Andre stood outside his own house.He was not allowed to knock. Not anymore.Rain fell on his shoulders. He did not move away from it. He did not care.Inside that house, his wife was sitting with her parents. Andre could hear their voices through the window. Low voices. Angry voices."He cannot even pay for electricity," said Claire's father. "How long do you want to suffer for a man like this?"Andre closed his eyes.Three years ago, this house was full of laughter. Claire used to run to the door when he came home. She used to kiss him before he even took off his shoes.Now she would not even open the door.The door opened anyway. But it was not Claire who opened it. It was her mother."Andre," she said, her voice cold. "You need to leave.""I want to see Claire," Andre said. "Just for a minute.""She does not want to see you.""Please.""Andre." Claire's father appeared behind his wife. His face was hard, like stone. "You lost the company. You lost the money. You lost the house. Wh

The black car did not move.Andre stood on the sidewalk, ticket crushed in his fist, staring at the open window and the stranger's calm face watching him from inside.Beside the stranger, in the shadow of the back seat, sat someone else. Andre could not see a face. Only the shape of a person, still and silent, watching him the same way a cat watches something small.Felix, the shop owner, banged on the television one more time. The screen flickered back to life with a burst of static."There we go," Felix muttered, not even looking at the car across the street.Andre turned back to the screen just as the picture steadied.The host was smiling, holding up the final ball."And our fifth number tonight," the host said, "is..."Andre's whole body went still."Forty one."For a moment, Andre could not move. Could not breathe. Could not believe what he had just heard.Four. Seventeen. Twenty nine. Thirty three. Forty one.Every single number matched."I won," Andre whispered.Felix turned t

Andre spent the rest of the night deciding, then changing his mind, then deciding again.By eleven o'clock, he had convinced himself he would not go. It was foolish. Dangerous. Exactly the kind of thing that got the first three users killed or lost.By eleven thirty, he was already walking.Marrow Street sat on the edge of the old industrial district, where warehouses stood empty and streetlights flickered instead of shining. Andre kept to the shadows, the phone heavy in his pocket, the chair leg from his room tucked into his jacket like a poor excuse for a weapon.Number seventeen turned out to be a warehouse with a single door left slightly open, a thin line of lamp light spilling onto the cracked pavement outside.Andre stood there for a long moment, his heart hammering.Come alone.He pushed the door open.Inside, the warehouse was mostly empty. Old crates stacked against the walls. Dust hanging in the air, caught in the light of a single lamp sitting on a wooden table in the cent

Andre did not go back to his room that night.He walked the streets until the sky turned grey, his mind replaying the warehouse over and over. Mara's shoulder slamming into his chest. Her voice, sharp and certain. Go. Now.By the time the sun rose, he had made a decision.He was going back.Marrow Street looked different in daylight. Quiet. Ordinary. The kind of street nobody would ever suspect of holding secrets.Andre found the warehouse easily enough, the same cracked pavement, the same faded number seventeen painted above the door.The door was locked.Andre pressed his face against the dusty window beside it, cupping his hands around his eyes to block the morning glare.The warehouse was empty.Not just empty of people. Empty of everything. No table. No lamp. No overturned chair from Mara's fight with Grant. No sign that anyone had ever set foot inside, let alone fought for their life there only hours before.Andre's stomach dropped.He tried the door again, rattling the handle u

The doorman barely glanced at Andre before waving him through.That surprised him more than anything else that night. He had expected questions, suspicion, someone to look at his borrowed suit and see straight through it to the man underneath. Instead, the doorman simply checked a name off a list Andre had never given him, muttered "Mr. Reyes, third floor," and turned to the next guest.Andre kept walking before his luck could change.Someone else was already using his invitation. Someone had put his face, or a description close enough, onto that list before he even arrived.The phone had done this. It had to have.The third floor of the gallery was a wide, dimly lit room filled with quiet conversation and the soft clink of expensive glasses. Paintings lined the walls, though nobody seemed particularly interested in looking at them. All the attention in the room was aimed toward a raised platform at the far end, where a velvet curtain hid whatever the night's real business would be.A