Midnight Novels & Stories

───── ❝ R U B Y F R I D A Y ' S P O V ❞ ──── ║ Gregorian Calendar ║ 01 - 01 - 2027 ║ Friday ║ 1st Midnight ║ The darkness of the circus tent hung like a shroud over my head, an oppressive presence threatening to smother us like a deep-rooted fear. Shivers of dread ran down my spine as I nervously surveyed the scene for a damn second, my eyes slowly adjusting to the horror that was to come later on.

I want to be precise about this, midnight, which was the specific and particular time of a man who had been in the kitchen for two hours with a woman who told him about roses and honest light and a mother named Sophia, who had then sat alone at the kitchen counter on her side for twenty-three minutes after she went to bed, who had then gone to his study and had opened his laptop and had looked at it without seeing it for another twelve minutes before he picked up his phone. Midnight. Nate answered on the third ring. Not the second ring, which was his standard, the third, which meant he had been asleep or close enough to it that

New York never slept. Not really. At two in the morning, the streets still pulsed with yellow taxis, flashing billboards, and strangers chasing things they couldn’t name. Dreams. Money. Love. Revenge. Sometimes all four. Ava Sinclair stood outside Club Rouge with her arms folded tightly across her chest, trying not to freeze in the brutal December wind. Her best friend, Talia, was still inside dancing with some finance guy who wore too much cologne and talked like he owned Manhattan.

Neither of us moving. I had gone to the window before she looked up. Like something had pulled me there. I pressed my hand to the glass. Forty minutes without her was apparently all it took. Yeah. Yeah it was. The knock came past midnight. Three knocks. Quiet. I looked at the door. "Come in," I said. It opened. Reina. Night clothes. Hair loose around her shoulders. No walls on her face, not the careful expression she wore during the day, not the controlled version she showed everyone. Just her, standing in my doorway at midnight.

She came looking for a fresh start. She found something far more complicated. Beatrice has spent years keeping herself afloat — working jobs that drain her, paying bills that never shrink, going home each night to a silence that grows heavier by the day. When a housekeeper position at one of the city's most lavish estates falls into her hands, it feels like the universe finally offering her something gentle. Something quiet. She didn't expect them. Silas is everything danger looks like when it's dressed in elegance. Refined, wickedly intelligent, and devastatingly charming — he speaks in carefully chosen words and looks at her like she's already a secret he intends to keep. Atticus

But that was before she stole my husband and my life. I stop walking, I am definitely lost. Defeated I sit down on a nearby rock, rest my head in my hands and just start sobbing. I lay back on the wet moss basically giving up. It’s getting dark and I see the light of the moon in the sky. It looks like it’s a full moon tonight. Usually I appreciate the full moon, a symbol of change, but I was too miserable to appreciate anything right now. I’m also worried I might have to spend the night out here in the cold, in soaking wet clothing.

All I can hear is a ticking clock, but I don’t know where it is coming from. “Midnight is coming,” a voice whispers. “Run while you can.” She asks if I can hear that, but I’m not sure what to tell her. “I can, but where is it coming from? We are on a bridge in the middle of the woods.” Valeria holds me tighter. “Kendric, we have to find out what midnight means. There’s something behind it.” I wake with a jolt, unsure of what in the world just happened. Valeria stirs by my side, her eyes wide with panic. “Kendric, were you dreaming again? You mumbled something about midnight and were shouting my na

The villain will surely go mad seeing her body. [This blind date of hers is quite good-looking, too. No wonder the villain's been jealous for so long.] [Why are there so many people siding with the villain? How disgusting! She deserves her death! I really want to see the hero taking the villain down!] When I woke up once more, it was back to midnight again. The moonlight shone dimly into the lounge as my hand was on the window latch, about to open the window. [Don't open the window! There's no cat outside! It's a serial killer!]

I whispered. We stopped at a red light. My gaze caught on a billboard the size of a building. It shimmered, transitioned—and suddenly, the word blazed across the screen in white fire: LUNARIS. A high-end nightclub. The most elite. The kind only the rich, powerful, and probably criminal could enter. Even back downtown, Lunaris was a fantasy, the kind of place people dreamed of making enough money just to glimpse. The ad shifted. And then his face appeared.

That thought was quickly tossed aside because if that was the case, the noises I made by kicking in a window aloud with my own cries and outburst from dressing my wounds would undoubtedly have been heard. Curled up between the two chairs with my face barely sticking out of my sleeping bag, my eyelids feel weighted with exhaustion and the comfort of finally being warm. The small LED lantern is in the dimmest mode, sitting on the table beside me casting a soft warm light. I usually sleep best in pitch black darkness, but am not brave or crazy enough to sleep without a light turned on while I'm inside this abandoned building at night. The last thing I remember doing before passing out for the n