As Daniel lay in that sterile hospital bed, something gnawed at the edges of his consciousness. A shadow in his mind, a whisper beneath his heartbeat. He had been close—so close—to something on the other side. But now, something was close to him.
That night, when Claire finally fell asleep in the chair beside him, the room grew colder. The steady beeping of the monitor slowed. Daniel felt his chest tighten, a suffocating weight pressing against him.
Then he saw her.
Lena.
Not as he remembered. Her skin was gray, slick with something unnatural. Her eyes, hollow and black, bore into him. She stood at the foot of his bed, unmoving. Watching.
"You left me," she whispered.
His pulse spiked. "Lena…?"
"You chose them. You chose to live."
Daniel struggled to sit up, but his body was leaden, pinned by an invisible force. The machines around him flickered, their rhythmic beeping warping into a discordant wail.
"You don’t get to walk away," Lena hissed. Her lips peeled back in something that wasn’t quite a smile. "You belong to me now."
A pressure built in his chest, a suffocating force, as if unseen hands were reaching inside him, twisting, pulling. His vision blurred, and he felt himself slipping—not just into unconsciousness, but somewhere else. Somewhere cold.
And then he saw it.
The river.
Not the one he had fallen into. Not the one that nearly took his life. This was something worse. The water was black as oil, thick as tar, filled with writhing figures just beneath the surface. They weren’t swimming. They were drowning.
Dying.
He recognized some of the faces. People he had wronged. People who had vanished. People no one had found.
He wasn’t just haunted by his past. He was tethered to it.
And then he understood.
Lena had never been his salvation.
She had been his reaper.
And now, she had come to collect.

---To be continued...