.Chapter 1 : 2:17 a.m

The clock stopped at 2:17.

Not 2:16. Not 2:18. Exactly 2:17.

Eliana Cross stared at the red numbers glowing in the darkness, and for several seconds she didn't move. She didn't breathe. She only watched, as if the clock might blink first.

Outside, rain tapped softly against the window, almost comforting beneath the distant hum of the city. Somewhere below, a car passed through the wet street, its headlights sliding briefly across the ceiling before disappearing.

She looked down at her laptop. The screen had gone dark.

She tapped the trackpad. Nothing. Tapped it again, and it flickered back to life, revealing a document she'd been fighting with for four hours.

CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR: PATTERNS, MOTIVATIONS, AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

Her university project. Thirty-seven pages, three cups of coffee, one headache — and still no conclusion.

She had a habit, when she got stuck, of rereading her own sentences out loud in a whisper, as if hearing them in someone else's voice might reveal what was wrong with them. She did it now, and the sentence sounded even worse spoken than it had looked written.

«Environmental instability may influence criminal behavior by...»

She deleted the last three words. Then the entire sentence.

"Great." She rested her forehead against her palm. "This is going nowhere."

Her phone lay face-down beside the laptop. She picked it up. 1:54 A.M.

"Twenty minutes," she told herself. She'd work for twenty more minutes, then sleep. She had an early lecture tomorrow — technically today, though at two in the morning that distinction had always struck her as a lie people told themselves to feel disciplined.

She caught her reflection in the dark window. Pale skin, dark circles, hair pulled loosely back. She looked away quickly and pulled the blanket off the armrest, wrapping it around her shoulders before turning back to her notes.

Criminal behavior. Patterns. Motivation. Predictability.

She highlighted a line from one of her sources: Most violent offenders demonstrate observable behavioral changes before committing an act of violence.

Observable changes. Warnings. Signs. She underlined it twice, more out of habit than insight, and kept reading.

Her phone buzzed — a university email, a reminder about a deadline. She dismissed it and glanced at the time. 2:03 A.M. Only nine minutes had passed. It had felt like an hour.

She got up, her chair rolling back and bumping the wall, and walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. The refrigerator hummed. Through the gap in the curtains she could see the street below, mostly empty except for a taxi crawling through the intersection and a man standing motionless beneath an awning across the road, too far to make out his face — but not, she noticed, too far to be looking up.

She watched him a beat longer than she needed to, then pulled the curtain shut and drank the water too fast.

She had barely sat back down when her phone buzzed again. This time it wasn't an email.

NO CALLER ID

She stared at it until it stopped ringing. Then it rang again.

She glanced at the closed curtains, and her thumb hovered over the screen before she picked up.

"Hello?"

Nothing. Not even static.

"Can you hear me? Who is this?"

A faint sound came through — breathing, slow and controlled. Someone was there.

"Who is this?" she said again, sharper now.

The call timer read 00:11 when a man's voice finally answered. Calm. Low. Almost gentle.

"Someone will die tomorrow."

Eliana stopped breathing.

"What?"

Silence. She gave a nervous laugh that came out weaker than she intended. "Okay. Is this some kind of joke? Because it's not very funny."

Nothing.

"Who is this? How did you get my number?"

"Marcus Reed."

The name came quietly, and then the line went dead.

CALL ENDED

Eliana lowered the phone slowly. "Marcus Reed," she said aloud, and it sounded absurd, like a line from a bad movie. Her hands, she noticed, were not as steady as her voice. She set the phone down, picked it back up, set it down again.

The name meant nothing to her. That, somehow, was worse than if it had.

She opened the browser and typed it in anyway.

The first result was a news article. MARCUS REED — INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST. A man in his early forties looked back at her from the photo — dark hair, sharp features, an expression that seemed used to being photographed mid-sentence.

She skimmed instead of read, the way people do when their hands won't stay still: crime reporter, corruption, a police scandal a few years back. A missing woman named Claire Morgan surfaced in the most recent headline, dated two hours earlier. She screenshotted the byline and kept scrolling, catching only fragments — harassment , threats , previous incidents — none of them landing.

It didn't explain why they'd called her. But there were always explanations. She just hadn't found the right one yet.

Her phone buzzed once more.

"Don't try to stop it".

She read it twice before it fully landed. Calling the police crossed her mind and left just as fast — she could already hear herself trying to explain it. "Someone called and told me a journalist is going to die tomorrow." They'd ask who called. She didn't know. They'd ask for the number. It was hidden. And then what?

Instead she took a screenshot, forwarded it to herself, and opened her notes app.

2:09 A.M. — Unknown caller. Male voice. Said: "Someone will die tomorrow." Named Marcus Reed. Call ended. Text received afterward: "Don't try to stop it."

She read it back twice, then went to the window and opened the curtain a crack. The street was empty now. The man from before was gone.

She let the curtain fall and stood very still in the middle of the room, listening to her own pulse.

Family, friends, university, work — she scrolled through her contacts without finding anyone obvious, until she landed on Maya, her best friend, and considered calling her before remembering it was past two in the morning. She put the phone down without dialing.

Then she noticed the clock. 2:16. One minute to 2:17. She didn't laugh this time.

Her phone buzzed again. This time, an image.

The photograph showed her own apartment building, taken from across the street in the rain, and in one lit window a small figure sat hunched at a desk. Her.

Eliana's breath caught. There was no timestamp burned into the image — nothing so neat — but she didn't need one. She knew her own curtains, her own desk lamp, and she knew, with a cold certainty that settled somewhere under her ribs, that whoever had taken it had been close enough to see her face if they'd wanted to.

She stepped back from the window without meaning to, the phone still in her hand, her other hand pressed flat against her chest — as if she could hold her own pulse still by force.

The apartment didn't feel safe anymore. Every sound seemed louder — the refrigerator, the pipes, the rain, a distant elevator groaning somewhere in the building. She checked the front door. Deadbolt. Chain. She walked through every room — bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, the closet she never used — and found nothing. No one.

Back in the living room, another message arrived. Four words this time.

"He knows you exist". 

Who? Marcus? The caller? Someone else entirely? She typed "Who are you?" and sent it. Delivered. Nothing came back. She tried again — "Why me?"— and got the same silence.

She zoomed into the photograph again, studying it the way she'd studied crime-scene images for her project — not for what was obviously there, but for what might be hiding at the edges. In the corner, half-swallowed by shadow, sat a black car parked beneath the same awning where the man had been standing earlier. She zoomed further, until the image blurred into grain, but she could still make out the shape of someone behind the wheel. Watching the building. Watching her.

She stepped back from the window again and reached for the emergency dialer — then stopped, her thumb hovering over the screen.

If whoever was doing this wanted her to call the police, wouldn't they have given her something easier to trace? A name that meant something. A number. A face. Instead she had exactly enough to be frightened and nothing at all to prove it.

That, she realized slowly, was the point. He didn't want her to be certain. He wanted her to doubt herself — and doubt, she was starting to understand, was easier to control than fear ever was.

She lowered the phone and walked back to her desk. The clock read 2:17 A.M.

She sat down slowly, and this time did not look away from it. She opened a new document — not the one about criminal behavior, a fresh page — and typed, at the top:

MARCUS REED

Beneath it: "Unknown caller. Threat received at 2:09 A.M. Possible surveillance. Reason unknown."

She stared at the list for a long moment. Then, without quite deciding to, she picked up her phone and dialed Maya after all. It rang twice before she hung up, her thumb still trembling against the screen. Not yet. She didn't know what she'd say.

Her phone buzzed one last time. No photograph now, no warning — just a single sentence.

"Tomorrow, you'll understand why I called you."

Eliana set the phone face-down on the desk, deliberately, the way you set down something that might break. Outside, an engine started, then faded into the dark.

She did not look at the clock again.

She already knew what it said.