CHAPTER 535: PROJECT CLEAN SLATE

Ace stood at the observation pane with a deep frown. On the other side of the one-way glass was the containment room. As its name implied, it was built to cage or to isolate, depending on the need. For Alaric, it was both.

The walls were blinding white, and sterile to the point of cruelty.. The bed was bolted to the ground, and it had a desk that looked more like it belonged in an asylum than in a packhouse. The wide glass turned the space into a specimen box, built so others could watch but never be seen.

It reminded Ace of those setups you saw in movies where the government stole people away and conducted secret experiments on them. But this place was built for controlled experiments, not family.

Right now, his brother, Alaric, looked vulnerable lying on that bed. His wrists hung heavy at his sides, chest rising in shallow breaths. Even unconscious, Alaric’s face was drawn tight, with his jaw clenched as though his rage had followed him into sleep. The sight twisted something in Ace’s stomach.

Ace pressed his palm against the glass and snatched it back when his own reflection stared back at him, wide-eyed and shaken. He still could not forget what happened.

All his life he had envied Alaric, their parents’ golden son, the one who carried all their pride. But watching Zara cough and clutch her throat on the floor while guards dragged Alaric away had knocked the envy clean out of him. All that was left was shock and a cold knot of dread.

Ace knew his mother can be cold and go to the extreme at times but locking Alaric in the containment room like a dangerous animal was a little too much. He was his brother after all.

Then again, strangling your mother was also too far. That part wasn’t negotiable.

Ace exhaled through his nose. Staring wouldn’t fix anything. There had to be a reason for that kind of rage. If he could understand what made his brother attack his mother, perhaps, he could come up with a solution to settle the dispute.

For once, he wasn’t going to be selfish. They were family after all. So Ace turned from the glass and headed for the labs.

Out of the four major wolf packs, the North Pack was the most technically advanced and industrialized pack. The main packhouse sat at the crest of a slope, stone and glass stacked in clean lines and screamed of wealth. That was the face they showed the pack. But behind it, the estate unfolded into what truly made the North different.

Three long, low buildings stretched out like arms, linked with enclosed walkways that never iced even in winter. This was the Storm Complex. The left wing specialized in biomedicine and neural science. The right wing built the government approved weapons, and restraints. The central wing fused the two together, where blueprints were made into prototypes.

Off to the side, two warehouses squatted under heavy roofs, marked with black stenciled letters. W-A housed raw materials and volatile compounds in temperature-controlled bays. W-B held crates of finished prototypes, sealed drums, and racks of parts waiting for shipment. A narrow, rails-on-concrete corridor connected W-B to a loading platform. From there, shipments moved out to Storm Enterprise HQ—also in the North—and from HQ they split into subsidiaries in human cities.

Beneath the central building was the sublevel where Alaric was being held.

Ace and Alaric had their own floors aboveground where they made their own discoveries. It was a strange privilege—being raised in a house where playrooms came with fume hoods and centrifuges—but it was theirs.

Ace took the north bridge to Zara’s floor. The guard outside the door glanced at him and looked away. Family didn’t need clearance.

The lab hit him in layers. The cold and the antiseptic bite that lived in the vents no matter the season. Underneath it, his mother’s scent still lingered, meaning she’d been here only minutes ago. Ace contemplated coming back later when a clutter of work on the table caught his attention.

Curiosity tugged him forward before he could stop it and he picked the old, brown, edges furred from too much handling. Notations in Zara’s precise writing crawled along the margins.

The sketch in the center was of some sort of helmet. It was designed in such a way the cap flared at the temples, ridged along the crown, with petals of some metallic mesh resting over where a werewolf’s umbra lobe would swell when the shift pressed at the skin.Silver thread traced a lattice around the ear cups, which were not cups at all but discs cut with strange grooves.

He leafed through the next page and there were more detailed drawings and cross-sections. A map of the lupine cortex, what old papers called the "beast brain," and what the new ones called the lupine network, and it was curved like a second hand around the hippocampus.

There were arrows pointing from scent centers to association clusters, thickened lines where bond responses burned brightest. A paragraph was underlined three times: bond recall pathways are reinforced by scent anchoring, tactile imprinting, and hormonal surge—episodic memories ’baked in’ under the bond response are resistant to standard inhibition.

Ace flipped to the diary and saw trial entries, dates, subjects and results.

Subject K-7:beta male. Exposure to Crown—low amplitude, short duration. Result: disorientation, mild dissociation, temporary scent dulling. Recovered baseline in 36 hours.

Subject D-3:omega female. Crown—moderate amplitude with micro-dose wolfsbane. Result: erasure of recent episodic recall; bond-linked memory unaffected; increased anxiety; recovered partial recall after 72 hours.

Subject H-1: rogue. Crown—high amplitude with silver resonance. Result: blackout rage; loss of shift control; feral snap; terminated.

Ace’s grip tightened, dread growing inside of him. He noted a line of text below it that said procedure aborted in subsequent trials; resonance threshold recalibrated—pretended to make it better. It didn’t.

He turned one more page and saw the name of the device : Mnemosyne Crown.

The name had been printed at the top of a draft protocol and below it was the codename Zara had given the program in the first few months of development.

Project Clean Slate.