Chapter 3: Bad Decisions and Blinking Lights
901 Words
By Friday evening, Lara Valdez had reached a very specific conclusion:
She was not cursed.
She was not hallucinating.
She was just aggressively overworked by a rich psychopath with a control issue.
That was the only explanation that made sense for the things she was seeing.
So when her phone buzzed at exactly 6:02 p.m. with a message that read—
Maya: You’re coming out tonight. No excuses. I will drag you if I must.
—Lara didn’t even hesitate.
She shut down her laptop, ignored the faint ache behind her eyes, grabbed her bag, and left Nexus Prime like the building might physically grab her ankle and drag her back.
Kyle Thorne was still in his office when she passed by the glass wall. He stood perfectly still, sleeves rolled just enough to be infuriating, staring at his screens like the city would collapse if he blinked.
For a half-second—just half—she thought the light behind him flickered strangely, like the glass reflected something darker. Older.
She blinked.
It was gone.
“Yeah,” she muttered to herself. “I need alcohol.”
---
Pulse was loud, sticky, and unapologetically human.
The kind of club where the bass rattled your bones, the lights were too bright, and nobody cared about quarterly profits or time margins.
Lara loved it instantly.
Maya spotted her from across the bar and shrieked like a woman possessed, waving her over with a drink already in hand.
“There she is!” Maya yelled over the music. “Miss Corporate Prisoner herself!”
Lara dropped into the seat beside her and accepted the drink without asking what it was. “If this kills me, tell my landlord I tried.”
Maya clinked her glass against Lara’s. “To surviving capitalism.”
They drank.
Lara exhaled hard, tension leaking out of her shoulders for the first time all week.
“Okay,” Maya said, leaning in. “Now tell me why you texted me ‘If I disappear, sue a billionaire’ at 2 a.m. on Wednesday.”
Lara groaned. “Oh my God. Him.”
“Ah. The villain,” Maya said. “The CEO with the face of a romance novel and the soul of a spreadsheet.”
“He stole my work,” Lara snapped. “Then hired me. Then worked me like I owed him a kidney.”
“And now you’re seeing things?” Maya asked lightly.
Lara froze. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to,” Maya said. “You’re doing the eye thing.”
“What eye thing?”
“The ‘I’m pretending I’m fine but I might be losing my mind’ thing.”
Lara laughed, sharp and disbelieving. “I swear, it’s nothing. I keep… zoning out. Seeing reflections that don’t make sense. Old things looking… shinier than they should.”
Maya squinted. “Shinier how?”
“I don’t know,” Lara said quickly. “Like my brain glitches for a second. Probably stress.”
“Or,” Maya said solemnly, “you’re developing superpowers.”
Lara snorted. “Please. If I had superpowers, my boss would already be dead.”
They both laughed.
The DJ switched tracks, something fast and reckless, and Maya grabbed Lara’s wrist. “Dance floor. Now. Before you spiral.”
Lara let herself be pulled up, laughing as the crowd swallowed them.
---
The lights strobed.
The music pounded.
Lara closed her eyes for just a second.
Just one.
And suddenly—
She wasn’t dancing.
Not flying-flying—but moving fast, weightless, like the ground had forgotten how to hold her. Wind rushed past her ears. Something vast and open stretched ahead, glowing faintly like moonlight on water.
She laughed.
The sound echoed.
Then—
Someone called her name.
“Lara!”
She gasped and stumbled, eyes snapping open.
The club slammed back into place. Music. Sweat. Bodies.
Maya had both hands on her arms. “Whoa—hey. You okay?”
Lara’s heart hammered. “Yeah. Yeah, I just—”
She looked down.
Her hands were shaking.
“I think I need water,” she finished weakly.
Maya guided her back to the bar, watching her closely this time.
“Okay,” Maya said slowly, handing her a glass. “That wasn’t normal.”
Lara drank, grounding herself in the cold, solid reality of it. “I told you. Overworked. My brain is fried. Probably reading too many fictional novels to conjure all these real-looking fantasy dreams.”
But as she stared into the clear liquid, she could have sworn—for just a blink—that it shimmered faintly, like light trapped beneath the surface.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
When she opened them, it was just water.
---
Later that night, Lara collapsed into bed fully clothed, exhaustion dragging her under before she could even kick off her shoes.
Her dreams came softly.
No faces. No voices.
Just movement.
She dreamed of running across stone that felt warm beneath her feet. Of laughter carried on the wind. Of something vast and alive watching from the sky—not threatening, not kind. Just aware.
When she woke, the dream slipped through her fingers like mist.
All that remained was a strange certainty settling in her chest.
Something was changing.
And whatever it was, it could not be because of Kyle Thorne.
...Could it?
- Writer
