Section one
The night bled into morning with restless silence. Adaeze drifted in and out of sleep, clutching her Bible against her chest as though it were a shield. When her phone buzzed, the vibration echoed louder than it should have in the quiet flat.
Bleary-eyed, she reached for it, expecting a notification from work or maybe her landlord about the heating. Instead, her cousin's name flashed across the screen.
She opened the message.
"Adaeze… you're not safe. The family secret is real. Don't trust anyone completely."
Her stomach dropped. She sat up in bed, phone trembling in her hands.
"Family secret?" she whispered. "What family secret?"
The words glowed on the screen like they carried weight from another world. She typed back three different replies before deleting them all. Finally, she wrote: "What do you mean?" but she didn't hit send. Her thumb hovered, her pulse racing.
A low creak from the hallway snapped her attention to the door. She froze, straining her ears. Nothing followed. Only the muffled hum of London beyond her window—distant sirens, the rumble of a bus, rain spattering against glass.
She shut her eyes and whispered Psalm 23 under her breath, trying to push down the dread that clawed at her chest. But when she reopened them, the message was still there, unchanging.