Dante had seen people die before. He’d seen the overdose cases slumped in alleyways, their lives traded for one last high. He’d watched bar fights spiral into something worse, where a single unlucky punch turned a man from drunk to dead. He’d witnessed the long, drawn-out collapse of men and women circling the drain, lives unraveling thread by thread until there was nothing left but regret and an unclaimed bar tab. Death wasn’t new. Death wasn’t even shocking. It was just the tax you paid for existing too long in a city that never gave refunds.

But he had never—never—seen a body disintegrate.

One second, the guy was dead but still there, slumped over in a heap of blood and silence. The next, his skin began to crack, deep fractures splitting across his face, his hands, his chest—spreading like dry earth before a storm. At first, Dante thought it was some kind of post-mortem twitch, the body settling into death. But then the cracks deepened, widening into fault lines, and the flesh beneath didn’t just bruise or rot—it crumbled. Tiny fragments broke away in eerie silence, drifting into the air like burnt paper curling at the edges. Smoke—thin, black, and reeking of something more than just charred meat—curled up from the ruins of him, twisting in slow, serpentine spirals. The smell hit Dante like a slap: not just fire, not just decay, but something ancient and wrong, something that had no business existing in a place as mundane as his shitty little bar.

His body moved before his brain caught up. He scrambled backward, knocking over a barstool with a sharp clatter that barely registered over the frozen terror in his chest. “Oh, hell no.” His voice was hoarse, half a whisper, half a prayer, but there was no one listening.

Dante’s breath came in short, uneven bursts, his ribs tightening like a vice was closing around his lungs. His hands had braced against the floor, palms pressing into the sticky wood as if grounding himself to something real would stop the sheer wrongness of what was happening. But it didn’t. Nothing about this was real—not in the way the world was supposed to be. People didn’t just come apart like that, didn’t disintegrate into nothing but smoke and silence, didn’t leave behind no bones, no blood, no proof they’d ever been alive at all. His brain grasped for explanations, clawed at any kind of rationalization, but there was nothing. Just the slow, deliberate collapse of a human body into something less than dust.

The skin went first, flaking away in dry, curling scraps, peeling like old paint from the frame of a house long abandoned. Then the muscle, unraveling in quiet, whispering threads, fibers turning to cinders, blackening and falling apart as if burned from the inside out. And through it all, there was no sound—no crackle of fire, no hiss of heat, just an awful, consuming stillness that made it worse. Dante had seen bodies decay before, had smelled the sickly-sweet rot of death, had watched blood congeal and flesh tighten as time did its cruel work. But this wasn’t time. This was something else. Some unnatural force unmaking the man piece by piece, as if the universe had changed its mind about him existing at all.

Dante pressed his back against the bar, trying to push himself further away even though there was nowhere left to go. His fingers dug into the wood, his pulse hammering at the inside of his skull. His gut told him to run, to get out before whatever had done this decided he was next. But his feet stayed planted, frozen by the grotesque, silent spectacle of a man being erased from reality in real time. And when the last of him collapsed inward, leaving nothing behind but absence, Dante found himself staring at the single thing that had survived. The only thing untouched by fire, by decay, by whatever the hell had just happened.

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The last of the man flaked away, his form collapsing inward, disassembling like he’d never been solid at all. No bones. No blood. No lingering trace of what should have been left behind. Just a faint, human-shaped smear of ash marking the warped wooden floor where he had fallen.

And the contract.

It remained. Untouched. Unburned. Unchanged. The blood still gleamed wet and red, stubbornly fresh despite everything else being reduced to nothing. It sat there like an accusation, like an invitation. Like a goddamn trap waiting for a fool to step into it.

Then, a voice.

Not spoken. Not shouted. But there, threading through the air with an intimacy that felt wrong, slithering into his ears, curling around his ribs, sinking deep into the marrow of his bones.

"Run."

Dante’s breath hitched. His pulse slammed against his throat, a frantic drumbeat of survival instincts firing at full blast. The whisper clung to him, to the air, to the space behind his eyes, like an echo that refused to fade.

Dante forced himself to swallow, but his throat was dry, like he’d just inhaled a mouthful of dust from a place that shouldn’t exist. His gut twisted with the unmistakable, animal certainty that he was not alone—not anymore. The air carried a weight, a presence, something unseen but watching, pressing against the edges of the room like a predator circling just outside the glow of a dying fire. The bar, his bar, suddenly felt smaller, as if the walls had crept inward when he wasn’t looking. His gaze flicked to the dark corners, to the spaces where the light didn’t quite reach, half-expecting something to move, to slither, to step forward on too-long limbs. But there was nothing. Just the contract. Just the smear of ash. Just the electric certainty that whatever had whispered wasn’t done with him.

His hand twitched toward the contract before he even realized what he was doing, some reckless part of his brain overriding the survival instincts screaming at him to not touch the goddamn thing again. But the damage was already done—he had touched it once, and something had noticed. He could feel it, feel the attention lingering like a stain on his skin, feel the cold prickle of something distant and patient, waiting to see what he’d do next. His fingers hovered over the contract, close enough that he could see the way the ink—or was it blood?—seemed to shift, writhing against the paper’s surface in patterns his eyes refused to focus on. It was wrong. So wrong. And yet, a part of him knew that simply walking away wouldn’t erase whatever had just marked him.

His pulse thundered in his ears, drowning out the dead silence of the room. His legs itched to move, to bolt for the door and keep running until his lungs burned and the city swallowed him whole. But he didn’t move. Couldn’t. Because running wouldn’t help—not from this. Whatever had spoken, whatever had warned him—it wasn’t the thing he should be afraid of. It was afraid for him. And that? That was worse.

He didn’t know what the hell had just happened.

Didn’t know what that thing on the floor was.

Didn’t know what had spoken.

But he knew one thing for damn sure.

He wasn’t sticking around to find out.