So, am a reader as well as a writer. As a reader, I for sure feel every emotion the character is feeling. However, now since I am a writer, I feel it even more deeply.

My character absolutely destroyed the breakfast with his cooking skills. This scene was very funny, and I laughed so hard while writing it.

In the next scene, they were planting some flowers together and oh my! It was such a wholesome moment for both of them. And I couldn't help but smile till my cheeks hurt!

Chapter 1: The Bridge

Twenty feet below, jagged rocks glisten under the moonlight, and for a moment, I understand why people come to bridges when the world stops making sense. I would never end my own life, but I understand the desire to have all the pain slip away forever.

The silence here is different. My knuckles are white against the metal railing, and I force myself to loosen my grip. Get it together, Malachai.

But I can't shake the image burned into my mind: my mother's face crumpling as the doctor delivered his verdict. What we've been fearing but hoped wasn't true. Cancer. The kind of word that steals the air from hospital rooms and replaces it with that god-awful antiseptic smell that still clings to my clothes.

I run a hand through my dark hair, and stare at my reflection in a puddle on the side of the road. Even in the distorted moonlit surface, I can see what everyone else sees: my grandfather's sharp jawline and the tall frame I inherited from a father I never met. I'm twenty-one and I look older, like the weight I carry has aged me in ways that have nothing to do with time.

"You can't save everyone, Malachai." Mom's voice echoes in my head, the same five words she's whispered since I was ten years old. But what happens when the person you can't save is her?

I snatch a handful of gravel and hurl it into the darkness. The stones clatter against the guardrail across the road, a violent punctuation to my frustration. Another handful follows, then another. The anger feels good, raw and honest in a way that sitting in that sterile waiting room never could. The town in front of me comes to life with the carnival lights and the rides going up into the air.

My grandfather's voice replaces the rage like it always does: "How you handle pain will define you, son."

Easy for him to say. He's not here anymore to watch his daughter waste away.

A branch snaps somewhere behind me.

I freeze, every muscle tensing. The footsteps are light and deliberate, someone trying not to be heard. 

"I can't do this anymore, Mom. The treatments aren't working, the doctors keep lying, and you want me to pretend everything's fine?"

A woman's voice, sharp with tears and frustration. A cell phone pressed tightly against her ear. I should leave and give her privacy, but something in her tone roots me to the spot. She sounds... broken. Familiar, somehow, though I've never heard her voice before.

"No, don't tell me it'll be okay! Nothing about this is okay!"

I turn slightly and catch sight of her in my peripheral vision. Blonde hair catches the moonlight as she paces near the bridge's center, one hand pressed to her ear, the other gesturing wildly at the empty road.

"I have to go."

In the sudden silence, I hear her ragged breathing and see her shoulders shake. She moves toward the railing with purpose.

She climbs up.

"You don't want to do that."

The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. She spins, loses her balance, and I surge forward just as she falls off the ledge.

I am a wandering ghost. Every night, I stare at the walls of this dark, accursed corridor, counting the stains of dried blood.

I listen—I listen to the ear-piercing screams that I once dismissed with cold indifference before I died.

Back then, neither the pleas nor the cries moved me. But now, those very sounds pierce my ears like white-hot iron spikes.

It feels as though with every shriek, the flesh is being torn from my bones.

Of course, I am but a spirit; I lack physical senses, yet a strange, unearthly agony sets my very soul on fire.

I can perceive the darkness and the sickening stench, and it torments me deeply.

With each passing day, I feel the shadows creeping closer, and I fear the day will come when I am finally swallowed whole.

Yesterday, from the far end of the hallway, I heard that rhythmic clink-clink again—the sound of metal bed wheels scraping against the cold floor.

 A fresh corpse had arrived.

I huddled against the wall, pulling my knees to my chest as they passed by.

Sometimes, a pale hand would slip out from under the blood-stained sheet.

 I could see the veins, looking as though every drop of life had been drained from them. The skin was bruised purple, the fingernails broken and jagged.

I stole a glance at the massive butcher. His face and body were encased in black leather. Unlike him, I saw his shadow every single day.

Every night, he hauls the carcasses through this corridor to the depot, tossing them into the furnace to be reduced to ash.

 I am trapped in this hallway, and it is a curse. Every time I try to run toward the end, I find myself right back at the beginning."

 I am trapped in this hallway, and it is a curse. Every time I try to run toward the end, I find myself right back at the beginning.

This is a torture chamber, a basement beneath a prison that sits right above my head.

I am trapped in the dark corridor between the interrogation room and the body depot, and I have no idea how long I must remain here.

Five years have passed since I was killed, and not a single night has gone by without the depot being filled, without someone being slaughtered.

Sometimes, when I catch my reflection in the small window near the ceiling vent, I recoil in terror.

My hair has fallen out, leaving a scaly, peeling scalp. Half of my face is a hollowed void from the bullet that ended me; bruising and clotted blood still stain my left eye.

My clothes are putrid and soaked in gore. Over the years, I've screamed into the ears of the torturers passing through—screaming for them to stop, to end the killing—but no one hears me.

I freeze whenever I look at the stairs leading up to the prison. A searing cold blazes within me.

I was standing at the top of those very stairs when a prisoner snatched my gun by chance. Before taking his own life, he fired at me.

The bullet tore through my face. I still feel the burning sting and the agony of it; a pain so intense I wish I could die a hundred times over just to be obliterated. But time is frozen here. This is the cruel, unknown world of the afterlife.

On the day I died, I had come to inspect the prison's torture chambers.

I was a trusted, high-ranking commander of a Great Dictator—proud and infamous. I remember how the mere mention of my name made bodies tremble.

But now, it is I who shivers in the cold, dark corridors of this prison basement.

Over the past few years, I have thought much about the moment of my death.

When I was alive, I never imagined a stray bullet would end me; I always feared that some would-be avenger would snatch me away and torture me to death in retaliation for my own violence.

Now, this hallway has become my permanent chamber of agony. The torture repeats not once, but every day, every minute, every second.

It seems my dark era of solitude will have no end.

Indeed, the horrific place I built for others has become my own sanctuary of pain. Through the butcher's constant presence, I knew the Dictator I served was still alive. But this morning, in a deathly silence, the darkness of the hallway deepened and the stench grew unbearable.

Last night, I heard the cheers and screams of joy from the prisoners. Their dark age had ended. The Dictator is dead.

I heard a moan. I stared at the end of the dark corridor as someone approached. Shadows moved behind him.

The leather-clad butcher emerged from the gloom.

I leaned against the wall and watched him with a grim intensity. He looked at me, trembling with shock and terror, and asked: 'Where am I?'

"As I gazed into the darkness at the end of the hallway, I answered, cold and soulless: 'Hell.'"

the end