Chapter 1
Caleb
Those who play in shadows always underestimate the light.
They think darkness is their ally, their shield against consequence.
They're wrong.
Darkness is just a temporary veil.
Nothing stays hidden forever.
Justice finds a way.
It always does.
You can run from it, hide from it, pay lawyers to build walls around it, but eventually it seeps through the cracks like light under a door.
Relentless. Patient. Inevitable.
And when you skirt around it for too long, when you think you've outsmarted the system, outmaneuvered the consequences, the only way it ends is…messy.
Violently messy, if I'm involved.
The kind of messy that comes with unmarked graves, desperate phone calls in the dead of night, and bloody clothes that need burning.
Every choice leaves a mark.
Every mark has a weight.
Every weight must be balanced.
I am the scales.
Justice isn't blind. That's a lie they tell children.
Justice has cold, calculating, patient eyes that watch, and wait, and remember everything.
If you earn it, you pay.
Blood for blood hammers through my speakers as I navigate the icy switchback mountain road.Fuck you, and fuck society too. It's a roaring anthem that calms me after balancing the debts.
A ritual now.
A signal that the score has been evened.
An indicator of finality.
Justice done, I put the night's work behind me and concentrate on my next target—Scarletta Mae Desmond.
Erotica writer. DarkDesires Forum pen name, ScarletSins.
Lonely twenty-something with dirty blonde hair and hazel eyes that hide behind a computer screen.
No job worth mentioning—just freelance copywriting she's too distracted to finish.
No purpose beyond the stories she writes in the dark hours between midnight and dawn.
