Chapter 13

She frowned, her eyes still holding that deep concern. “ David. I’m sorry. You’re working so hard. You’ll find something. You always do. You’re so good at this.” She reached across the counter, took my hand, and squeezed it gently. Her touch was warm, comforting, a steady presence. “Just… don’t lose yourself in it. You’re already exhausted.”

“I can’t afford to lose myself,” I muttered, staring at my reflection in the polished countertop, seeing a stranger looking back. "I can't afford to fail. This job, it's... it's everything. It's what I do. It's who I am." The thought of not being a detective, of not having this purpose, was a cold, empty pit in my stomach, a void stretching before me. It was like looking into a black hole. I just couldn't imagine it.

Gracie just kept holding my hand, her thumb stroking my knuckles. “I know it is. And you won’t fail. You’ll find something. You just need a breakthrough.” Her voice was soft, steady, a quiet strength that somehow always managed to calm the storm inside me. She understood, in her own way, the passion I had for putting bad guys away, for making things right. It was a comfort I didn't get from anyone else.

I sighed, finally picking up the spoon and forcing myself to take a bite of the soup. It was warm, good. Maybe she was right. Maybe a breakthrough was just around the corner. But looking at the never-ending piles of paper back at the precinct, listening to the echoing silence of a killer who left no trace, it felt a million miles away. My future, my entire life, felt like it was hanging by a single, thin thread, fraying fast, and I was losing my grip. The clock was ticking. Faster and faster.

The ringing tore me out of a dead sleep. Not my alarm. My work phone. My heart slammed against my ribs before I even reached for it. It was still dark outside, the kind of deep, quiet black that meant something was wrong, terribly wrong. My eyes snapped to the clock: 4:17 AM. No good news ever came at 4:17 in the morning.

"Corbin," I mumbled, my voice thick with sleep and dread.

"Detective! Get down here! Code Red! It's the Commissioner!" The voice on the other end was too high, too frantic. It was a young officer, Garcia, from the night shift. He sounded like he was about to throw up.

My blood ran cold, pushing the last of the sleep from my brain in a brutal rush. "Davies? What about him?"

"He's... he's been found, sir. At his private residence. It's bad, Detective. Worse than the others. Much, much worse."

My gut twisted into a tight, hard knot. Davies. No. Not him. This was impossible. This wasn't how this game was supposed to be played. The killer stuck to the lowlifes, the untouchable scumbags. Davies was a son of a bitch, sure, a political animal, but a victim? A pedophile? No way.

I slammed the phone down. Gracie stirred beside me, a soft murmur escaping her lips. I didn't even look at her, just threw the covers off, my mind already racing, pulling on clothes without really seeing them. Every muscle in my body felt rigid, ready to snap.

The drive to Davies’s sprawling house felt like it took forever, the siren wailing a desperate cry into the pre-dawn silence. My hands were clamped to the steering wheel, knuckles white. This couldn't be real. This couldn't be the same killer. Or if it was, everything I thought I knew was a lie. The rules had just changed, violently.

When I pulled up, the street was already a carnival of flashing blue and red lights. Uniformed officers swarmed the manicured lawn, crime scene tape already stretching, blocking off the entire street. Reporters, somehow, were already showing up, their camera flashes popping like tiny explosions in the dark. The sheer scale of the response, even for a commissioner, told me Garcia wasn't kidding. It was bad.

Ben. Ben met me at the tape, his face ashen, eyes wide with horror. He didn’t even say hello. He just looked at me, then gestured vaguely towards the house. "You gotta see this, Dave. It's... it's a whole new level of sick."

The house was big, too big for one man. But inside, it felt like a tomb. The air was colder here, heavy with something metallic and sweet that turned my stomach. It was the distinct, sickening smell of fresh blood, thick and coppery, already starting to fill the grand space. I walked through the front door, past uniformed officers who looked pale and grim. They averted their eyes, like they'd seen something they could never unsee.

And then I saw him.

Commissioner Davies. Splayed out in his grand living room. The room was a disaster zone. A crystal decanter lay in shards, a dark puddle of liquor seeping into the plush rug. An antique lamp was overturned, its shade askew like a broken hat. But all of that was just background noise to the horror that was Davies. His eyes were wide, bulging, frozen in a mask of sheer, pure terror. His mouth was open in a silent scream.

But it was his body that made my stomach lurch, made my very bones ache. This wasn't just a clean kill like the others. This was an act of brutal, intimate violence. His expensive silk robe was ripped open, exposing his chest. It was a canvas of deep, jagged cuts, not just the single precise stab wound we’d come to expect. His skin was flayed in places, almost like deliberate carvings. His arms, too, were slashed, long, angry gashes that exposed muscle and bone in places. The blood—God, the blood—was everywhere. It painted the white rug a gruesome, shocking red. It spattered the velvet curtains. It coated the polished surface of the coffee table. The coppery stench was overwhelming now, stinging my nostrils, making my eyes water. It smelled like a slaughterhouse, raw and primal.

My breath hitched. My vision blurred for a second. This wasn't the same. This wasn't the ghost. This was something else. Someone else. Or… something had snapped inside the killer, some deep, dark fury unleashed in a way we hadn't seen before.

"Evans, what the hell happened here?" I forced the words out, my voice tight, barely a whisper. Dr. Evans, the lead forensics tech, was kneeling beside the body, her face grim, her movements slow and deliberate. Even she looked shaken, her usual stoic composure cracked by the sheer brutality of the scene.

She looked up, her eyes meeting mine, then quickly dropping back to her gruesome work. "Multiple stab wounds, Detective. At least a dozen. Far beyond what we saw in the other cases. Brute force. And… a lot of anger. This was personal. Very, very personal. Looks like he was… tortured." She cleared her throat, her voice strained. "The primary fatal wound is still to the heart, same method as before, but the rest… it’s overkill. Post-mortem, some of it. But some of it, he was alive for."