Chapter 4Spend It All Or Die Tonight

Once the adrenaline faded, the fear went with it.

I’ve spent my whole life being afraid—of poverty, of sickness, of the end. But now that the monster had a face, I could fight back. If Beatrice wanted to play, I’d play. I would spend every cent she threw at me until she ran dry.

"Dr. Lowery, I’m putting you on a ten-thousand-dollar daily retainer," I told the physician I’d recruited from out of state. "Your only job is to test every drop of water and every scrap of food that enters this house. I want to know the second you detect a toxin."

By the twenty-first day, the deposit was over two million dollars.

I bought a fortress of a house, upgraded the security to military grade, and locked myself in. I had chemical sensors and a private doctor who was forbidden from contacting the outside world. If Beatrice wanted me dead, she wasn't going to get me with a "sudden" heart attack this time.

Every day, I spent.

Day twenty-two: Five million dollars. I bought art, jewelry, and offshore gold, ensuring the balance hit zero before the clock struck midnight. I was convinced Beatrice was reaching her breaking point. No matter how rich you are, liquidating tens of millions in cash every few days is a nightmare.

But by day twenty-four, when the balance hit nearly twenty million, my confidence began to crumble.

How could one person have this much liquidity? Even for a tech mogul, this was an impossible amount of cash to move anonymously. Was I really worth this much to her?

At 2:00 AM, unable to sleep, I slipped out of the house. I drove three hours to a tiny, rural town and found a local credit union. I bribed a late-night IT contractor with fifty thousand dollars to let me look at the raw data in the federal system for my account.

I typed in my ID and my account number.

The screen blinked. Balance: $0.00.

My heart stopped. The managers hadn't been bought. The system wasn't being manipulated by Beatrice.

The money... it really didn't exist in the physical world.

But if the money was "magic" or "supernatural," then why did the bank manager know about my medical history?

I felt like my brain was fracturing. If the money wasn't Beatrice’s, then my first death wasn't a murder—it was a systemic erasure. A rule of the universe.

I frantically refreshed the page. Before I could see more, the contractor pulled me away. "Someone's coming, you gotta go!"

On the drive back, I looked at the twenty-million-dollar figure on my phone. Despair washed over me. How do you spend twenty million in a day?

I started buying luxury yachts online, donating to every GoFundMe I could find. But the sheer volume was too much. The "System" was flagging me. I got a call from a federal agent. I hung up. I didn't care about jail; I cared about midnight.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The sound of the front door being kicked in echoed through the house. I checked the monitors. Men in uniforms.

Panic seized me. I ran to the storage room, tripping over a stack of boxes. Junk spilled everywhere. And there, glinting under the harsh fluorescent light, was a small plastic card I hadn't seen in years.

I froze. I picked it up, then looked at my phone.

The pieces finally clicked, and the horror of it nearly made me vomit.