I agreed to marry a rich elderly man to rescue my family—but on our wedding night, he never laid a hand on me.

“Not of you,” he said. “Of what’s in your past.”

Little by little, the truth began to peel open. He told me his first wife had died in her sleep. The doctors said heart failure. But he believed something else had been happening.

“She would wake at night,” he said, “eyes open, but not really there… like someone else was driving her.”

I got goosebumps.

Then he confessed the worst part.

He had fallen asleep once. And when he woke up…

It was too late.

After that, he turned the house into a fortress: cabinets locked, bells on doors, latches on windows. I felt like I was living inside a prison built out of fear.

I asked in a small voice, “Do you think I could…?”

He cut me off immediately.

“No. But fear doesn’t need logic.”

Then the first real shock came.

One morning, a servant said I’d been standing at the top of the stairs in the middle of the night—eyes open, unresponsive. He had been holding me, drenched in sweat, keeping me from falling.

He looked at me and said, almost desperately:

“See? I wasn’t wrong.”

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