“We’ll see about that,” Neff murmured behind him.
Rick left them under the lamp’s pale circle and stepped out into the dim corridor. Officer Oakley stood guard at the door, hand resting on his belt. Good kid, sharp eyes, steady presence.
“Escort Mr. Frost to holding when they’re done,” Rick said.
“Yes, sir,” Oakley replied.
Rick left the interrogation wing and cut through the station’s guts, past rows of empty desks and the scatter of case files left to sleep where their owners had dropped them. Phones rang somewhere distant, a lonely echo against the late shift hush. The corridors carried the familiar tang of burnt coffee and stale sweat, the smell of long nights etched into the walls. Going home was pointless; he’d be back before dawn anyway. By the time he reached his office and shut the door behind him, the quiet had thickened, heavy as fog.
He drew the blinds and dropped onto the couch, the room lit only by the lamp glowing on his desk. For a moment, he simply sat there, heavy, then reached to shake out a cigarette and strike a match. Smoke soon curled toward the ceiling in slow ribbons. Time dragged in silence. He studied the murder board glowing faintly in the lamp’s halo, tracing the red lines between photos, the faces of the dead staring out at him. Frost was good—too good—but sooner or later, he was going to break. They all did eventually.
Why, then, did he feel this unease?
Rick rose, went to his desk, and poured himself a drink, the bourbon catching the lamplight as it slid into the glass. Helet it sit in his hand a moment, heavy and cool, as his mind drifted elsewhere. Ash. That ripe mouth, that nimble body, the fathomless sadness masked by all that dangerous beauty. His thumb hovered over his phone, the urge sharp and reckless, just to hear his voice again, smoke and silk wrapped in one. He set the phone down. No. He wouldn’t be that guy, the one who held too tight. Ash was a bird bred for open skies, wary of cages, living by whim and flight. Rick would honor that freedom, even if every bone in him ached to bind the boy to his side and never let him slip away.
His thoughts turned to Frank. He hadn’t checked in since yesterday, and now the hour was too far gone—Frank would be sleeping, or at least pretending to. His partner’s voice came to him anyway, steady, cautioning:‘Slow down, think straight.’Rick swallowed the bourbon instead, heat sliding down his throat, the silence in the office pressing tighter around him.
The city outside wailed with distant sirens, their banshee cries bleeding into the night. Inside, the case weighed down on him, a stone around his neck, dragging at every breath. In the end, exhaustion won. Rick sprawled across the couch, tie loose, shoes off, the last cigarette ground to ash in the tray. From the corner, the murder board glared in silence, its riddles smoldering in the dark, burning holes into his thoughts, until sleep finally dragged him under.
Chapter Forty-Nine
(1:55 a.m.)
Ash stirred awake, throat raw, skull thrumming as though nails had been driven deep into the bone. His lashes fluttered, consciousness reeling as the blur sharpened and the darkness thinned into light. Dozens of pillar candles ringed the chamber like wax columns, their flames swaying in sluggish currents of air. The illumination pooled across the floor in liquid gold, throwing long, jittering shadows that made the walls breathe. Bones were scattered across the concrete, yellowed, brittle with age. A rat skittered between them and vanished through a small hole, claws tapping a frantic staccato before silence reclaimed everything.
He was underground. The air told him before his sight did: damp, bitter, dense with mold and rot. A cavernous chamber stretched around him, cylindrical in shape and bare as a gutted carcass. Off to his left stood a narrow table, laid out with scalpels, syringes, jars of viscous blood, and several small steel containers set in a neat, obsessive row—the tools of someone who had been working down here for a long time. Above, corroded pipes veined the high ceiling, weeping sporadically with tiny teardrops, the sound a steady metronome marking time toward some unknown, dreadful crescendo.
Ash forced himself upright, head swimming, bare feet scraping against cold concrete. He realized that he was naked—someone must have stripped him after he went under—but the thought barely registered. Modesty had never been one of his vices, and the chill didn’t touch him anyway. He stood at thechamber’s center, wrists unbound, ankles free. No ropes. No chains. Nothing tethered him but the emptiness itself. Curious.
An X-shaped wooden cross loomed at the far wall, tall as a doorway and built from thick, antique beams. Iron shackles hung from each of its four arms, the kind meant to pin a body spread-eagled and helpless. A torture prop torn straight from a medieval inquisitor’s wet dream, used here for an equally evil purpose. It was stained. Weathered. Used.
He’d seen it before. He’dbeenhere before, in dreams that always ended in blood.
But worse, far worse, was what adorned the curved walls around it.
Mounted in a perfect array, hung the faces.
Each was stretched over a mannequin’s pale head and pinned to a wooden plaque in grotesque mimicry of hunting trophies. Empty eye sockets stared at him, lips parted as if about to speak; a silent audience of the dead.
And among them—Jimmy.
Ash’s chest constricted, heat flaring behind his eyes until his vision blurred. This was the bastard’s gallery. The Sculptor’s museum of horror.
His fingers curled into fists. He felt the thrum in his blood, that dark current pulsing under the skin. Whatever this freak thought he’d accomplished, he’d dragged the wrong guy down here. Ash would tear him apart, burn through his mind until nothing remained but terror and screams.
The hulking bulkhead door stood to his right—steel-riveted, submarine-tight, a slab built to keep the world out. He stepped toward it, only to be flung back as if the air itself had hardened into iron.
Only then did Ash become aware of the circle beneath him. Painted in thick strokes of rust-red blood, eldritch sigils clawing across the concrete in twisting lines and jagged curves, eachseeming to twitch if he looked too long. The same alphabet he’d seen scrawled at the crime scenes. And he was standing in its center.
Ash hissed and lunged again, driving harder. The moment he touched the circle’s edge, an eerie blue shimmer flared up around him, thin as breath, glistening along the painted line. An unseen barrier flexed against his momentum, jolting him off balance. He shoved, slammed, threw himself forward; the shimmer flashed with each impact and vanished the instant he retreated. He could move no more than a few feet in any direction. No chains, no shackles, yet he was trapped all the same.
“What the fuck?” he spat, question echoing in the chamber. His pulse hammered. This made no sense—none of it. Things like this shouldn’t be possible. But the last few days had torn his reality wide open. Maybe stranger things walked between heaven and earth than he’d ever dreamt of. And maybe he’d been a fool to think his hunger was the worst of them.
He tried to piece together how it had happened, how the bastard had gotten to him. The last thing he remembered was the stun gun pressed to his back outside the firehouse, the sharp pain buckling his knees. He should have sensed him, should have heard him coming. No one was that quick, that quiet. What the hell was this guy?
A faint rustle drifted from beyond the bulkhead—soft, measured, too deliberate to be vermin. Footfall? His instincts sharpened, tension coiling through him, but the sound faded before he could parse it.
“Hey!” His voice cracked against the stone. “Can anyone hear me? Come here, you motherfucker, and face me!”
