The door creaked open.

Not with the sharp, hurried urgency of a late-night drunk stumbling in, nor with the heavy hesitation of someone unsure if they belonged. No, this was deliberate. A slow, creeping groan of old wood giving way—not letting someone in, but letting something through.

Dante didn’t hear footsteps. No shift of weight against the floorboards. No sharp inhale of breath. Just silence, thick and absolute, settling into the bones of the room like dust in a long-abandoned house. The air itself seemed to curdle, growing heavy, thick, wrong. The neon glow from the bar sign outside flickered in protest, stuttering in and out, warping the shadows along the walls into something almost alive. And then, as if it had been there all along, waiting for the exact right moment to be perceived—it stepped inside.

A man-shaped thing. Too tall. Its shoulders jutted at odd angles beneath an immaculate suit, its limbs a fraction too long, the joints slightly too sharp. It moved like something stuffed into the vague approximation of a human form, its proportions chosen by an artist who had never actually seen a person before but had only heard them described in clinical, detached terms. Its skin was the color of old parchment, thin and dry, stretched too tight over bones that didn’t quite sit right beneath it.

Then there were its eyes.

Or rather, the yawning, bottomless absence of them.

The emptiness where its eyes should have been wasn’t just an absence of color or reflection—it was an absence of recognition. There was no curiosity, no malice, no spark of anything remotely human. Just void. A sucking, hollow thing that made Dante’s skin crawl with the deep, animal certainty that he was being measured in a way he couldn’t comprehend. Not judged. Not watched. Simply… calculated.

Something in his gut twisted. It wasn’t just the sight of the thing that set off alarms in his brain—it was the way the space around it felt wrong. Like it wasn’t standing there so much as it was occupying the idea of space, an approximation of presence that barely held itself together. His instincts screamed at him to move, to put as much distance as humanly possible between himself and whatever this was, but some unseen force pinned him in place, locking his muscles with an unnatural stillness.

The longer he stared, the harder it became to focus on its shape. The suit was crisp, the fabric dark and smooth, but it was too smooth. It had no texture, no seams, no imperfections—just the suggestion of cloth stretched over something that understood clothing only as an abstract concept. The edges of its form flickered at the periphery of his vision, bending and shifting like a mirage. If he looked too long, he got the distinct, gut-wrenching feeling that its shape might change, that it could become something else entirely—something worse—if it simply decided to.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Dante fought the instinct to recoil. He refused to call this thing a man. A man had weight. A man had breath. A man had eyes that didn’t make the air around them seem to pull inward, as if light itself was reconsidering the notion of existence in their presence.

The thing adjusted its cufflinks with slow, deliberate precision, the movement mechanical, rehearsed—an imitation of human vanity performed by something that had no need for it. When it finally spoke, its voice wasn’t a voice at all. It was the sound of tectonic plates grinding beneath the earth, the deep, groaning shift of something ancient and inevitable.

“Signatory: Dante Lucero.”

Dante went still. Every nerve in his body shrieked at him to move, to bolt, to get as far away from this thing as possible. But his feet might as well have been nailed to the floor.

“Uh,” he started, aiming for casual and missing by several hundred miles. “Who’s asking?”

The thing tilted its head in a slow, unnatural arc. The hollows where its eyes should have been remained fixed on him, and yet, somehow, they drew closer.

“Your contract is active.” It raised one unnaturally long hand, tapping its wrist where a watch should have been. But there was nothing there—just smooth, parchment-colored skin and the overwhelming, gut-deep certainty that it did not need one.

“Your first payment is due.”

Dante swallowed. His throat was dry, his pulse hammering. “Payment?” He let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “I didn’t even get anything yet!”

The thing smiled. Or at least, the corners of its mouth moved. Not up, not down—just outward. Too wide. Too slow. The motion of something unused to the concept of lips and their limitations.

“Incorrect.”

Dante’s right hand burned.

Panic clawed its way up his throat, but his mind—always a step behind his mouth, always a little too reckless for its own good—was already scrambling for answers. What the hell was happening to him? The burning wasn’t just pain. It wasn’t like touching a stove or grabbing something too hot. It was deeper, older, something that didn’t just sear his skin but coiled around the marrow of his bones, gnawing at him from the inside out. Like something was waking up.

His breathing hitched, chest tight, every instinct screaming at him to fix it, stop it, make it go away— but how? He couldn’t drop his own damn hand. He couldn’t scrape away the black veins threading through his skin, pulsing like ink spilled into water. He wanted to run, to shove his hand into ice, to do anything to make it stop, but he had the sinking feeling that this wasn’t the kind of thing you could just ice down and hope for the best. This was something permanent. Something that had been waiting for him to make a mistake.

Dread settled in his gut, heavy and suffocating. His mind reeled, grasping at whatever logic he could force into the situation. Contracts. Payment. A debt being collected. He had no idea what he had just sold, but if the way his body was reacting was any indication, it wasn’t money this thing was after. And the worst part? The absolute, gut-punching horror of it? He already knew, deep down, that this wasn’t something he could buy his way out of.

Not just warmth. Not just heat. Fire. Hunger. Decay.

The blackened veins along his arm twisted, surged, expanded. He sucked in a sharp breath as a sudden, unbearable pull coiled through his bones, like unseen strings had just tightened around him, like something had just reached in and begun taking.

Like something was already collecting.

His stomach dropped into a black hole. “Oh, hell no.”

The enforcer took a step closer.