Act One - City of the Damned — Chapter 4

Driven by desire and curiosity three days after El Ensueño, David Martín secretly returns, intent on buying another moment with Chloé. He finds the stairwell dark and the door ajar, and steps into silent, dust-choked rooms stripped of furnishings, ceilings collapsed and paint peeling.

In Chloé’s ruined bedroom, open to the night sky, David senses another presence and glimpses a man-shaped silhouette at the corridor. The figure retreats before David can confront him. A flash of streetlight reveals a rubble pile where David uncovers a severed porcelain hand, recalling the “wooden” hand he had noticed, and he flees, shaken.

Outside, David scans the street crowd for the watcher, then enters a nearby café. A baffled waiter tells him El Ensueño closed after a fire fifteen years earlier. Disturbed, David leaves the untouched beer and resolves to verify the story.

At the newspaper archives with Matías, David confirms a brief from 1903: a pre-dawn blaze on Corpus Christi killed six—one client, four women, and a child—officially blamed on a faulty oil lamp, though clergy hinted at divine retribution. Back at his lodgings, David rereads Andreas Corelli’s card bearing the words “Great expectations,” the enigma now deepened by the impossible events he has witnessed.