Every transaction has a price. The dangerous ones are the ones where you don’t know what you’re buying.
When Dr. Adam Khalil, a rational cardiologist, receives a call that his father has vanished in the night, he returns to the home he grew up in and finds words scratched into the study wall: It has been here for months. I thought I could control it. I was wrong. Adam, don’t look for me.
Hidden in the closet is an ancient, impossible book—Shams al-Ma‘arif—and a desperate warning not to read it. Against every instinct, Adam does.
That same night, something enters his home. Tall, faceless, patient. And it makes an offer: his father’s location, in exchange for one year from the end of his life.
The transaction is the first of many.
What begins as a search for a missing parent unravels into a nightmare of generational debt, manipulated grief, and a cold intelligence that has been building an account across three generations. The entity doesn’t just want years. It wants something only Adam can give—freely, knowingly—and it knows exactly how to shape its offers so he can’t refuse.
As the price escalates and the line between love and sacrifice blurs, Adam must uncover the secret his grandfather carried from Cairo in 1948, confront what he’s willing to pay for his own son’s life, and discover the one transaction the entity cannot afford to complete.
Because the true cost isn’t the years you give up. It’s the person you become by the time you’re done paying.
THE PRICE is a terrifying, emotionally resonant literary horror novel for fans of The Elementals, A Head Full of Ghosts, and ancient-text occult thrillers—a story about loss, inheritance, and the unbearable weight of the things we’d do to keep our families safe.
