Adrian Cole opened his eyes to white walls and the steady beep of a machine. His body felt like it had been put back together with scrap metal. He had pains in places he didn't know could hurt. His skin felt tight and was covered in bandages where the fire had burned him. He blinked at the bright lights, trying to remember what happened. The fall. The black void. The red words. The deal. "What was that? I must be going crazy," he said to himself. A nurse walked in with a clipboard. She looked kind but tired. "Mr. Cole? You're awake. That's good. You’ve been asleep for three days. You have smoke in your lungs and broken ribs, but strangely, you are recovering very fast. You are lucky to be alive." Three days? Adrian sat up quickly, but a sharp pain hit his side. "My family. Where are they? Elena? Maya? Beatrice?" The nurse looked at the door and hesitated. She put her clipboard down slowly. "They... came by the first day. They left some papers for you. I think you should rest

For the next forty-eight hours, Adrian Cole stayed trapped inside the Edgewood Motor Inn. He had no choice. Whenever he tried to step outside, the world felt like a danger zone full of human skin. He saw strangers brushing past, hands grabbing for bus railings, and accidental touches that could trigger the red screen in his eyes. Every graze could bring a new death countdown into his head. He did everything he could to avoid being touched. Back in his room, he kept the safety chain on, the lock turned, and a chair wedged under the door handle. Trays of room service food piled up outside, untouched. He lived on bags of chips from the vending machine and bottled water. He sat there counting the hours until the two-day clock for Maya ran out. The minutes felt long and heavy, filled with the weight of the terrible thing he might have to do. Most of the time, he just sat on the edge of the sagging bed. He stared at his own hands under the dim yellow light of the lamp. How do you strang

Adrian Cole understood one reality: to escape Shadow, he had to keep moving. The warehouse carnage had bought him some time—three angelic harvests, three billion dollars silently wired into his offshore accounts—but Shadow’s presence still scratched at the corners of his mind, faint but persistent, like nails on a distant chalkboard.He abandoned the forest on foot, hitching a ride with a trucker who didn’t ask questions, his eyes flicking nervously toward the shifting shadows outside the truck’s cab. First stop: a used-car lot on the edge of the city. Cash in hand—no questions asked there either—he bought a nondescript white van and loaded it with the basics: water, protein bars, a burner phone, and a laptop.He drove for hours without a destination, following an endless highway under a flat, gray December sky. The ledger stayed silent, showing no new targets and no hauntings beyond Sarah’s fading echo. But his heart raced at every passing car and every flicker in his periphery, wond