaking into her own nightclothes. He was rigid at first, a statue of grief, but then he seemed to collapse into her, his full weight leaning against her as a ragged, broken sob finally tore itself from his throat. It was a sound she had never heard from him before—not the angry roars, not the quiet tears in the dark, but the raw, unfiltered sound of a soul being shredded from the inside out.
"Why are you crying?" she whispered, her own tears mingling with the steam and the water on his shirt. It was a foolish question; they both knew the vast, unanswerable 'why' that loomed over them.
He pulled back slightly, his hands gripping her arms, his eyes, red-rimmed and desperate, locking onto hers. The expression on his face was terrifying in its intensity—a landscape of pure, unadulterated agony. "I remember," he choked out, the words bubbling up from a deep, poisoned well. "I was in here, and I just… I remembered. The way John would laugh when I tossed him in the air. The sound of his footsteps running down the hall when I came home from work. The weight of him falling asleep on my chest." A fresh sob wracked his body. "I can't… I can't carry this, Luna. The not knowing. The why. I can't do this investigation. It's eating me alive. But I swear to you, I will find who did this. I will look them in the eye, and I will kill them. I will kill them."
The vow was a raw, primal thing, stripped of all pretense of justice or legality. It was the promise of a father, written in blood and grief.
Luna held him, letting the storm pass. When his breathing began to even out, becoming ragged hiccups instead of soul-deep sobs, she took a small step back, her hands still on his shoulders. The unanswered question still hung between them, a ghost in the steam-filled room.
"What were you saying, Noah?" she asked, her voice gentle but firm. "Before I came in. You said, 'Luna is a—' A what? And who were you talking to?"
For a fraction of a second, a veil descended over his eyes. The raw agony was replaced by a flicker of something else—calculation, evasion. Then it was gone, so quickly she almost doubted she'd seen it. He took a deep, shuddering breath, mastering himself with a visible effort that was almost as painful to watch as the breakdown itself.
He looked at her, his gaze now steady, if exhausted. "You," he said, his voice hoarse but clear. "You are an important piece for the investigation. The most important piece." He gestured vaguely around the bathroom. "I was talking to myself. Making theories, running through scenarios, trying to find a new angle. And remembering… just remembering moments. That's all."
The explanation was smooth, logical. It fit the facts. A man under unimaginable stress, talking himself through a crisis in the privacy of a bathroom. It was a perfectly reasonable story.
And as Luna looked into her husband's eyes, at the man who was her partner in this hell, the father of her murdered son, she knew, with a cold certainty that settled deep in her bones, that he was lying.
He had managed to explain it away, to construct a narrative that was just plausible enough to end the conversation. But the unfinished sentence—Luna is a——echoed in the silence that followed, a tiny, sharp shard of doubt lodged in the heart of their shared grief, promising that the path ahead was even darker and more treacherous than they had feared.
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Chapter 22 Ends
To Be Continued…