Backup Girlfriend : A Short Story

An innocent man. An engineered obsession. A trap lined with sharpened wood stakes and cold blood. To the rest of the city, Christian Noel is practically a ghost—a quiet, gently unassuming barista who delivers daily coffee orders and vanishes into the background tiles of his neighborhood. But Christian doesn't know that his absolute silence has been bought. He doesn't know that a wealthy, unhinged socialite named Vivienne Montoya suffers from a suffocating, clinical separation anxiety—and she is paying a hefty fortune to watch his every move. When Christian's long-lost childhood friend, Sara, suddenly resurfaces in a crowded library hallway to claim a marriage promise made in elementary school, an intricate illusion of domestic peace is born. But out here, innocence is no protection against an unfathomable abyss. Abducted into the dark shadows of an abandoned loading dock, Sara is subjected to a brutal, psychological torture by masked men swarming the shadows. Released back onto the gravel streets traumatized and mentally broken, a venomous, calculating hatred takes root in her chest. She cannot touch the untouchable socialite mistress—so she decides to strike exactly where it will hurt Vivienne the most. Christian Noel. From independent author Kuze Onameni comes BACKUP GIRLFRIEND, a relentless, claustrophobic neo-noir psychological thriller single. Stripping away traditional narrative boundaries with raw, cinematic pacing and pulse-pounding suspense, this tight 8,000-word novelette offers a chilling, uncompromising look at what happens when a man's entire reality fractures under the cold, gray eyes of a monster. The rain is turning to blood on the marble tiles. Scroll up and enter the trap.