The silence isn't empty. It's listening.

Marco and Guy just wanted a quiet ride through the hills above Nice ? two old friends, two motorcycles, and nothing more dangerous on the agenda than local talk of a "Beast" prowling the woods near L'Escarène.

Then the storm hits, the roads wash out, and the only shelter for miles is an abandoned military hospital nobody has set foot in for decades.

They shouldn't have gone inside.

This place isn't haunted. It's worse. Decades ago, a psychiatrist obsessed with curing human suffering built a machine to extract pain itself ? and never found a way to stop it. What's left behind doesn't just haunt these halls. It listens. It learns. It replays every trauma back at whoever's unlucky enough to hear it.

When their friend Fredo is pulled in too deep, Marco and Guy have one choice left: go deeper into the machine's heart, or lose him ? and themselves ? to a silence that never stops feeding.

Book 3 in The Dubois series, where two ordinary men keep stumbling into the extraordinary ? and keep riding away from it, one scar at a time.