Somewhere deep, a warning whispers that this isn’t a coincidence.
My focus drifts back to the father’s file. Without thinking, I click open the crime scene photos. His body sprawls across the floor of their living room, limbs twisted at unnatural angles. A vast pool of blood thickens beneath him, dark and congealed. The report lists the details in neat, detached lines—twenty stab wounds to the stomach, ten to the genitals, and two to the palms, one in each hand.
Christ.
I can’t even bear to imagine the weight she must have felt while delivering the stabs. A sick twist coils in my stomach as a thought sparks in my mind, refusing to be ignored.
My hand moves to the back of my neck, fingers grazing the skin, prickling under my touch, as I run through every possible reason she could have done this.
It’s so violent, so personal. The stomach wounds—maybe just pure, blazing rage as a result. But the palms and genitals…
A blast of white-hot fury tears through me, sharp enough to blot out everything else. My jaw locks, muscles straining as the truth edges closer, forming a shape I already recognize too well.
If it’s what I think it is, then I wish I had been the one to do it. In fact, I would have put him through far worse.
I tear my gaze from the photos before the thought festers, finding her eyes again. But now, behind the rage, I see something else.
A glint of despair. A shadow of helplessness buried deep beneath the violence.
I know that look. Not the full depth of it, not the horror she must’ve lived through, but the feeling of being lost, broken, unsure how to move forward. I remember the fog after the car accident, when I didn’t know what to do with myself, what the world wanted from me.
Iris had no one. No one to stand between her and the world that kept trying to break her. No one to guide her back to her feet. She was dragged into a cell, forgotten, and then delivered into the asylum that consumed what little she had left. Two years she endured there—two fucking years—before The Order claimed her. The realization tears straight through me, leaving a hollow ache in its wake.
Something opens in my chest, vast and echoing, a void too deep to measure. It pulses like an old wound that never learned how to close, one that cries out into the dark with a voice no one ever answered.
What comes back is nothing at all.
Only silence.
My fingers shift back to her prison file. I scroll through the dense pages, letting the words pull me in as they lay out the fragments of her early life in school, each line painting her behavior in vivid, unforgiving strokes.
Impulsive. Constantly in fights with classmates. Broke a girl’s finger at the desk next to her. Stabbed a boy in the eye with a sharpie.
Aggressive. Uncontrolled. Chaotic.
The words repeat, etched into the file like a scratched record stuck on the same note. I lean back slightly, another thought crossing my brain. I’m glad I chose to explore this on my own. I can almost hear the mental gasp of my team if they ever saw this—their wide eyes, their jaws slack with disbelief.
They’d be disturbed. I, on the other hand, am not.
I’mcaptivated. Each word strikes like a live wire humming through my veins. There has to be a reason she moved through the world like this—a reason behind the wreckage and the fury, hidden beneath the calm, razor-edged mask she wears now. Something buried deep, something that shaped her, forged her, carved her into who she became.
I click on her school records, my gaze sliding over less dramatic, more formulaic information. Repetition of the same descriptors: anger, impulsiveness, need for guidance, lack of control.
I scroll down, close to abandoning the foolish hope that anything good might surface, when something catches my eye. A note, tucked between the reports, written in the careful hand of a teacher named William Johnes. My chest pulls tight as I stare at it, a faint constriction settling over my ribs. I read his words slowly, letting each one settle, each one unravel the narrative carved before it.
He writes about her as if he’s seeing a different child entirely. Capable. Fascinating. A mind that sharpens itself on languages, literature, history, and the arts. He claims she could have been the brightest student in her class, a quiet brilliance waiting to ignite—if only she learned to steady herself, if only her emotions could be reined in rather than left to burn unchecked.
I shake my head, just barely, as a thin thread of pride slips through me, subtle and unexpected. All this chaos, all this violence, all this raw, untempered fury—and beneath it lies something sharp and luminous. Brilliance buried under ruin. Genius wrapped in scars.
The more these fragments fall into place, the more the layers of her life peel back in slow, deliberate reveals, the stronger the pull becomes. I find myself wanting more, needing more, drawn to the contradictions that shaped her, compelled to chase the truth of the woman who rose from all that wreckage.
I switch back to the previous tab, letting my gaze sweep over the teacher’s note once more. Something tightens in my chest, a strange tension I can’t quite name, stretching thin beneath my ribs. Before the thought fully forms, my hands are already moving, instinct taking over. My fingers glide across the keyboard, typing out his full name, his workplace, and his old address. The keys strike in a steady rhythm, each click a small vibration in the quiet, a mechanical heartbeat pulsing through the room.
Leaning back into the chair, I wait for the database to work its magic. My joints crack as I flex my hands, the dull pain reminding me I’m still flesh and bone. Somewhere in this obsessive spiral, I’ve lost track of time, of hunger, of everything that marks a man human.
A soft chime breaks through, and I straighten in my seat, fully focusing on it. The program spits out a large tab of information, and my eyes land instantly on the red letters under his picture.
Deceased.
