“See you, Wonder Woman,” he said.
The door clicked shut behind her. The loft grew quiet again.
Ash lingered in the silence, cigarette smoldering between his fingers. Outside, the sky had shifted to pewter. The wind tugged at the fire escape, soft and steady, and somewhere in the distance, he heard the first soft roll of thunder. Rain would fall soon. He glanced at the window, the slender towers glowing in the distance. That warmth inside him—low, slow-burning—hadn’t faded. If anything, it had settled deeper, behind the ribs. A spark he didn’t want to name.
He had to get ready for work. Had to put on his face, lace up his boots, strut out under the lights, and become someone else for a while. But all he could think about was Rick fucking Slade. The way he looked at him. Touched him. Took him apart and put him back together without even trying.
Ash dragged on the cigarette, watching the ember flare. Feelings were a trap. He knew that. He’d gone through hell learning it, spent a lifetime dodging it. So why the fuck did it feel like the trap was now closing?
Chapter Thirty
(7:46 p.m.)
The house smelled like Pine-Sol and grief.
Rick stood at the edge of the living room, his back to the foyer, shoes leaving wet marks on the beige carpet. He forgot to wipe them. Rain dripped from his coat, down his fingers, into the creases of his knuckles. He watched it bead and fall, a slow, hypnotic rhythm that felt more real than anything else around him.
Mrs Burns was sobbing. Not the wailing kind of grief, not yet; this was the softer, spreading shock that was only beginning to sink. The kind that cracked through silence like glass crushed in a bare hand. Her voice came in wet gasps between the broken sobs, the syllables barely human anymore.
Mr Burns hadn’t spoken. Just sat beside his wife on the couch, his fingers clenched white around her shoulders, jaw flexing with the restraint of a man who wanted to scream or punch through drywall but wouldn’t—not with strangers in the house. Not with his wife falling apart like wet paper.
Frank was crouched in the armchair across from them, murmuring something Rick didn’t catch. Maybe he was saying “I’m sorry” again, or repeating the official facts without giving them the darker details, like it might soften the edges.
Rick didn’t look at them. His gaze was on the framed photo above the fireplace, taken maybe five years ago, a high school graduation portrait. Sean, in cap and gown, that wide, all-American smile frozen forever. Brown eyes, a sharp jaw, a mole above the right eyebrow. Handsome. That’s how he looked when he still had a face to smile with. That’s what Rick will try toremember, instead of another carved-up corpse discarded like garbage.
Sixth one.
Rick’s jaw ached, but he didn’t remember clenching it. His tongue felt thick in his mouth, heavy with copper and fury. He tasted the ghost of last night—Ash’s sweat, Ash’s breath, the low groan he made when Rick had pressed him into the sheets and held him there, skin flushed, trembling beneath him. But it was distant now. A fever dream slipping through the fingers of the night.
This was reality. This was blood on cold pavement. A mother breaking in real time. A killer who kept getting away. And Rick had been too busy chasing ghosts in another pretty boy’s eyes.
No parent should survive their child.
Frank’s voice cut through the fog. “Do you have someone who can stay with you? A friend, or family nearby?”
“Yes,” the father said, hoarse. “Her sister’s on her way.”
Rick tuned out again. The words were always the same. Shock. Denial. The inevitable turn towhy? What kind of monster would do this?
He wished he had an answer. Hell, he wished it was some garden-variety psycho with mommy issues or a head injury and a knife fetish. But it wasn’t. This one was… methodical. Deliberate. There was a design to the carnage, a kind of logic Rick could feel pressing at the edges of his brain but couldn’t quite articulate.
He’d seen wolves do less to their prey.
He swallowed hard and felt the heat rise behind his lids, sudden and unwelcome.
No. Not here.
He shoved the feeling down, locked it in that rusted basement in his chest where all the other sorrows lived. There’d be time for guilt later. For now, there was only the hunt.
He turned toward the door, the rustle of his coat whispering faintly. Frank met his eyes across the room and gave a tiny nod. Time to go. Rick nodded back, jaw set, and stepped out into the rain. Let the storm wash him clean.
(9:08 p.m.)
Rain skittered against the windows, smearing the city outside in streaks of black and bleeding neon. Inside the cramped office, only the desk lamp burned, its amber glow pooling over the scattered files, the empty cups, the beat-up couch in the corner. Somewhere in the bullpen, a radiator hissed like a serpent preparing to strike.
Rick stood before the murder board, arms folded tight, sleeves rolled to the elbow, jaw clenched so hard it felt fused. A cigarette smoldered forgotten in the ashtray, sending up a thin ghost of smoke. His eyes were locked on the gallery of young faces staring back at him in perpetuity. Beautiful once, now butchered and ruined, their images anchored above crime-scene snapshots and photographs of an arcane mark rendered in blood.
No connections. No goddamn breaks. Only carnage.
