The whisper—Take the prize—didn’t leave Asha’s mind. Even as detectives packed up equipment and the coroner’s van pulled away with Raj’s body, that phantom sentence echoed inside her like a bruise. Something had been in the house. Something had watched her sleep. Something had walked those stairs. And now that “suspicious death” had turned into something darker in the eyes of the police. By noon, Detective Reyes returned with a grim expression, a binder under his arm, and two additional officers trailing him. “Mrs. Patel,” he said, “we need more context about the night you won the jackpot. Anything unusual you saw or heard before leaving the casino.” Asha hesitated. How was she supposed to explain the cold gusts, the glitching screen, the whisper behind her? How could she bring up the shadow without sounding unhinged? “There… was something,” she admitted quietly. “When the machine went off, the lights flickered. And I thought I saw someone standing behind me. But when I turned, no one was there.” Reyes exchanged a look with one of the younger officers, who didn’t even try to hide his skepticism. “We’re going to retrieve casino footage. Just routine,” he said. “Given the circumstances, we want to rule out anyone who might’ve followed you home.” Asha almost told him that the thing following her home wasn’t living. But she bit the inside of her cheek and nodded. By afternoon, the detectives were seated inside a small viewing room at Desert Mirage Casino, their faces lit by the cold glow of multiple monitors. Asha wasn’t there—she’d been asked to stay home—but she could imagine the tension as they watched the night she won. Most of the footage looked normal. People clapping, machines ringing, Asha covering her mouth in disbelief, Raj hugging her with shaky excitement. But around the twenty-minute mark, Detective Reyes leaned closer to the screen. “Hold on,” he murmured. The image distorted. Horizontal lines cut across the playback like scratches. Only when a dark blur passed behind Asha did the entire file glitch for a full two seconds. “Run that again,” Reyes said. The technician rewound. Same problem. The screen bent, pixelated, then returned to normal when the blur disappeared. “Could be data corruption?” the tech offered weakly. “Only when that figure moves,” Reyes said. “Loop just that section.” They slowed the frame rate. The figure behind Asha didn’t walk like a person. It didn’t match the height or shape of anyone in the casino. No clear outline. More like… a smudge. Something moving without actually moving. “It’s not triggering motion sensors,” the tech said confused. “Everything else registers motion—this thing doesn’t. It’s like it’s not physically there.” Reyes frowned. “Digital artifacts don’t cast shadows.” But the figure’s shadow was clear—stretching long and distorted across the casino carpet. The technician checked the hallway footage next, the one taken when Asha turned and looked over her shoulder. That’s when the problem became impossible to ignore. “Sir,” the tech said, touching his earpiece, “we’re missing forty seconds.” Reyes stiffened. “Missing… as in deleted?” “No. Corrupted. But selectively corrupted. Only this segment.” The tech highlighted a gap in the timeline. “This is exactly when Mrs. Patel turned around.” “Restore it.” “I’ve already tried. Something overwrote the frames digitally. It’s not a standard glitch.” Reyes muttered something under his breath. “Why this moment? Why only when she looked back?” Nobody had answers. Hours later, while detectives combed through remaining audio logs and crowd footage, an alert buzzed on Reyes’s phone. It was the preliminary autopsy update. Raj Patel had been strangled. Manually. Reyes read the note twice before closing the screen. The bruising patterns were consistent with fingers pressing into the neck—but the spacing didn’t match Asha’s hand measurements. He knew because they’d already taken her prints and hand scans as part of procedure. Someone taller. Someone with longer fingers. Someone whose grip didn’t match any profile in their system. It wasn’t adding up. None of it was. The next morning, the FBI’s digital forensics specialist, Jonah Parr, arrived at the casino to examine the corrupted frames. He wasn’t part of the official case yet, but Reyes trusted him; the man had a reputation for recovering footage that was supposedly unrecoverable. Parr played the file over and over, zooming in on every pixel, enhancing contrast, isolating shadows and motion trails. Finally he froze one frame and stared at it long enough for Reyes to notice. “Jonah?” Reyes asked. “What are we looking at?” Parr didn’t answer at first. He leaned forward, adjusting the zoom again, then pointed at the screen. “You said there was one figure behind her,” he said quietly. “One shadow.” “Yes,” Reyes replied. Parr exhaled slowly, almost shakily. “Detective… that’s not one shadow.” He tapped the screen. “It’s two.” And both were standing directly behind Asha.