“She’s the sixth one in a month,” I pressed. “The ACD has been sweeping the others under the rug, calling them anomalies. But the victim, Talia Merrin… they branded her. A sigil burned into her forearm while she still breathed.”
I paused, letting the weight of it sink in. “And we found a shard. A piece of evidence Morrow tried to bury before we could even log it. But his own analyst—Faye Solstice—slipped up. She recognised the brand.”
His hand stilled on the counter. A fraction of a second—but enough. My instincts flared, brushing against him. The kitchen air turned frigid. His terror washed over me, settling in my bones, but beneath the panic lay a tremor of suppressed anger.
“She called them the ‘Purge Cases’,” I said quietly. “From two decades ago.”
His back stiffened. A tiny, involuntary betrayal.
“We have dozens of people missing right now,” I pressed, stepping closer. “Vulnerable people, the ones no one looks for until it’s too late. Was it the same back then? Did the city start emptying out before the bodies appeared?”
Eamon stared at the kettle, his knuckles white where he gripped the counter. For a moment, I thought he would ignore me, but the weight of the past seemed to press the words out of him.
“The city was… chaotic,” he said, the admission rough and low. “People fell through the cracks. Scores of them. We had a stack of missing persons files that reached the ceiling, and we never found most of them. They just vanished.”
He turned his head slightly, his profile sharp against the kitchen light.
“That was a long time ago,” he said at last. Flat. Controlled.
“We dug up the digital file, Dad. Orin found a cold case with the exact same burn pattern. Same placement. Same geometry.” Istepped closer, my voice dropping. “But here’s the interesting part. The file was corrupted. Most of the data was lost in the digitisation disaster. But the Lead Investigator’s signature block? That wasn’t lost. It was wiped.”
He turned slowly. His features were locked into a rigid mask.
“I remember you mentioning Taskforce-4 years ago,” I said, the words tasting like copper. “You were part of that unit. You worked those cases.”
He didn’t blink, the quiet in the kitchen growing heavy.
“But we checked the digital archives today,” I continued. “Someone scrubbed your name from that file. It’s a ghost record now—just like Darian is trying to scrub this investigation.”
Eamon let the accusation hang in the air. He offered neither denial nor excuses about clerical errors. He just stood there, staring past me at the wall, his mute refusal a heavier weight than any confession. It was true then. He ran the cases. But there had to be a reason he let them bury the truth.
“The ACD wants jurisdiction,” he said finally, voice clipped. “Give it to them. You don’t need this.”
A numbing fury tightened through me.
“Walk away?” I asked. “Six bodies, Dad. And now they’re refining the method. Do you expect me to shrug and let a serial killer walk because the ACD told us to back off?”
“I’m telling you to be careful.” His voice dropped, gaining weight—the kind of gravity that froze the space around him. “An officer died on that case twenty years ago. A good man. My partner.”
I stopped breathing for a moment. “What was his name?”
Eamon hesitated—one heartbeat, no more—but it was enough to split something open.
“Daniel Thorne,” he said, his voice low. “He got too close to something none of us understood. And someone made sure the investigation never saw daylight again.”
The words landed like blows.
“So it was a cover-up,” I murmured. Anger, dread, horror all fighting in my chest. “And you were part of it.”
His eyes met mine—and for the first time since I was a child, raw terror stared back. The fear reached past the accusation, fixing entirely on me. It hit like a physical weight, a crushing panic that had nothing to do with his career and everything to do with my safety.
“Drop it, Selene.” Not a plea. An order. Final.
“No.” The word emerged soft but unshakeable. “I’m a detective. I don’t drop cases because the ACD barks. And you’re not protecting me—you’re hiding something. You and Darian both.” My voice trembled with fury. “Why? Who are you protecting?”
His face shuttered completely. He turned his back. The dead air—colder than any argument—settled between us like a wall.
“Fine,” the word tore out of me, raw and brittle. “Be that way.”
