The darkness wasn't a void; it was a physical weight, a shroud of cold velvet wrapped so tight around my throat that my lungs began to scream for air they couldn't find. My chest burned with the friction of a heartbeat that had nowhere to go.
Am I dead? The thought didn't trigger panic—only a dull, rhythmic throb at the base of my skull. I tried to twitch a finger, to signal to the universe that I was still here, but my limbs were cast in lead. I was nothing more than a ghost drifting through a sea of pressurized ink.
Then, a flicker of impossible light.
A figure materialized from the gloom, moving with a predatory grace that defied the laws of physics. He wore a suit of such pristine, blinding white that it felt like looking directly into the sun. Against the suffocating blackness, he appeared as a celestial anomaly—either a savior or a reaper.
"Who are you?" I tried to scream. The muscles in my neck strained, but my voice remained a silent vibration, lost in the vacuum.
He didn't answer with words. He leaned over me, his features eclipsed by the radiant glare radiating from his own form. When he reached out, his fingers appeared unnaturally long, pale as bone. The moment his skin touched my forehead, the crushing cold vanished. In its wake came a searing, electric heat—a surge of raw energy that made my very soul recoil in a silent shriek.
"Jessy," he whispered. The voice was deep, a smooth cello note that vibrated through the marrow of my bones, dangerously calm. "You don't belong to the dark yet. You belong to me."
Then, the world shattered like a high-velocity bullet hitting a mirror.
"Jessy! Nurse, she's waking up! Look at her eyes!"
Fluorescent lights stabbed at my retinas like heated needles. I gasped, my lungs expanding with a violent, ragged jerk for the first time in what felt like centuries. The clinical stench of bleach, ozone, and the cloying, sickly-sweet scent of funeral lilies flooded my senses, making my stomach churn.
"Mom?" I rasped. My vocal cords felt as though I'd been forced to swallow a handful of broken glass.
"Oh, my baby girl..." My mother collapsed toward the bed, her face a haggard mask of sleep-deprived exhaustion and raw relief. She seized my hand, her skin feverish and trembling against mine. "You're okay. You're in the hospital. You had a terrible accident, Jessy. Such a terrible accident."
"The man," I whispered, my heart monitor beginning to kick up a frantic, panicked rhythm. Beep. Beep. Beep-beep-beep. "The man in white. Where did he go? He was right here."
My mother's grip faltered. She traded a quick, pained look with the nurse, who was busy adjusting the clear plastic lines of my IV drip.
"Honey, you were alone in the car," Mom said, her voice dropping into a tone of devastating pity. "The police said it was a hit-and-run. There was no one else there. You've been drifting in and out for days."
I closed my eyes, but there was no escape; the image of that white suit was burned into my eyelids like a solar flare. They thought it was a hallucination—the dying sparks of a concussed brain. But I could still feel the phantom heat branding my skin. He wasn't a dream. He was a debt.
The reality of the crash began to leak back into my mind like toxic sludge. Manhattan. The rain hadn't just been falling; it had been screaming against the windshield. I remembered the rhythmic, hypnotic thwack-thwack-thwack of the wipers—a metronome for a life that was seconds away from ending. I had been thinking about the "Ghost Code," the leaden weight of the encrypted drive buried in my purse, and my father's trembling hands when he gave it to me. He'd called it a gift. He'd forgotten to mention it was a bullseye.
When the UNI transport truck hit, the world hadn't gone black. It had gone a searing, blinding white that tasted of copper and ozone. I felt the chassis of my car fold like origami, the shriek of twisting metal echoing inside my skull until the sound became a part of my anatomy. In those final seconds, I hadn't seen my life flash by. I had seen lines of code—shimmering, golden binary that pulsed in perfect synchronization with my failing heart.
I opened my eyes again, forcing them through the crust of dried salt and trauma. The "sterile purgatory" of the room felt less like a sanctuary and more like a sensory deprivation tank. Every beep of the monitor was a hammer blow.
"You're awake."
The voice wasn't my mother's. It didn't belong to a doctor. It was deep, resonant, and carried the terrifying density of a mountain.
I turned my head with agonizing slowness, every vertebra protesting the movement. A man sat in the corner of the room, draped in shadows that seemed to swallow the harsh hospital light. He was dressed in a suit that likely cost more than my entire education—a sharp, midnight-black contrast to the bleached walls. His eyes were the color of a frozen sea, fixed on me with a predatory intensity that pinned me to the sheets.
"Where am I?" I tried to ask, but it was a pathetic, broken sound.
"You are safe," he replied. The way he paced the word made 'safe' sound like a threat of execution. "My name is Yuri Volkov. And from this moment on, Jessy, your life belongs to the silence."
I stared at him, the heat on my forehead from the man in white still throbbing, clashing with the ice in this man's gaze. The crash had been the easy part. Surviving Yuri Volkov was going to be the real war.