Dead Daze – Pitch-Black Second Chance – Story Fodder Read Online J.A. Huss

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Dark, Insta-Love Tags Authors: J.A. Huss Advertisement

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The application process for rentals these days is insane. Background checks, credit checks, employment verification, references. I didn't qualify for anything—not with my credit score in the toilet and my employment history looking like a fucking patchwork quilt of part-time gigs and freelance work that barely covered rent.

But for this place—this beautiful, enormous third-floor loft with its exposed brick and twelve-foot ceilings and windows that let in actual goddamn sunlight—I offered to pay a year in advance.

Thirty thousand dollars.

Cash. Well, wire transfer. Same difference.

I didn't even blink when I made the offer.

The landlord didn't either. Just nodded like people threw that kind of money around every day and handed me the keys three days later.

Nine months ago, I'd never had thirty thousand dollars in my life. Hell, I doubt I even made that in a year with the pathetic employment history I had—cobbling together coffee shop shifts, and freelance copywriting gigs that paid pennies, and restaurant work that left me smelling like fryer grease.

Now, I literally have millions.

I don't know the exact number. I stopped trying to calculate it after the first few weeks.

Every month I get bank statements in my email. Each account has exactly two hundred fifty thousand dollars in it. No more, no less. The maximum the FDIC covers in case of bank failure.

I had to look that up. I didn't understand why he kept making new accounts instead of just dumping everything into one. Why the specific number. Why it mattered.

Finally ChatGPT explained it to me in tiny little baby words: federal insurance limits, asset protection, risk mitigation. The kind of financial planning that people with actual wealth do automatically, without even thinking about it.

I don't know how many accounts there are. A dozen, at least. Maybe more.

I don't even open those emails anymore.

I have enough money to really escape. To actually, genuinely disappear if I wanted to badly enough. The resources are there, sitting in those accounts I don't open anymore, waiting to be deployed.

I could hire someone to help me cover my tracks—a fixer, maybe, whatever those people are called. Probably hire an entire security team if I needed to. Find a hacker who specializes in making people vanish digitally. Get myself somewhere safe, somewhere remote. Purchase a whole new identity with papers good enough to pass scrutiny. Figure out a way to systematically close all those accounts he set up, liquidate everything, and funnel it into new ones under a different name in a different country.

I've thought about it. Late at night when I can't sleep, when the walls of this beautiful apartment feel like a new prison, just prettier. I've mapped it out in my head, step by step, like plotting one of my stories.

The logistics of disappearing.

There are exactly two reasons I don't do this.

One. Deep down, in the part of me that's learned to think like him whether I wanted to or not, I don't think it would actually work.

Whatever money I have access to—these millions that still don't feel real, that I can't quite wrap my head around—he's got a billion times more than that.

Literally.

His resources outweigh mine so completely it's almost laughable to compare them. The power differential is staggering.

If he genuinely wants to find me, if I become a problem he needs to solve, he will find me. He'll deploy whatever tools, whatever people, whatever technology it takes.

And unlike me fumbling around trying to figure out how disappearing even works, he'd know exactly how to do it efficiently.

And two… and this is the part that makes me hate myself a little more each time I acknowledge it… I don't actually want to leave.

Not him, not this place, not even this completely fucked-up scenario we're living in.

It's… God, it's exciting. It makes me feel alive in a way nothing else ever has.

It's also sick. Deeply, fundamentally sick.

And I'm so goddamn tired of being sick.

This changes today.

At the airport, standing in the check-in line with my single carry-on bag, I have second thoughts.

Is it crazy to fly to Vegas to shop?

Yes. I mean, there's no other answer than yes, is there?

That's the rational response. The sensible one. The thing a normal person would say if you told them what I'm doing right now—booking a last-minute flight to Nevada because I've decided the boutiques in Idaho Falls aren't going to cut it for whatever this transformation is supposed to be.

But… if one had the funds—and I do, courtesy of Caleb's relentless deposits that keep appearing in my account like accusations I haven't responded to—and one had never been to Vegas, which I haven't, and one was shopping for a glow-up, which is apparently what I'm calling this performance now, and one lived in sleepy Idaho Falls where the most exciting store is a Target that still has a Pizza Hut inside it… is it really crazy?


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