mike
ABOUT ME
ABOUT ME
STORY BY mike
THE MENDEL INHERITANCE
Reads
THE MENDEL INHERITANCEThe call came at 3:47 AM.Ethan Cole almost ignored the unknown number. Something made him answer."Your father didn't kill himself."The voice was synthetic. The line went dead.For two days, Ethan hasn't slept. Not because of the call, but because of what he uncovered while investigating his father's supposed suicide. Coroner reports don't match. Evidence has been overlooked. And a photograph his father took days before his death contains something impossible—a man standing behind him whose face is completely blank.Not blurred. Not hidden.Missing.As a journalist, Ethan knows how to uncover lies. What he doesn't know is that the truth may be far worse than any conspiracy he has ever investigated.His search leads him to the Facility, a secluded wellness research center hidden beyond security checkpoints and dense forest. Officially, it offers voluntary treatment to troubled patients. Unofficially, it houses residents who never leave.Liam Vance, the Facility's head of security, once believed in its mission. After his wife vanished eight years ago, the Facility promised answers. Instead, it gave him questions—hallways that seem to change overnight, patients who speak in impossible languages, and rumors of a hidden basement level absent from every blueprint.Then there's Oliver Chen, a former patient whose treatment ended in disaster. Following a mysterious therapy session, he began hearing whispers behind walls and finding coded messages hidden throughout the Facility. The staff call him unstable.Oliver knows they're wrong.He's been waiting for someone like Ethan.Charlotte Vance, Liam's estranged sister, possesses a keycard that opens nearly every door in the Facility except one—the door at the end of Sub-Basement Three. A door that hums with unnatural energy. Eighteen months ago, her ex-husband, psychiatrist Dr. Julian Thorne, vanished after entering it.Charlotte wants answers.She also wants revenge.Facility director Amelia Cross remains calm while everything around her begins to unravel. Intelligent, composed, and utterly convinced she's protecting humanity, Amelia oversees experiments designed to alter memory, suppress dangerous knowledge, and control individuals she believes pose a threat.She also recognizes the faceless figure in Ethan's photograph.Because she helped create it.Yet Amelia isn't simply the villain.She's the only person who understands what's truly happening.The Facility's greatest secret has nothing to do with mind control or government cover-ups. It centers on a rare neurological phenomenon known as the Receiver Frequency—a unique harmonic resonance found in certain individuals. Ethan's father discovered it. Others tried to weaponize it.Now something dormant beneath the Facility is awakening.Something that communicates through the Receivers.Something that transforms nightmares into instructions and fear into obedience.The residents were never patients.They were antennas.And someone—or something—is broadcasting.Ethan has only three days before crucial evidence is destroyed and the Facility transfers its most problematic residents. Three days before Amelia's final phase begins. Three days before Liam's missing wife returns—not as a victim, but as a weapon.Everyone is hiding secrets.Everyone has betrayed someone.And the deeper Ethan digs, the more he realizes that every answer leads to something older, darker, and far more dangerous than he imagined.Some doors exist to keep things out.The Facility's doors exist to keep things in.And the thing waiting beneath the building has been waiting for Ethan since before he was born.Welcome to The Mendel Inheritance.You can check in anytime you like.But you can never leave.
Updated at
Fracture Line
Reads
Vance Cole was the Ghost – an off-the-books operator for a joint special operations unit that officially never existed. He’s thirty-two years old, physically unremarkable except for a map of scar tissue across his ribs and a twitch in his left hand that flares when adrenaline spikes. For six years, he ran black-site extractions, asset retrievals, and wet work across four continents. Then his own government burned him. The operation was called Clean Slate. A CIA deputy director named Arthur Rennick decided that Ghost and his three teammates knew too much about a failed coup in Venezuela. Instead of a pension, they got a drone strike. Vance survived because he was in the latrine when the Hellfire hit. His team didn’t. He spent eighteen months in a Colombian cartel’s torture basement before escaping. Now he’s back in the United States, but not for revenge. Not yet. Revenge is a luxury for people who still have something to lose. Vance has nothing. Except a single piece of evidence: a data chip his team leader shoved into a wound before dying. On that chip: proof that Clean Slate wasn't about silencing them. It was the opening move in a coup against the US government itself. Rennick is building a private army from the wreckage of three dissolved intelligence agencies. And he's about to activate something called Project Fracture Line – a synchronized attack on fourteen critical infrastructure nodes that will collapse the eastern seaboard into chaos. The chip also contains a list of eight names. Other survivors. People Rennick thinks he killed but didn't. Vance's mission: find them before Rennick does, assemble a force capable of striking back, and expose the conspiracy before Fracture Line goes active in ninety-two days. The clock is ticking. The list is short. And every name on it is a ghost who wants to stay dead. The team he must build: Hawk – Former Delta Force sniper, now a fugitive living in the Montana wilderness. He has a wife and daughter Rennick is holding as leverage. Hawk doesn't trust Vance because Vance left his team to die in Venezuela. He's not wrong. But he's also the only man alive who can make a 2,500-meter shot in a crosswind. Flint – Ex-Mossad tactical planner, currently running security for a Las Vegas casino owner with underworld ties. Flint lost his brother to Clean Slate. He joined Rennick's operation originally, then flipped when he saw the true scope. He's the strategist – but he's also the most likely to betray Vance if the price is right. Echo – A former NSA signals analyst who went underground after Rennick framed her for treason. She lives in a converted shipping container outside Phoenix, running a pirate radio network for other fugitives. She has access to satellite override codes that could cripple Rennick's communications – but using them will broadcast her location to every hunter-killer team on the continent. Indigo – A private military contractor's logistics chief, the woman who moves the guns and the money. She's not a soldier; she's a fixer. She can get the team into any building, any country, any vault – for a price. Her price is Rennick's head on a platter. He killed her fiancé during a "training accident" that was really an assassination. But here's what Vance doesn't tell them. The data chip also contains a second layer – encrypted, locked, and flagged with his own biometric signature. When he finally cracks it, he'll learn the truth: Project Fracture Line isn't Rennick's plan. It's a contingency from the previous administration. Rennick is just the cleanup crew. And the fourteen infrastructure nodes? They're not random targets. They're the locations of a network of underground bunkers containing something that wasn't meant to see daylight. Something that, if released, will make the coup look like a parking ticket. Vance must unite four broken, paranoid, lethally skilled survivors – each with their own agendas, traumas, and secret reasons to kill him – into a single unit capable of stopping a shadow war before it ignites. He must navigate betrayals that are certain, losses that are guaranteed, and a conspiracy that grows more tangled with every revelation. He must decide, again and again, whether the mission justifies the human cost. You don’t survive a kill list by being faster or stronger. You survive by making sure no one knows your name until the bullet is already in the air.
Updated at
BLOOD AND STEEL: RISE OF THE UNDERDOG
Reads
Seven years ago, they buried him alive. Jayden Cross was nothing—a janitor at Silverhold Industries, the city's most powerful corporation. He mopped floors while billionaires walked over him. He emptied trash while his childhood sweetheart, Zoe, was stolen by Alexander Sterling, the heir to a banking empire. He was invisible. Expendable. Forgetable. Then they framed him for embezzlement, beat him within an inch of his life, and threw him into a mass grave outside the city limits. That was the mistake. Because in the darkness, six feet under, something woke up. An ancient system older than civilization. A brutal, uncompromising force called THE CRIMSON TRIAL—an evolutionary engine that rewards only one thing: survival through domination. Jayden clawed his way out of that grave with broken fingers and a burning soul. The System grafted itself to his nervous system, offering him power beyond human limits. But every gift comes with a price. The Crimson Trial demands constant escalation. Complete missions. Crush enemies. Absorb their "Essence." Level up. Or die trying. Now he's back. Not as the janitor. Not as the victim. But as a ghost wearing a wolf's mask. The city has changed in seven years. The Sterling family now controls eighty percent of the eastern seaboard's black-market economy. Zoe is Alexander's wife, living in a penthouse that costs more than Jayden's childhood neighborhood. Andrew, Jayden's only friend from the old days, has become a ruthless fixer for the underworld—and he doesn't know Jayden is alive. Nobody does. Jayden infiltrates the lowest rung of the Sterling empire, working as an enforcer for a mid-level drug lord named William "Billy" Vancore. From there, he begins dismantling the organization piece by piece. A shipment here. A lieutenant there. A witness who suddenly remembers everything. But the Crimson Trial isn't patient. It demands blood. And every time Jayden kills, the System feeds—granting him enhanced reflexes, accelerated healing, and terrifying abilities that blur the line between man and monster. By the time he reaches Chapter 20, he can dodge bullets. By Chapter 50, he can break steel with his bare hands. By Chapter 80, he'll question whether he's still human at all. The enemies aren't just men. They're systems themselves. Alexander Sterling isn't just a wealthy sociopath. He's the host of another ancient system—THE GOLDEN THRONE—which rewards manipulation, wealth accumulation, and psychological destruction. He doesn't fight with fists. He fights with lawyers, assassins, and the crushing weight of infinite money. He's been playing this game for fifteen years. His level is unknown. Zoe isn't just a victim or a villain. She has her own agenda, her own system fragment she found in Alexander's vault—THE SILENT MIRROR—which allows her to read micro-expressions and predict human behavior with terrifying accuracy. She's been playing both sides for three years. And she suspects Jayden is alive. Andrew, the loyal friend turned underworld shark, carries THE IRON PACT—a system that grows stronger through promises kept and broken. He gave a vow seven years ago: "If I ever find who did this to you, I'll burn their world down." He's been hunting the truth ever since. When he discovers Jayden is alive, will he embrace his friend or see him as a rival? Four system hosts. One city. Zero rules. The Crimson Trial has a hidden function Jayden doesn't know about: THE PURGE. When multiple system hosts exist in the same geographical area, the systems force a battle royale. Only one can remain. The losers don't just die—their Essence gets absorbed, making the winner exponentially more powerful. The countdown has already begun. In six months, the Purge will trigger automatically. Jayden has one hundred and eighty days to eliminate Alexander, secure his territory, and find a way to disable the Purge—or become powerful enough to survive it. But every enemy he kills makes the Purge more aggressive. Every level he gains shortens the timer. The system is designed to accelerate conflict, not resolve it. And there's a third player no one sees. Deep beneath the city, in a vault that predates recorded history, a fifth system sleeps. THE OBSIDIAN CROWN. It has no host. It has been waiting for ten thousand years for the right moment to awaken. The approaching Purge is the catalyst. When all other systems bleed enough Essence into the city's ley lines, the Crown will rise—and whoever claims it first will become something beyond human. Something god-adjacent.
Updated at
NO WAY OUT BUT THROUGH
Reads
The text arrived at 3:17 a.m. No caller ID. No emoji. Just three words: “You killed her.” Slade Crowe, former covert interrogator turned private security consultant, thought he’d buried his past in a concrete vault six feet under. But someone has dug it up. Someone who knows not only what he did—but why he did it. And they’re not asking for money, an apology, or his resignation. They’re asking him to play a game. A game with no rules, no exits, and a body count that’s already begun to climb. Slade Crowe is a man built for the dark. Six-foot-four, scarred hands, a face that looks like it remembers every lie it ever told. He used to work for an off-the-books government unit that specialized in extraction—not of people, but of secrets. He could make a terrorist weep for his mother in under seven minutes. He could find the single thread of truth in a room full of liars. But three years ago, on a black-site mission in the Caucasus, something broke. His team was ambushed. His closest friend, a woman named Mira, was taken. Slade got her back—but not whole. She died in a safe house forty-eight hours later, her last words a whisper he’s never repeated. Now Slade lives a quiet, paranoid life in a converted industrial loft in the port city of Verance. He does small jobs: corporate security audits, finding stolen data, the occasional threat assessment for people too rich to call the police. He drinks alone. He trusts no one. He has a single rule: never go back into the labyrinth. The text breaks that rule. Within seventy-two hours, Slade discovers that the person behind the message—calling themselves “The Minotaur”—has orchestrated a multi-layered conspiracy involving five seemingly unrelated people: a disgraced journalist, a hedge fund manager with a secret server farm, a retired police captain with a hole in his memory, a teenage hacker who lives in a church basement, and a woman named Ember Voss—a forensic psychologist who once wrote a profile on Slade himself for the FBI. Each of them holds a fragment of a larger truth about the black-site mission that destroyed Slade’s life. Each of them is being hunted. And each of them has been told that Slade Crowe is the only one who can keep them alive—for now. But The Minotaur has a twist: every time Slade saves one of the five, he must eliminate another person from a list. Not kill necessarily—destroy their career, expose their darkest secret, frame them for a crime, or break them psychologically. The list includes corrupt politicians, human traffickers, and at least two people Slade once called friends. If Slade refuses? The Minotaur releases a file that proves Slade himself murdered his partner Mira—not the enemy. The file is a forgery, but a perfect one. Slade would spend the rest of his life in a supermax prison, or dead at the hands of Mira’s family. This isn’t about money or revenge. It’s about control. The Minotaur wants to watch Slade become the monster he always feared he was. They want to see if a man who spent years deconstructing others can survive being deconstructed himself. And they’ve seeded the game with traps designed to exploit every weakness: loyalty, guilt, rage, and the desperate need to know the truth about Mira’s final hours. As Slade digs deeper, he uncovers a shadow organization called The Labyrinth Society—a loose collective of former intelligence operatives, rogue AI architects, and millionaire sociopaths who run “reality games” on high-value targets for entertainment and political leverage. The Minotaur is their champion. And Slade is their new favorite player. But Slade isn’t alone—though trust is a luxury he can’t afford. Kane Torrance: A former military sniper with a prosthetic leg and a debt to Slade. Kane is loyal to the point of self-destruction, but he has a secret: he was on that black-site mission too, and he lied about what he saw. Dante Marchetti: A shadowy information broker who trades in secrets harvested from the dark web. Dante claims to want to help Slade destroy The Labyrinth Society, but his real agenda involves a woman Slade has never heard of—Lyric. Ember Voss: The forensic psychologist who profiled Slade. She’s brilliant, obsessive, and dangerously attracted to the darkness in him. She joins the hunt to study The Minotaur’s methods—but she’s also hiding a burner phone with direct contact to one of the five targets. Lyric Chen: A former child prodigy in cryptography, now a recluse living off-grid. She possesses the only known backdoor into The Labyrinth Society’s communication network. She also has a price: she wants Slade to kill the man who murdered her sister. That man is on Slade’s “protected” list.
Updated at
THE LAST ALIBI
Reads
The gunshot that killed your wife came from inside your own hand. You remember the smoke. The blood. The screaming. The police have the 911 call where you whispered, “I think I killed her.” The forensic team has your fingerprints on the trigger. Your lawyer has already told you to take a plea.But here’s the problem, Cole.You didn’t do it.You remember the night before – a fight over the credit card bill, her walking out, you drinking alone. You remember waking up on the couch at 3:47 AM. The bedroom door was open. The light was on. You walked in, and there she was. Lauren. Your wife of eight years. A single gunshot wound to the chest. And in your hand? A Sig Sauer P320 that you’ve never seen before in your life.The last three hours of your memory are gone. Not fuzzy. Gone. Like someone erased a tape. The prosecutor calls it “alcohol-induced blackout rage.” Your public defender calls it “a nightmare.” You call it something else: a setup.Welcome to The Last Alibi – a 120+ chapter psychological thriller where every answer spawns three new questions, every ally has a price, and the only thing more dangerous than the conspiracy is your own shattered mind.Cole Mathers is not a hero. He’s a 34-year-old high school history teacher with a gambling debt, a crumbling marriage, and a newly discovered talent for getting framed for murder. The evidence against him is airtight: his DNA under Lauren’s fingernails, his voice on the 911 call (sounded exactly like him – but did it?), and a neighbor who swears she saw him arguing with Lauren at 3 AM. Cole has one lifeline: a suppressed memory that surfaces in fragments – a face in the dark, a second set of footsteps, a whisper that said, “Blame the drunk husband. They always do.”But when he starts digging, he discovers Lauren wasn’t who she seemed. Her private messages reveal meetings with a man named “Clark.” Her bank account shows deposits from a shell company tied to a black-site intelligence firm called Aegis Solutions. And her death? It matches the signature of a contract killer known as “The Eraser” – a ghost who stages murder-suicides so perfectly that no one ever looks twice.Now Cole must do the impossible: prove his innocence from inside a system designed to convict him, while hunted by the real killers who want him silenced, and haunted by the terrifying possibility that maybe – just maybe – he really did pull the trigger.His only allies are a disgraced former FBI profiler with a bottle problem (Sabine) and a young, ruthless defense attorney who plays political chess with human lives (Dean). But trust is a luxury Cole can’t afford. Because Sabine has her own ax to grind against Aegis. Dean is running for district attorney and needs a high-profile acquittal. And the one person who might know the truth – Lauren’s mysterious sister, Petra – hasn’t been seen since the funeral.By Chapter 30, Cole will escape custody (not a spoiler – it’s in the tags). By Chapter 70, he will uncover a conspiracy that links Lauren’s death to a decade-old massacre in Afghanistan and a secret surveillance program that listens through every smart device in the city. By Chapter 110, he will realize that the real target was never Lauren. It was him. And the final arc? Not until you say so.But here’s the hook that will keep you reading for 120+ chapters:Every time Cole thinks he’s found the truth, he finds a new lie. Every time he trusts someone, they betray him. And every time he looks in the mirror, he wonders if the face staring back is the victim – or the killer.No final resolution. No clean ending. Just escalating tension, buried secrets, and a man forced to become the very monster they framed him as – in order to survive.For male readers who love slow-burn suspense, strategic mind games, and protagonists who break before they bend. Welcome to the longest nightmare of Cole Mathers’ life.
Updated at