Cost of Living

A Supernatural Horror Novella

By: Corey Johnson

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Zade and Tiana don’t rent apartments.
They manage a system that feeds on people.

The Briar is a luxury building with a waiting list and a reputation for miracles. Tenants get promotions, healed bodies, erased debt, and lives that finally start moving forward.

All the building asks in return is time.

Zade runs the numbers. He decides who gets approved, who gets drained, and who quietly disappears when the balance goes negative. Tiana enforces the contracts, cleans up what’s left behind, and tells herself the tenants agreed to the deal. The building is alive, it has needs, and someone has to make sure it’s fed.

They’re not monsters.
They’re property managers.

When Camille Kline moves in, she’s supposed to be just another transaction—desperate enough to sign, grateful enough not to ask questions. But Camille reads the lease. She notices the cold that creeps through the walls at night. She pays attention to the tenants who vanish and the apartments that need “deep cleaning.”

And attention is expensive.

As the Briar’s appetite grows and its overdrafts pile up, Zade and Tiana are forced to make harder choices: who gets a miracle, who gets collected, and how many lives they’re willing to burn to keep the system running.

Because the building never stops feeding.
And it always charges interest.

Cost of Living is a dark urban fantasy told from the inside of the machine—a supernatural horror novel about power, exploitation, and the people who convince themselves that running the system is not the same thing as being evil.