I did not.
He stopped beside me, close enough that I could smell his cologne.
“You look tired, Clara.”
“Night shifts.”
“You should take care of yourself. This room has a way of swallowing people.”
My pulse beat hard in my throat.
Marco reached into his coat and pulled out a small white envelope.
“For your trouble.”
I stared at it.
“I can’t accept gifts.”
“It isn’t a gift. It’s gratitude.”
“Hospital policy.”
“Hospital policy,” he repeated, amused. “How comforting.”
He tucked the envelope into the pocket of my scrub top before I could step away. His fingers brushed the fabric lightly, deliberately.
“Buy something pretty,” he said.
Then he leaned closer, his voice dropping.
“And sleep well.”
He left with the same calm he had brought in.
I waited until the door shut.
Then I ripped the envelope from my pocket.
Inside was ten thousand dollars in cash.
And a photograph.
Me, standing in the stairwell, phone pressed to my ear.
On the back, written in neat black ink, were four words.
Wrong number, Clara Jenkins.
My hands went numb.
Behind me, Nicholas opened his eyes.
“He knows,” I whispered.
Nicholas stared at the photograph, then at the door.
“No,” he said.
The certainty in his voice made me turn.
“What do you mean, no?”
His eyes were dark and awake and full of something I could not name.
“Marco suspects,” he whispered. “But this…”
He looked at the handwriting again.
“…is not Marco.”
The heart monitor beeped steadily between us.
Once.
Twice.
Then the screen flickered.
Not from the storm.
A message appeared across the monitor in green letters where his heartbeat should have been.
HELLO, FATHER.
Nicholas stopped breathing.
So did I.
The letters vanished.
His normal rhythm returned.
From somewhere deep in the hospital walls, the lights went out.
PART 3
The darkness that swallowed Room 412 wasn’t the soft grey of a fading evening; it was an absolute, heavy void.
The emergency backup generators failed to kick in this time. The rhythmic, reassuring green glow of the monitors vanished, leaving behind a profound silence punctuated only by the heavy, erratic patter of rain against the reinforced glass.
I froze, my hand still gripping the photograph of myself in the stairwell. The ten thousand dollars spilled from my fingers, fluttering onto the sterile linoleum like dead leaves.
“Nicholas?” I whispered, my voice trembling in the dark.
No answer.
Only the sound of shifting sheets. Then, a low, rasping breath that carried a lifetime of cold, calculated fury.
A heavy hand grabbed my wrist—not with the clumsy weakness of a man waking from a coma, but with the terrifying, absolute precision of a predator seizing its prey.
“Door,” Nicholas rasped. The broken glass of his voice had vanished, replaced by a dark, metallic edge that cut straight through the terror paralyzing my limbs.
“The lights—”
“Door. Now.”
I stumbled backward, tearing my arm from his grip, and lunged toward the entrance. My fingers fumbled against the cold brass handle just as the hallway outside plunged into pitch blackness. Shouts echoed from the nurse’s station—distant, panicked, confused.
Before I could pull the heavy oak door open, the lock clicked.
