Page 1 of Heresy (The Lost Gospels #1)

ONE

THE GHOST AND THE RUIN

VERA

T he deadbolt thuds home like a judge's gavel.

Final. Absolute. I slide the chain across—metal singing against metal, a sound I've programmed myself to love.

The third lock clicks. Three barriers between me and everything that wants to devour what's left of who I used to be. Three locks. Never enough.

My apartment breathes around me—four walls of calculated anonymity, furniture chosen for its disposability. Nothing here screams, stay. Nothing whispers home. Just temporary coordinates in a life built for rapid evacuation.

A car backfires below.

Lightning-strike panic. My hand finds the Ka-Bar before conscious thought, steel cold and serrated. Heart hammering my ribs like a caged animal. Breath shallow, a metallic taste flooding my mouth.

Just a car. Just a car. Just a?—

But my nervous system doesn't believe in just. Eight months of hyper-vigilance have rewired every synapse. I force my fingers to release the hilt, one by one, like defusing a bomb made of my own flesh.

The Nikon waits on the coffee table. Heavy. Real. Mine.

I lift it, and the transformation begins. Behind this lens, I'm not the woman who counts locks like rosary beads. I'm pure vision. The world becomes mathematics: aperture, shutter speed, focal length. Variables I can control. Behind the lens, the world can't touch you.

The go-bag lurks in my peripheral vision, its strap visible through the deliberately cracked closet door. Thirty-six hours of survival compressed into canvas. Cash. Fake passport. Burner phone. The promise I carved into my bones during those fluorescent-lit hospital hours: Never. Again.

But tonight feels different. Tonight feels like standing at the edge of my own cliff.

The map spreads before me—Brooklyn's wounded coastline. My finger traces Red Hook's broken geography, where the city stops pretending to be beautiful and just is. Raw. Honest. Unashamed of its fractures.

People ask why I photograph ruins. The answer burns behind my sternum, too true to speak: Broken things don't lie. They survive without the exhausting performance of wholeness. And broken things never ask why you understand them so completely.

Battery check: full. Memory card: empty, hungry. Golden hour approaches—that brief window when light forgives everything. My reflection catches in the window. Pale. Hollow-eyed. The face of someone who's been holding her breath for months.

Maybe tonight I exhale.

The decision crystallizes. I need this. Not just photographs, but the risk. The choice to walk toward uncertainty. For eight months, I've existed in negative space—defined by what I avoid.

Tonight, I choose movement.

The camera bag is packed with reverent precision.

Lenses slide into place—ritual, armor, resurrection kit.

I shoulder the weight. Three locks disengage, each click a small rebellion against the fortress I've built from fear.

The hallway smells like other people's lives. I'm not looking for safe anymore.

I'm looking for honest.

The G train spits me out like something distasteful. The waterfront opens before me, and Manhattan's frantic heartbeat fades, replaced by the slow, ancient rhythm of the harbor. Wind through abandoned spaces. The sound of emptiness finding its voice.

I pull my collar up against the harbor wind.

Low tide exposes the city's dark secrets—rotting pier foundations, the bones of industry.

Ghost territory. My paranoia, that constant electrical hum, simply evaporates.

Hard to feel hunted when you're the only living pulse for blocks.

This is what peace feels like. Who knew it would taste like salt and rust?

I lift the Nikon, my familiar shield. The viewfinder narrows reality to manageable dimensions, where chaos becomes composition. First shot: a thick iron bollard, its corrosion turned to copper fire by the setting sun. Click. The shutter's mechanical blink—a small victory against time.

Movement becomes meditation. Hunting light.

Minutes dissolve. I document the slow, magnificent death of the industrial age, each frame a small act of resurrection.

For this suspended hour, I'm not a girl on the run.

I'm an artist. A witness. I find something I’d forgotten existed: belonging.

This is why I survived. To see. To prove that broken things can still catch light.

Then I see it.

The building rises at the pier's end like something from a fever dream.

A brick leviathan, its ambition collapsing into magnificent ruin.

Windows like blind eyes. Most have been bricked over, as if the building is slowly closing its eyes to shut out whatever horrors it's witnessed.

The sun's final rays strike the top floor, setting brick on fire while the foundation drowns in purple shadow.

My breath stops. Perfect. Haunted.

This isn't just a photograph. It's a conversation. The rational part of my brain screams its familiar warning: too isolated, too far from escape, the kind of place where women disappear.

But the artist is louder. This is why you came here.

My feet move without permission. A chain-link fence topped with rusted barbed wire guards the approach.

A faded sign hangs like a dead thing: NO TRESPASSING.

Near the foundation, a gap has been peeled back like skin from a wound, dark and inviting.

I slip the camera strap over my head, settling the Nikon's weight against my chest.

I have to get the shot. The words repeat like a prayer. This is how you resurrect yourself. One frame at a time.

The moment I slip through the wound in the fence, the air transforms. Colder, thicker, charged with secrets. The quiet I found peaceful moments ago becomes a watchful silence. I am not a photographer anymore. I am prey.

I use a line of shipping containers as cover, moving like a shadow.

My hypervigilance becomes a tactical advantage, every nerve ending mapping the environment.

A crumbling loading dock offers a clear sightline.

I settle into position like a sniper. The building dominates my vision: rust-stained brick bleeding in the dying light, windows like dead eyes.

My finger hovers over the shutter release. Everything aligns?—

A sound rips through the harbor's hum like tearing fabric.

A scream.

Short, guttural, swallowed by brick walls that keep secrets. It bypasses thought and speaks directly to the lizard brain. Run. Now.

But my feet are rooted to the concrete. The photographer in me wars with the survivor who knows curiosity kills. What was that? This building isn't just ruins. It's active. Occupied.

Document or die. Choose.

I move, dropping into a tactical crouch, circling the perimeter.

There. A high window on the ground floor, a single pane of grimy glass someone forgot to seal.

I hoist myself onto a stack of weathered pallets, wood creaking in protest. I raise the camera, the telephoto lens a telescope into a nightmare.

Through the dirty glass, I see them: big men in leather cuts, their patches proclaiming allegiances I don't recognize. They form a circle, a primitive ritual. My hands shake as I adjust the focus.

A man is strapped to a steel chair in the center of their circle. Bloody but conscious, his eyes wide with a terror that knows what's coming. Another figure, impossibly large, holds something in steel tongs—metal that glows a sick orange, pulsing with heat. A brand.

Don't, the survivor whispers. This isn't documentation. This is suicide. Walk away.

But my finger has divorced itself from rational thought. I am a witness. This is what I do. The artist wins. She always does.

My finger depresses the shutter release.

Click.

In the charged silence, the mechanical snap explodes like gunfire. It ricochets off concrete and steel, the audible moment the observer becomes a participant.

Inside, a head turns with predatory precision. Then another. Eyes like winter find mine through the grime-streaked glass—cold, dead, the kind of gaze that has looked at too many people who stopped existing shortly afterward.

I have been seen.

There is no thought. Only a single, silent scream in my mind: Run.

I launch myself from the pallets, hitting the ground in a roll that sends sharp gravel biting through my jeans. The camera bounces against my chest like a stone heart, each impact a reminder of the choice that doomed me.

Behind me, the warehouse erupts. Shouts—not of panic, but coordination. They move with the efficiency of predators.

They're herding you.

The realization hits like ice water. This isn't a chase—it's an orchestration. My lungs burn as I careen between shipping containers, each turn anticipated, calculated, controlled.

There—a gap between containers ahead. It yawns like salvation. My last chance. I pour every molecule of adrenaline into my legs, launching myself toward the narrow passage. The gap grows larger—sanctuary, escape, survival. Almost there. Almost?—

My boots hit not open pavement, but solid, unmoving steel.

The impact reverberates through my skeleton. A wall of corrugated metal rises before me, rusted and absolute as a gravestone. The gap was a deception.

The alley is a coffin made of steel, and I have just sealed myself inside.

Panic floods my system, cold and suffocating. I whip around, back pressing against frigid metal, chest heaving. They planned this. They knew exactly where I'd run.

They aren't running anymore.

Two figures stand at the alley's mouth, blocking the last threads of dying light, silhouettes guarding the border between hope and horror. They watch me with the unnerving patience of wolves who have tired out their prey. They don't need to move. They've already won.

Then they both take a synchronized half-step back, creating a path. An invitation. They aren't the finale. They're the opening act.

A new figure emerges from the twilight, stepping between his lieutenants.

He moves with a quiet, lethal grace that makes trained killers look like amateur dancers—like violence contained in human form.

Larger than the others, broader through the shoulders, he carries a weight that would crush lesser men.

This is what an apex predator looks like.

The aura radiating from him isn't just authority; it's a gravitational force that makes the steel walls feel closer, the air itself thinner.

He stops just outside striking distance, his shadow falling over me like a shroud.

I see the worn black leather of his cut, the dull glint of silver on his hand—not jewelry, but something that suggests rank, that draws blood.

He isn't breathing heavily. He isn't angry.

The absence of emotion is more terrifying than rage. This man radiates a perfectly controlled stillness—the kind that belongs to executioners, to judges who have learned that death is an administrative function.

His eyes find mine. No heat. No triumph. Only the cold, weary finality of a man who has passed this sentence before and knows exactly how it ends. He views my terror not as entertainment, but as an inevitable byproduct of the choices that led me here.

Like a judge who decided the verdict long before the trial began.

The camera hangs heavy against my chest—evidence and anchor. I don't regret the photograph. Even facing this, a part of me whispers that some moments demand witnesses, regardless of the price. At least someone saw.

He takes another step forward, closing the distance. I can smell leather and motor oil and something darker, the scent of a man who wears brutality like cologne. When he speaks, his voice will carry the weight of absolute authority, the calm of knowing every possible outcome belongs to him.

And I understand, with crystalline clarity, that my story as a free woman ends here.