chapter one
532 Words
The rain did not fall in drops that night.
It descended like judgment.
Devlin stood beneath it anyway, as if weather could no longer humiliate him more than life already had.
The glass tower before him did not feel like a building.
It felt like a sealed kingdom—a monument carved from ambition and sin, rising into a sky that refused to forgive it.
And Devlin… Devlin did not belong to kingdoms.
Not yet.
“Luci…”
The name slipped from his lips like a spell he hadn’t learned how to control.
A borrowed identity. A fragile crown he had placed upon himself in the dark, hoping the world would bow to it before it shattered.
Inside that tower lived everything he had ever starved for.
Fame—bright as false constellations.
Fortune—heavy as chained gold.
And the kind of power that did not ask permission before it rewrote lives.
He stepped back.
Once.
Twice.
As if retreat might still be mercy.
But the world answered him with silence.
Then—
The doors opened.
Not with invitation.
But with inevitability.
A man emerged, and the air itself seemed to straighten in his presence.
Black suit like ink made flesh. Eyes like carved obsidian that had forgotten softness existed. He did not walk so much as arrive, as though the ground had been expecting him.
Devlin felt it immediately—
this was not a man shaped by the world.
This was a man who shaped it back.
Their eyes met.
And something unseen, ancient, and unspoken tightened between them—like a thread pulled between two fates that should never touch.
“You linger,” the man said.
His voice did not echo.
It commanded the silence to listen.
Devlin swallowed, rain sliding down his lashes like trembling glass.
“I was leaving.”
A lie.
Even the air did not believe him.
The man stepped closer, and the space between them collapsed into something dangerously intimate—like gravity had chosen sides.
“You are not leaving,” he said calmly. “You are waiting to be chosen.”
Devlin’s breath faltered.
Chosen?
The word felt too large for a boy who had spent his life being overlooked.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Devlin whispered.
But the man only tilted his head, studying him like an ancient book written in a language he had almost forgotten.
“And yet you stand before a gate you are afraid to enter,” he said softly. “Tell me, little star… what do you think is waiting inside?”
Devlin’s voice cracked at the edges of hope.
“Everything I’ve ever wanted.”
A pause.
Then the faintest shadow of a smile touched the man’s lips—something not warm, not kind, but knowing.
“Everything you’ve ever wanted,” he repeated, as if tasting the phrase for its cost.
He turned slightly, the tower’s entrance yawning open behind him like the mouth of a sleeping beast.
“Then walk in, Luci.”
A beat.
A final warning, wrapped in silk:
“Just understand—devils do not give fortunes.”
His gaze sharpened.
“They collect them.”
- Writer
