Chapter 1: First Breath
Concrete scraped my cheek. Cold and wet and wrong.
I gasped—lungs expanding like they hadn't worked in days—and rolled onto my back. Gray sky above, framed by brick walls. An alley. Garbage stink and car exhaust and something rotting nearby.
My hands hit the ground as I pushed myself up. They weren't my hands.
The realization came slow, dreamlike. Wrong knuckles. Wrong skin tone. Callused fingertips I'd never earned. I turned them over, watching them shake, watching the tendons move under skin that wasn't mine.
Joe Goldberg cannot kill anyone.
The words hit me like a freight train. Not a thought—a command, carved into whatever was left of my consciousness. I pressed my palm against my temple, but the message kept repeating.
You cannot kill Joe. If he kills, you weaken. If he dies, you die.
"Christ." My voice came out rougher than expected. New vocal cords. New throat. Everything borrowed.
Break his obsessions, grow stronger.
A shoe nudged my ribs. I flinched back, hands up—defensive instinct I didn't know I had.
"Hey, man. Hey." A homeless guy crouched a few feet away, shopping cart behind him piled with bags. "You okay? You weren't breathing for like, a whole hour."
I stared at him. My jaw worked, but words took effort. "An hour?"
"EMTs came." He scratched his beard. "Thought you were dead. Then you started moving and they just... left. Weird shit, right?"
Weird shit. One way to put it.
I checked myself. Athletic build—lean muscle under a gray t-shirt. Jeans, worn comfortable. A jacket crumpled beneath me. I patted pockets until I found it: a wallet. Brown leather, scuffed at the corners.
The driver's license stared back at me. Fin Coulson. Age twenty-eight. Address in the East Village.
Not my name. Not my face. Not my life.
But it was now.
"Thanks," I told the homeless man, and my voice steadied. "I'm okay. Just... fell."
He gave me a look that said he'd seen stranger things in this city. "Sure, man. Take care of yourself."
I got my feet under me. The body—Fin's body, my body now—protested. Scrapes on my palms stung. My head throbbed with a dull ache that had nothing to do with hitting concrete. The message kept looping, quieter now but constant:
Joe Goldberg cannot kill anyone. You cannot kill Joe.
Who the hell was Joe Goldberg?
And what had I been before waking up in this alley?
I tried to remember. Reached back through the fog and found... fragments. A different life. Different everything. Then nothing. Like a signal cutting to static.
Dead. I'd been dead. Or someone had—the real Fin Coulson—and I'd slid into the vacancy like a bad tenant.
My stomach turned. Not metaphorically. Actual nausea, actual hunger, actual need that made my knees weak.
Food. I needed food.
The wallet had forty-three dollars. I counted it twice, fingers clumsy. No credit cards, just the ID, a library card, and a key ring with three keys and a nearly-rubbed-off address tag.
I squinted at it. 247 E 7th Street.
Home. Maybe.
But first: calories.
I walked out of the alley on legs that belonged to someone else.
The bodega was four blocks away. Fluorescent lights, crowded shelves, a guy behind the counter reading a newspaper and not giving a damn about anything.
I grabbed a sandwich—ham and cheese, plastic-wrapped—and a large coffee. Black. The transaction happened on autopilot: money down, change back, no eye contact.
Outside, I leaned against a lamppost and bit into the sandwich. The taste hit like a drug. Sharp, overwhelming, real in a way nothing else had been since I woke up.
Different tongue. Different taste buds. Everything amplified.
I chewed slowly, cataloging sensations. The bread's texture against my teeth. Salt from the ham. The chemical tang of processed cheese. My body—Fin's body—wanted this. Badly.
The coffee came next. First sip burned my lip. I didn't care. The bitterness spread across my tongue and something in my chest loosened. Like coming home after a long trip, except home was a body I'd never lived in.
A woman walked past, phone pressed to her ear, arguing about dinner reservations. A cab honked. Somewhere close, a dog barked.
New York. September, based on the chill. The real Fin Coulson was dead, and I was standing outside a bodega in his skin, drinking his coffee, wondering what the hell Joe Goldberg had done to deserve a cosmic restraining order.
Break his obsessions, grow stronger.
Obsessions. Plural. This wasn't a one-time thing. This was a mission. A purpose.
My hands shook around the coffee cup. Not from cold.
I'd died. Somehow. Somewhere. And whatever put me here wanted me to stop a man from killing people, without killing him myself.
The rules were insane. The situation was insane.
But the coffee was good, and the sandwich was filling the hole in my stomach, and I was alive when I shouldn't be. That had to count for something.
I pulled out the keys. Squinted at the worn tag.
247 E 7th Street.
Time to find out who Fin Coulson was. And what kind of life I'd inherited along with his body.
I tossed the sandwich wrapper in a trash can and started walking.
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