Page 18 of No One’s Daughter

The door opened quietly.

The scent hit me immediately, the same faint one we’d been following from the alley. Except in here, I was swallowed by it.

I stepped inside, my gaze sweeping the space in a single, efficient pass.

Small.

Neatly contained.

Lived-in.

The flat was modest but… intentional. Soft furnishings, books stacked in uneven piles, a worn sofa by the window. Personal touches everywhere, half-finished cups of tea, a jacket draped carelessly over the back of a chair.

A woman’s space.

That, more than anything, caught my attention.

I moved further in, slowly, deliberately, taking in the details.

This place was far too cluttered, far too lived in. Something wasn’t right. “Something’s off.”

Marlette didn’t respond. She was already moving through the room, careful, methodical, touching nothing she didn’t need to.

Everything was too human.

Too mundane.

This place was in complete juxtaposition with the violent crime that had led us here.

There were no signs of struggle. No disruption that matched the violence we had just witnessed. No indication that anything capable of that kind of attack belonged here.

And yet—

The unfamiliar scent lingered.

I strode into the kitchen and opened a cupboard to find various boxes of tea stacked tightly into the space, like someone had tried to stuff it in there without a single ounce of effort given to organisation. I pulled out a box of hibiscus tea to see it was only four years out of date.

Internally, I gagged.

Did humans really drink this stuff?

Grimacing, I closed the cupboard again and made my way back to Marlette.

“Here,” Marlette said, after a moment, handing me an electricity bill she’d found.

Miss Ailsa Delaney.

“Name mean anything to you?” I asked.

“No. You?”

“No,” I said, folding the piece of paper and putting it in my pocket.

We continued our search, moving with care, disturbing as little as possible. Drawers remained mostly closed, objects returned exactly as they had been found.

A soft thud broke the silence and I turned to see a… cat.

It sat perched on the arm of the sofa, watching us with an unblinking, unimpressed stare, tail curled neatly around its paws.