Chapter 3

The mariachi band hadn’t even struck its first trumpet note when my eyes flew open.

It was 6:59 AM.

I was staring at the red digits on the nightstand clock, my heart hammering a frantic, erratic beat against my ribs like a trapped bird. Cold sweat turned the back of my t-shirt slick against the sheets.

I had three seconds before the nightmare started all over again.

I reached across the bed, my fingers flying over the dark nightstand, blindly searching for her phone. I caught the hard plastic casing, swiped my thumb across the glowing screen, and slammed the power button down hard right as the clock hit 7:00 AM.

Silence. The mariachi band never got to play.

I let out a long, ragged exhale, collapsing back against the pillows. I beat it, I thought, a wave of desperate relief washing over me. I beat the signal. I changed it.

“Seb?”

The voice came from under the mountain of white duvet. A pale, slim arm shot out, reaching blindly for the empty nightstand. Her hand slapped the bare wood twice, knocked over a dry glass that rattled against the lamp, missed her missing phone entirely, and finally flopped onto the mattress.

From beneath the pillows came that same heavy, tragic groan.

“I’m dead, Seb,” she muffled directly into the mattress. “Call my boss. Tell them I died doing what I loved: sleeping.”

My relief dissolved into liquid ice.

She hadn’t heard the alarm. The alarm hadn’t even rung. But her body moved to the exact same cues anyway, repeating the script line for line, action for action. I wasn’t just fighting a timeline, I was fighting an invisible track that her mind was running on without her even knowing it.

“We aren’t staying home today,” I blurted out, throwing the covers off my legs. My voice came out too fast, too sharp, laced with a jagged edge of panic I couldn’t smooth down. “And we aren’t going to that stupid festival.”

Helena peeked out from under the blanket, blinking her dark eyes at me in complete bewilderment.

“What? Seb, it’s seven in the morning. Why are you shouting?”

I didn’t give her time to think. I didn’t give the morning a chance to set its teeth into us.

Instead of letting her drift around the apartment humming off-key, I practically dragged us into the kitchen. I didn’t wait for her to brew coffee. I grabbed two cereal bowls, dumped granola inside, and thrust a spoon into her hand.

“Eat,” I said, pacing back and forth across the small kitchen tile, my knees twitching with restless, jittery energy.

“Sebastian, what is wrong with you?” Helena asked, holding her spoon in mid-air, watching me with a mixture of amusement and growing concern. “You look like you’ve had five espresso shots, and you haven’t even sat down.”

“We’re leaving early. Right now.” I grabbed a random dark blue button-down shirt from the closet, completely different from the gray henley I had worn the last two times and threw it on.

“No fussing over hair. No talking to Roxy the dog. We’re getting out of the city.”

“Out of the city?” She frowned, setting her spoon down. “What about the flower festival? You promised we would spend the whole day there!”

“I changed my mind,” I said, grabbing her denim jacket off the back of the couch and holding it open for her. “I’m taking you to that beach resort up north. Three hours away. Salt air, seafood, ocean view. You’ll love it.”

Helena stared at me for a long beat before letting out a soft, confused laugh. “Okay… sudden trip to the coast? You’re acting like someone is chasing you, Seb.”

I froze with the jacket in my hands, forcing a tight, unnatural smile onto my face.

“If I told you the truth, you would think I’ve completely lost my mind.”

I got us into the car by eight-fifteen. A full forty-five minutes earlier than yesterday. Or the day before.

I slammed the driver’s side door shut, turned the key in the ignition, and pulled out onto the main boulevard, breathing heavily. I didn’t take Main Street. I didn’t take Fourth Avenue. I headed straight for the northbound highway ramp, accelerating hard through a yellow light.

We’re on the highway, I told myself, clutching the steering wheel until my knuckles turned stark white. The tower isn’t even in the same zip code. We are safe.

Ten minutes later, red brake lights flared in a massive, unbroken chain as far as the eye could see.

I slammed on the brakes, stopping inches from the bumper of an eighteen-wheeler.

“Whoa!” Helena braced her hands against the dashboard. “What’s going on?”

An overhead digital traffic sign hummed to life in glowing orange letters:

ACCIDENT AT EXIT 12. HIGHWAY CLOSED. ALL TRAFFIC MUST DETOUR AT MAIN STREET.

My stomach dropped into a bottomless pit. “No. No, no, no…”

“It’s fine, Seb,” Helena said gently, laying a soothing hand over my white-knuckled grip on the gearshift. “We can just take the Main Street exit and head back toward the park.”

“We are not going toward the park!” I yelled, a little too loudly. I caught the startled look on her face and immediately swallowed hard, forcing my voice down. “I mean… let me just turn around. We’ll take the back roads.”

I took the exit, made three illegal U-turns, and drove down a series of quiet, residential side streets I had never used in my life. I was driving blindly, twisting through obscure neighborhoods just to stay moving away from the botanical gardens.

At 9:45 AM, the car engine gave a sickening clunk, shuddered violently, and completely died in the middle of an intersection.

“What happened?” Helena gasped as steam began to billow from beneath the hood.

I stared blankly at the dashboard as the check engine light blinked red. We were stranded. And when I looked up to read the street sign on the corner, my blood ran instantly cold.

We were three blocks from the botanical park.

It didn’t matter what route I took. It didn’t matter what clothes I wore or what time I left the apartment. The world was bending, snapping, and breaking its own rules just to herd us right back toward the exact same point on the map.

We had no choice but to walk while we waited for a tow truck that the dispatcher swore was “at least two hours out.”

The sweet, sickly scent of hyacinths drifted over the stone walls of the botanical park, invading my lungs. I felt physically sick. My skin was hot, my chest tight, every nerve ending in my body screaming at me that we were walking right back into a meat grinder.

“Sebastian.”

Helena stopped dead on the brick sidewalk. She reached out and wrapped her fingers around my wrist, pulling me to a halt.

I turned to look at her, my breathing shallow and fast.

She stared into my eyes, her face pulled into a look of deep, quiet worry. “You’ve barely smiled today,” she said softly. “You keep looking over your shoulder like you expect something to jump out at you. You jump every time your phone vibrates in your pocket. Talk to me, please. What is happening?”

I stared down at her, looking at the warm sunlight on her hair, the faint freckles on her nose, the utter innocence in her gaze. I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and yell that in three hours, a metal tower was going to snap with us inside it.

Instead, my throat closed up. “I just… I have a really bad feeling, Helena.”

She stepped closer, reaching up with both hands to gently cup my face. Her palms were warm and soft against my icy skin.

“I’m here,” she whispered, looking straight into my eyes with complete, unwavering trust. “Whatever it is, I’m right here with you.”

Those two words almost broke me right there on the pavement. A sharp, burning ache choked my throat. She was trying to comfort me, entirely unaware that I was losing my mind trying to save the very person holding my face.

When we drifted into the central plaza, dragged there by the sheer lack of anywhere else to go, the gardens were packed.

And there, right on cue, was the tower. Sleek, glass, steel, rising up like a massive needle stabbing into the sky.

“Oh, look!” Helena pointed up at it, her eyes brightening with that same familiar fascination. “Let me buy us tickets for the observation deck. It’ll take your mind off the car!”

“No,” I snapped immediately, stepping between her and the ticket booth.

She blinked, taken aback by my harsh tone. “Why not?”

“It’s too crowded,” I lied rapidly, my eyes darting frantically around the plaza, searching for any excuse that would hold up. “My head hurts. The sun is too bright up there. The view isn’t worth waiting in line for, Hellena. Let’s just sit on a bench down here. Please.”

Helena let out a bewildered laugh. “Since when do you hate heights? Seb, you’re being ridiculous. It’s just a view.”

She didn’t know. She didn’t know that the view came with the sound of snapping steel.

“I’m not going up there,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “And I don’t want you going up there either.”

Just as she opened her mouth to argue, a loud, crackling sound burst from the park’s public address speakers overhead.

“Attention, festival guests,” a cheerful voice chimed through the park. “Due to the arrival of the annual Spring Flower Parade, all ground-level walking paths and garden plazas will be temporarily cleared for the next sixty minutes. Please move toward the perimeter clearings or the Observation Tower concourse.”

Before I could even process the announcement, security guards in bright yellow vests began unrolling thick velvet ropes across the main pathways. A massive wave of hundreds of tourists surged forward, compressed into a tight, moving wall of bodies.

They pushed us. They shoved from the left, crowded from the right, funneling the entire crowd down the only remaining open walkway.

Directly toward the glass doors of the tower.

My blood ran completely cold. It was like watching an invisible, colossal hand sweep across a chessboard, knocking down every piece I had set up, forcing my king into the exact corner it wanted me in.

“See?” Helena laughed, caught in the flow of the moving crowd, her hand tightly intertwined with mine. “The universe wants us to go up!”

“No,” I whispered, panic rising like a tidal wave in my chest, suffocating me. “No, this isn’t happening. No!”

I went into a full, desperate frenzy.

“We’re leaving,” I said, spinning around and trying to push back against the tide of people. “Helena, turn around. We’re getting out of the park.”

“Seb, we can’t push through all these people!” she gasped as a man bumped hard into her shoulder.

“I don’t care! We’re leaving!”

I grabbed her hand and hauled her toward a side exit, ignoring the angry glares of the crowd. We broke free of the main path, spilling out onto the street outside the park gates.

“I’m calling a ride,” I muttered, my hands shaking so violently I could barely unlock my phone screen. I pulled up a rideshare app, pounding my thumb against the screen to request a car.

Driver assigned. 2 minutes away.

“Thank God,” I breathed, pulling Helena into the shade of a bus stop. “We’re taking a taxi back to the apartment.”

Thirty seconds later, my phone buzzed.

Your driver had to cancel due to parade road closures.

I requested another. Cancelled.

I requested a third. No drivers available.

“Seb, what is wrong with you?!” Helena finally shouted, pulling her hand out of mine. She stood in front of me, her chest heaving, her dark eyes filled with a mixture of anger, hurt, and deep confusion. “You’re trembling! You’ve been acting like a crazy person all day! What is going on?!”

I looked at her, standing under the bright afternoon sun, completely untouched by the horror I was carrying. The sky above us was clear. The air was warm. Everything looked entirely, deceptively normal.

And we were standing fifty feet from the base of the tower.

“This isn’t happening…” I whispered, clutching my hair with both hands, my knees buckling slightly under the sheer weight of absolute helplessness. “It’s pushing us. It’s forcing us.”

“Next group, please!”

The operator’s booming voice echoed from the open glass doors of the observation tower entrance.

The crowd behind us surged forward again, an unstoppable wave of human noise and movement. Helena was pushed toward the velvet ropes, and instinctively, I lunged forward to wrap my arm around her waist, keeping her upright.

We were standing right at the threshold of the glass elevator. The shiny metallic doors were slid wide open, revealing the polished floor inside.

Helena turned her head, looking up at me. Her expression softened, the anger fading into pure concern as she felt how hard my heart was beating against her shoulder.

“Seb…” she murmured, reaching up to lay a hand over mine. “You’re terrified. Why are you so terrified?”

I looked down into her eyes, my chest heaving, tears of pure, frantic desperation burning behind my eyelids.

“What if I told you…” my voice cracked, barely audible over the chatter of the crowd. “What if I told you I’ve already lived today? Twice.”

Helena blinked. A small, sympathetic smile touched her lips, the look someone gives a person making a bad, confused joke. “Seb, that’s…”

She stopped.

She looked at my eyes. She saw the absolute, unhinged horror staring back at her. She saw that I wasn’t joking. I wasn’t laughing. I was a man standing on the edge of an executioner’s block.

The smile died on her face.

“Next group, move inside!” the operator called out, stepping behind us.

The crowd pressed against my back, a gentle, relentless pressure nudging us forward.

I gripped Helena’s hand so tightly she winced, but she didn’t pull away. I looked at the glass doors, then down at our intertwined fingers.

For the first time since this nightmare began, I understood the terrible, suffocating truth.

We weren’t choosing to step into that elevator.

Something else was moving us. Something bigger, older, and entirely merciless was pulling the strings, and no matter how hard I screamed, no matter how fast I ran, today was going to happen exactly the way it wanted to.

The elevator doors slid shut with a soft, final hiss.