Page 143 of Chaotic Curse
My phone vibrates.I yank it out.One bar now.
A new text from a number I don’t recognize.
It’s a photo.Grainy.It’s the barn.Two figures.One slumped, one upright.A third shape in the foreground—just the hint of a shoulder.Whoever took it is almost in the frame.
Under it is a message.
Nice knots, Bellamy.Try harder.
My pulse goes flat.I lift my head into the dark and grin without humor.
“You want to play?”I say to the ghost of cheap aftershave riding the night air.“Okay.”
A second buzz.Another photo pops up.Close-up this time.Reyes’s wrist, chafed and bleeding, hand giving the camera a lazy thumbs-up.On his ring finger, a smear of something darker than dirt.
And then a third—a shot of a safe keypad.Not mine.Not his.Looks like a stock image.Just numbers lit in cold blue.The code fields blank.The caption under it:
Tick-tock.
The screen goes black.
I stand in the doorway of the barn, fists opening and closing, knuckles burning under old blood and new.
Eagle’s last stuttered syllable scrapes through me again.D—D—D?—
Dad and who?
Reyes is gone.
Then I see them.
More texts.
From Daniela, sent hours ago.
Belinda is missing.DHS revoked her temporary protected status.
This quickly?What the fuck?
My breath catches in my throat.
I stopped being the good son.I embraced chaos, did what felt right in the moment.
Pandora’s box has been opened, and that same chaos has now cursed everything I touch.
In my head, lines form.Connections.Somehow this is all connected.But how?
I have to get to Daniela.Have to protect her.
I call her.
Fuck.
Voicemail.
“I’m coming, baby,” I say into the phone.“I’m on my way.”
I hop into my truck, gun the engine, and screech over the gravel toward the dirt road.
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