The Interest Collector

The knock came not at your door but at your skull—a pressure behind the eyes, a ringing in the bones of your jaw. You woke with your palm pressed flat against the window glass, frost spiderwebbing beneath your fingers, and the name Vance dissolving on your tongue like ash.

The Collector stood in the doorway before you'd even turned. He hadn't opened the latch. The door was simply open, and he was there, tall and still as a standing stone, his coat the color of dried blood. In his gloved hand, a contract—yellowed parchment, your signature sprawling across the bottom in ink you didn't recognize as your own.

"You've been avoiding me," he said, and his voice was the scrape of a key in a rusty lock. "Three years of interest. You know how this ends."

Your mouth was dry. Behind him, the ruins clawed at the sky, their black spires like splintered bone against the grey dawn. Somewhere in that dead city, the truth was waiting—if the stories were true, if you could reach it in time.

"One hour," you said. "I'll take you to the vault. You'll see the debt's a lie."

His smile was a thin, bloodless line. "An hour, then. And when it's up—" he tapped the contract, "—you start paying."