No family. The mother who tried to mold me in her own image, who erased my father like he was a stain, is gone. I left her world at sixteen and never looked back. Haven’t heard her voice in nine years.
I have few friends. No one who might notice my recent week-long disappearance.
Only Ashley, and I’ve managed to put her in the crosshairs just by existing in her orbit.
My apartment is a disaster of salt lamps and crystals, cleansing properties long since choked out by dust. I record a podcast in a cramped closet with paper-thin walls. My bank account skims the surface of zero, always threatening to vanish beneath.
Hope is a word for elsewhere.
My only ambition is to survive the month, dodge the next utility cutoff, and cough up another episode of spiritual advice I hardly believe myself some days.
I feel like I’m sinking in invisible quicksand. Drowning in all the empty places abundance was supposed to fill.
Maybe it was always a trick. Manifesting. Aligning. Cosmic ordering. Words, words, words, spun like threads over a hollow nothing. Not one of them mattered. Not really.
Not until this shark journeyed into my bland little river and sank his teeth into my soul.
That was the first real pulse I’d felt in years. Maybe ever. In danger, yes. Afraid? Absolutely. But for once, undeniably alive.
He’s right.
About everything.
No sugar to coat the taste, no gentle edits. Just the unflinching, jaw-snapping truth.
Kirill fixes his gaze on me, dissecting every twitch behind my eyes. “What exactly have you manifested?”
The answer slams into me with hurricane-like force, and I blurt it without thinking. “You.”
He stills before his expression sharpens to a razor’s edge. “Don’t say that. You don’t manifest a guy like me, Jordan. You survive. If you’re lucky.”
The room contracts. The air thins.
My lungs struggle to inhale.
This man doesn’t offer dreams or sugar-spun lies. He knows what he is. And he makes sure I know too.
My vision blurs.
Tears, maybe.
Or just the collapse inside me, the fake optimism that kept me upright all these years finally folding and buckling. My limbs feel waterlogged as my will leeches away.
No sense in denying that I’m a wreck.
“Maybe I’m tired of only surviving.”
Kirill doesn’t respond, but for a second, I swear he sees me. Not the podcast voice or the crystal hoarder or the fraud.
Me. The real me.
I never manifested abundance. Or healing. Or hope.
I only ever managed to summon this dangerous killer. And the worst part?
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel awake and alive.
Chapter 21
