Somewhere close, a door opened.
I stopped breathing. I couldn’t move, couldn’t think.
A shuffle across the stone. Then another. And another.
Heavy. Slow. Followed by strange breathing, just loud enough to make my blood freeze.
Whatever it was, it was coming closer, one step at a time.
My hands fumbled along the ground, searching frantically for a weapon. The floor was cold and rough. I ran my fingers over every inch I could reach.
Anything.
Please, anything.
But there was nothing.
The shuffling stopped—right in front of me.
For a split second, everything stilled. Even the heavy breathing cut off.
Silence.
I felt sick from fear. I was about to throw up.
Then something slammed into me, knocking me flat onto the stone. A body pressed down. Fingers locked around my throat like iron, squeezing.
“Stop!” I choked out, clawing at the hands. My nails scraped skin, but the grip didn’t loosen.
The high-pitched ringing returned, tearing through my skull, shrill and relentless, drowning out everything else.
“No!” I screamed, flinging the word more at the noise than at whoever was crushing my windpipe. “Not now! Not fucking now!”
But it was too late.
The ringing yanked me under like a rip current, dragging me into a flashback before I could brace for it.
I was still being choked, but suddenly, I wasn’t on the floor in the basement. I was upright, standing. The chains were gone. The stone was gone.
I was in the library of the Breakers.
It wasn’t the one I knew, though. It was the same space, but different. It was dim and shadowy. A CD player sat next to the antique bookshelf. Nearby, a landline phone rested on a side table. Its coiled cord was stretched and tangled. It was as if I’d been dropped into the 1990s.
Outside, a storm raged, wild and furious. Wind screamed and rain hammered against the window in rapid bursts. It sounded just as violent as the storm currently hitting the Breakers.
Maybe even worse.
Looking up, I saw him, standing in front of me.
The man from my nightmares. Only this time, he wasn’t blurred. His features were razor clear.
A chill spread through my chest as the realization sank in: He looked just like Daniel. He was almost the spitting image of him.
The man was older, maybe in his forties or fifties, but he had the same deep brown eyes. The same facial bone structure. His nose was broader, but the resemblance was impossible to miss.
He wore a fine tailored suit, polished and dark, as if he’d stepped out of a portrait. Everything about him looked expensive.
And he knew me.
