The First Sign
405 Words
I didn’t sleep that night.
How could I?
The echo of his words—They’d die—kept replaying in my head like a broken record.
By morning, I convinced myself it was all some elaborate scam. Rich men did weird things for fun, right? Maybe Adrian Valtor was just… bored.
But then a sleek black car showed up in front of my apartment at exactly nine a.m.
The driver stepped out and bowed slightly. “Miss Evans, Mr. Valtor is expecting you.”
I hesitated, glancing at my phone. No calls. No texts. Just silence.
And the memory of my sister’s terrified face last week, begging me to find a way to pay off the syndicate before they “took her as payment.”
I got in the car.
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The Valtor Estate looked like it belonged on the cover of a magazine—tall gates, manicured gardens, and a mansion that could easily swallow my entire neighborhood.
Inside, everything gleamed: marble floors, crystal chandeliers, gold-framed paintings. It felt… cold. Too perfect.
Adrian was waiting in the grand living room, dressed in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up, exposing strong forearms and a wristwatch worth more than my life.
“Change of heart?” he asked.
“Let’s just say I’m listening,” I said carefully.
“Good.” He motioned for me to sit. “We’ll draw up the contract. But there’s something you need to see first.”
He led me down a hallway lined with locked doors, stopping at one at the very end. Pulling out a key, he unlocked it.
The air inside was cold. Too cold.
It was a bedroom—but not just any bedroom. On the vanity sat a row of framed photographs. Each showed a different woman in a wedding dress, smiling… and each frame had a black ribbon tied around it.
My stomach twisted. “These are—”
“My wives,” Adrian said flatly. “All of them.”
I turned to him, my voice barely a whisper. “What happened to them?”
A sudden noise came from behind me.
Like a breath.
But when I looked, no one was there.
Then I saw it—a shadow crawling up the wall by itself, stretching toward me like a hand.
“Lyra,” Adrian’s voice was low, urgent. “Don’t move.”
The shadow’s fingers were almost touching my neck.
- Writer
