"My apartment's not far from here."
Alex said it like he was inviting me for coffee instead of offering to explain how he'd been screwing with my job for the past decade.
"I don't think that's a good idea," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because you're my target. And I'm starting to like you." The words slipped out before I could stop them. "That's dangerous for both of us."
Alex smiled. "Too late for that, don't you think?"
He had a point. We were way past the professional death god/victim relationship.
"Fine," I said. "But I'm not staying long."
Alex's building was one of those converted warehouses in Tribeca that cost more per month than most people made in a year. The kind of place where young doctors with rich parents lived while they pretended to rough it in the city.
We rode the elevator to the eighth floor in silence. My heart was still doing that weird beating thing, getting faster every time Alex looked at me. Which was often.
"Here we are," he said, unlocking a heavy metal door.
The apartment was nothing like I'd expected. No expensive furniture or fancy art. Instead, it looked like a cross between a medical office and a detective's headquarters.
One entire wall was covered with photographs. Hundreds of them. All different people, different ages, but they all had one thing in common—they looked happy. Alive.
"Welcome to my real job," Alex said, hanging his keys on a hook by the door.
I walked closer to the photo wall. Each picture had a date written in the corner and a small note attached. "Maria Santos - heart attack prevented 3/15/24." "James Liu - car accident avoided 7/22/23." "Sarah Chen - suicide intervention 11/30/23."
"You've been keeping track," I said.
"Had to. Couldn't risk saving the same person twice by accident."
"How many?"
"Seventy-three confirmed saves. Probably more, but those are the ones I'm sure about."
I stared at the wall of faces. Something about them looked familiar, but I couldn't place it.
"How does it work?" I asked. "The predicting thing."
Alex walked to his kitchen, which was basically just a counter with a coffee machine and a mini-fridge. "Want something to drink?"
"Alex."
"Right. Sorry." He leaned against the counter. "It started after my parents died. First it was just nightmares—seeing people I didn't know dying in ways that hadn't happened yet. Then I started recognizing the people in real life."
"And you decided to interfere."
"Wouldn't you?"
"No. Natural order exists for a reason."
"Does it?" Alex pulled out his phone and scrolled through something. "Here. This is what I see."
He handed me the phone. On the screen was a photo of a middle-aged woman sitting in what looked like a coffee shop. But there was something wrong with the image. Around the edges, the woman looked fuzzy, like the photo was double-exposed.
"This is Elena Rodriguez," Alex said. "Took this picture three days ago. See the shadowy area around her?"
I looked closer. The shadows weren't random—they formed shapes. Dark figures standing behind her chair, reaching toward her.
"I see shadows."
"Those shadows show up forty-eight hours before someone's scheduled to die. The darker they get, the closer the time." Alex took back his phone. "Elena was supposed to have a stroke Thursday morning at 9:23 AM."
"Was supposed to?"
"I called the ambulance to her coffee shop Wednesday night. Told them there was a gas leak. They evacuated the building, found Elena unconscious from a mini-stroke, got her to the hospital in time for treatment."
"So she didn't die."
"She didn't die."
I stared at him. "Alex, do you have any idea what you've been doing?"
"Saving lives?"
"Breaking cosmic law. Disrupting the natural order. Playing God."
"Says the woman whose job is literally to end lives."
He had a point, but that didn't make it right.
"It's different," I said. "Death gods maintain balance. We don't create chaos."
"Don't we?" Alex moved closer to the photo wall. "Look at these people, Raven. Really look at them."
I walked back to the wall, studying the faces more carefully this time. There was something about them that nagged at me. Something familiar...
Then it hit me.
"Oh my God."
"You recognize them."
"These are mine." My voice came out as a whisper. "These are my failed collections."
Alex nodded. "All seventy-three."
I stared at the wall, my mind racing. Every face belonged to someone I'd been sent to collect over the past ten years. People who should have died but didn't. Targets who somehow slipped away at the last minute, leaving me to file incident reports and deal with Marcus's disappointed glares.
"You've been following me," I said.
"Not following. Watching over."
"For ten years?"
"Give or take."
I turned to face him. "How is that possible?"
"The same way I've been dreaming about you since I was six. The same way your heart started beating when you touched Harold Morrison." Alex sat down on his couch, which was covered in medical journals and coffee-stained notebooks. "We're connected, Raven. Have been for a long time."
"Connected how?"
"I was hoping you could tell me."
I walked over to his couch and sat down next to him, careful to leave space between us. Being too close to Alex made it hard to think clearly.
"Tell me about the first save," I said.
Alex grabbed one of the notebooks from the coffee table and flipped through it. "Mrs. Eleanor Park. Eighty-six years old, terminal pancreatic cancer. I was fifteen, working as a volunteer at Mount Sinai."
"Working as a volunteer at fifteen?"
"I was advanced for my age. Anyway, I was delivering flowers to the oncology ward when I saw her. Same shadow pattern as Elena Rodriguez, but darker. Much darker."
"What did you do?"
"Panicked, mostly. I was just a kid who could see death coming and had no idea what to do about it." Alex found the page he was looking for. "But then I remembered something from my dreams. The woman with white hair told me that sometimes death makes mistakes. Sometimes people die before they're supposed to."
"Death doesn't make mistakes."
"Doesn't it?" Alex looked at me. "What if I told you that Mrs. Park was supposed to live another three years? That her cancer was supposed to go into remission, and she was supposed to meet her great-granddaughter?"
"I'd say you're wrong."
"Then explain this." Alex pulled out a folder from under the coffee table. It was thick with medical records and legal documents. "These are Mrs. Park's files. Look at the date on her original prognosis."
I took the folder and opened it. The medical report was dated six months before I'd been sent to collect her. According to her doctor, Mrs. Park had a 70% chance of remission with aggressive treatment.
"This doesn't mean anything," I said. "Prognoses change."
"Do they? Or did someone change them?"
"What are you suggesting?"
"I'm suggesting that not everyone on your company's collection list is supposed to be there."
The words hit me like cold water. "That's impossible."
"Is it?" Alex stood up and walked to a desk in the corner of the room. He pulled out another folder, this one even thicker than the first. "I've been researching this for years, Raven. Every person I've saved, every life your company wanted to end early."
He handed me the folder. "Look at the pattern."
I opened it and found myself staring at spreadsheets, medical records, life insurance policies, and financial documents. All organized with the kind of obsessive detail that made my death god heart proud.
"What am I looking at?"
"Money," Alex said simply. "Every single person on your collection list had something in common. They were all worth more dead than alive."
I flipped through the pages. Mrs. Eleanor Park had a life insurance policy worth two million dollars. James Liu was about to inherit his grandfather's restaurant chain. Sarah Chen was a whistleblower investigating pharmaceutical fraud.
"This is..." I stopped, not wanting to say the word.
"Murder," Alex finished. "Your company isn't maintaining natural order, Raven. They're running a supernatural assassination service."
My hands started shaking. "That's not possible."
"Isn't it? Think about it. Who decides when someone's time is up? Who makes the collection lists?"
"The natural order. Cosmic balance. Fate."
"Or Marcus Void and whoever he works for."
I stared at the folder in my hands. If Alex was right, if even half of what he was suggesting was true, then everything I'd believed about my job, my purpose, my entire existence was a lie.
"Why are you showing me this?" I asked.
"Because you need to know the truth."
"What truth?"
Alex sat back down next to me, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his skin. "The truth about who you really are. And why your heart started beating when you touched Harold Morrison."
"Alex—"
"Harold Morrison wasn't supposed to die, Raven. His name was added to the collection list three days before you were sent in. Someone wanted him gone because he was about to expose a medical conspiracy."
"How do you know that?"
"Because he told me. After you failed to collect him, he came to me. Told me about a nurse who tried to help him but couldn't finish the job. Said she looked like she was in pain the whole time."
My chest felt tight. "He remembered me?"
"He remembered you trying to save him instead of kill him."
I stared at Alex, my mind reeling. "I wasn't trying to save him. I was trying to do my job."
"Were you? Or were you trying to break free from programming that was never supposed to be there in the first place?"
"I don't understand."
Alex reached over and took my hand. The moment his skin touched mine, that electric sensation shot through me again. My heart responded immediately, beating faster and stronger.
"Your heart knows something your mind doesn't," he said softly. "It knows you're not supposed to be a killer."
"I am a killer. It's what I was made for."
"What if you weren't made, Raven? What if you were born?"
"That's impossible."
"Is it? Because I've been having dreams about you for twenty-three years, and in every single one, you're trying to remember something. Something important."
I pulled my hand away from his, breaking the connection. "Even if you're right, even if everything you're saying is true, it doesn't change anything. I still have a job to do."
"Killing me."
"Yes."
"In fifty-four hours."
"Fifty-three."
Alex smiled. "What if I told you there was a way to break the programming? A way to remember who you were before?"
"I'd say you're lying."
"And what if I told you that the woman in my dreams gave me specific instructions on how to do it?"
My heart skipped a beat. "What kind of instructions?"
"The kind that could set you free." Alex stood up and walked back to his desk. "But it's dangerous. And it might not work."
"What's the risk?"
"If it doesn't work, you'll die. Really die, not just lose your immortality."
"And if it does work?"
Alex pulled out one more folder, this one smaller than the others. "If it works, you'll remember everything. Who you were, who you loved, and why someone wanted you to forget."
He handed me the folder. "But you'll also lose your death god powers permanently. You'll be human, mortal, with maybe sixty years left to live."
I stared at the folder, afraid to open it.
"What's in here?" I asked.
"Everything I know about the woman you used to be." Alex sat back down next to me. "Her name was Dr. Rachel Thorne. She was a cardiologist at Mount Sinai Hospital. And fifteen years ago, she died in a car accident that wasn't an accident."
End of Chapter 6