Prologue: A Long Way Down ♣ ♦ ♥ ♠

Life’s a deck, shuffled by unseen hands. Fate deals the cards, Death, the final adversary, and Time—our precious minutes—are the chips sliding across the felt.

Some days, you’re dealt aces; other days, it’s a seven-deuce unsuited, tightening like a noose around your neck. You bluff, you bet, and you pray no one calls. But Fate’s a patient dealer, and the House always wins. She watches with a cold, knowing smile as your chips slip away.

When Death makes his move, you’d better have more than a joker up your sleeves. It’s never been about the cards—it’s about having the guts to call his bluff before he calls yours.

But even then, the game’s rigged, and no one leaves the table with chips in hand.

♣ ♦ ♥ ♠

The obsidian typewriter clacks, its crimson keys etched with glowing sigils that flicker like static, moving of their own accord. Each stroke sends a pulse of cold, electric pain through the neural wires drilled into my skull, syncing my heartbeat to its unholy rhythm. The machine is alive, feeding on the words that spill from me, drawing out the last remnants of my soul. Whoever dredged it up from the abyss knew it belonged here—like it’s been waiting for this moment, for my story. To drain me dry and leave me cold, empty, husked. I sit here as it composes my memoirs—a dramatic tell-all about how I single-handedly destroyed everything that mattered to me; available soon in hardcover.

At the other end of the silver table, a woman sits cross-legged, a smug smile curling her lips as she leafs through a file—my file. I can tell she’s not quite human, my keen detective instincts pick up on the subtle signs right away. The way her eyes linger on me, as if she’s weighing whether to flay me slowly to savor the screams or continue with the interview—the way her canines are a bit too long, her smile stretched too wide, as if she’s already envisioning my entrails as her next accessory. Oh, and the horns sprouting from her head—yeah, those are a dead giveaway.

I test the ropes again, feeling them bite into my skin, reopening the barely healed wounds on my wrists. In the corner, a shadow smokes a cigar. His red mechanical eye flickers faintly, scanning every twitch I make. The lens clicks and whirs—an old D-grade model, by the looks of it; cheap, outdated tech.

They’ve been at it for hours, peeling back the layers of my mind, savoring every strip they tear away. I can see the twisted delight in their eyes, crafting a report that will be their golden ticket to some better hell. I’m just another rung on their ladder, another stone ground to dust beneath their polished boots. She smiles. All sharp teeth and a sense of superiority you can only get when you’re not the one tied up in the chair.

“So,” the woman says, her voice cool and clinical, like a scalpel slicing through flesh, “why don’t you start from the beginning?”

Her words coil around my thoughts, yanking me back through time like a dog on a leash. My vision smears, the present bleeding into the past.

I’m not here anymore. I’m somewhere else.

The Tearing? I wonder. Is that where you want to go?

The world around me cracks, shatters, and I’m there, standing at the edge of the abyss as the earth crumbles beneath my feet. The sky above splits open, a jagged wound in the fabric of reality, spilling chaos into the world below. The ground groans, buckling under the weight of its own destruction. Everything is caving in, collapsing, and I can’t stop it. I’m just a passenger, along for the ride.

But that’s not where she wants me. Not yet.

“Earlier,” she hisses, sharp as broken glass. “Take me back to the night you first died.”

And suddenly, I’m yanked back again, the tearing world fading like a bad dream. The shadows close in around me, cold and familiar, pulling me deeper into the darkness, into the memory I’ve tried so hard to forget. The memories they yank from me don’t come clean; they cut on the way out.

The typewriter clacks in the distance, syncing with the pounding of my heart, each keystroke a hammer driving nails into my coffin. She wants every detail, every moment of pain, every bloody step that led me here.

And she’ll get it. Every last drop.