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Chapter 5: Trapped Between Shadows
The air in the room was heavy, suffocating, thick with an eerie silence that made Lila's skin crawl. She struggled against the ropes binding her wrists, but it was useless. Her eyes darted around, trying to make sense of the darkness.
Bodies lay strewn across the cold, stone floor. Faces twisted in silent screams, limbs frozen in unnatural positions. The smell of decay mingled with the sterile scent of the hospital, forming a nightmare she could almost taste. Panic clawed at her throat.
Then, a sharp pull surged through her chest. Her vision blurred, her body convulsed, and she felt herself being torn apart—not physically, but in a way that felt infinitely worse. Her soul was ripped from her body, hovering above it, weightless and trembling. She looked down at herself, utterly helpless.
Through this detached view, she could see the room in horrifying clarity. The walls were marked with scratches, shadows flickering in impossible patterns. And there, standing among the bodies, was her captor. A woman—or what had once been a woman—loomed over the floor, her eyes dark pools of pain and fury. The spirit's presence radiated power, sadness, and unrelenting vengeance.
"You feel it, don't you?" the spirit whispered, though her lips didn't move. The voice echoed inside Lila's mind. "The betrayal… the lies… the deaths… all because they took everything from me."
Images flashed before Lila's eyes: a bustling hospital, laughter echoing in the halls, love blossoming between a young couple. Then shadows, poison in the water, dying patients, screams she couldn't hear, and finally… betrayal. Lila's eyes widened as the full horror of the spirit's past unfolded before her, playing out in her own mind as though she were watching a cruel movie.
The spirit's gaze swept over her hovering soul. "And now… you will see what they felt. You will understand pain. You will understand fear. Just as I have."
A cold wind surged, and Lila's soul shivered. She wanted to scream, to fight back, but her body lay motionless, powerless on the floor. She floated, trapped between life and death, forced to witness the suffering of countless others.
And then, a shadow detached itself from the far corner of the room, moving toward her with deliberate steps. Lila's chest tightened as terror surged through her. She wasn't alone—and whatever approached was far worse than she had imagined.
Her heart—or what remained of it in spirit form—raced. Could she escape? Could she survive the wrath of a soul bent entirely on revenge?
The answer was somewhere in the darkness, but it wasn't going to reveal itself easily.
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