Chief Slate settled into his chair like a stone sinking into mud. Leather sighed beneath him. The office light was a pale, sickly thing, catching dust motes that drifted like ash in the stale air.
Across the desk, Mayor Blackwell sat with the stillness of a man measuring his own breaths. Not relaxed. Never relaxed. Every angle of him was a calculated performance.
Slate let the silence stretch, watching the subtle tremor in Blackwell's throat—a tiny betrayal of the calm he was selling.
"How did you even know?" Slate's voice was gravel, worn down from years of barking orders and swallowing truths.
Blackwell's mask slipped—just a flicker at the corner of his mouth, there and gone. He laced his fingers on the desk, knuckles whitening. The smile he offered didn't belong to him.
"I'm the mayor," he said, each word slow and deliberate, like he was dosing out poison. "Nothing stirs in this town without eventually landing on my desk. Especially when it involves the Halverns. I have sources. Leave it at that."
Slate leaned forward. The smell of old coffee and decay hung between them. "That's a neat story. But it's not the one I'm buying."
The mayor's smile vanished. "The truth is negotiable, Chief. But fine. If you want to play this out…" He dropped his voice. "What first caught my eye wasn't the Gracy accident report. It was who filed it."
Slate's face hardened into something carved from cliffside. "It wasn't the mechanical team."
"No." Blackwell's eyes gleamed, predatory. "It was your Lieutenant Detective. Caleb Saye."
The name landed between them like a shiv.
"Caleb?" Slate repeated, the taste of it wrong. "He wasn't even stationed here when that report was processed."
"Officially, no," Blackwell allowed, leaning back. "But we both know Caleb has roots here. Deep, tangled roots. His sister, Viola, was woven into the Halvern circle once. Too close for comfort."
"Get to the point."
"The point," Blackwell whispered, "is that Caleb's been cleaning up his family's messes for decades. He pinned Theodore Halvern's death on Serena Drayke twenty-five years ago using evidence that… well, let's just say it couldn't be replicated. Maybe he was protecting his sister. Maybe he was protecting himself. But the math has never added up."
Slate didn't blink. "You're accusing one of my best of burying a murder?"
"I'm suggesting that some debts don't stay buried. They grow. They fester." Blackwell's gaze drifted to the window, where rain had begun to sketch watery trails down the glass. "Speaking of the dead… do you ever wonder, Chief? About old Theodore?"
Slate frowned. "What's there to wonder?"
A strange, sarcastic doubt crept into Blackwell's tone. "You really think a man like that—a kingpin with more enemies than allies—just conveniently dies in a mansion fire? No body ever recovered in a way that could be… verified?" He leaned in, his expression a theater of raised brows and mocking suspicion. "Or do you think maybe the old bastard staged the whole thing? Faked his death, slipped into the shadows to pull strings where no one could see?"
Slate studied him. "Why ask me? You're the one with all the sources."
Blackwell didn't answer. Instead, he looked down at his own hands, resting on the desk. They were trembling. A fine, constant shake, like a wire humming under current.
Slate watched as Blackwell's eyes glazed over. The mayor wasn't seeing the office anymore. He was somewhere else.
Blackwell's vision fractured.
One moment, his hands are on Slate's desk. The next—
He's younger. Thinner. Strapped to a metal chair in a room that smells of ozone and antiseptic. Concrete walls, low ceiling, a single hanging bulb swinging gently. A heavy curtain divides the space. Shadows move behind it—whispers, clipped and clinical, words he can't make out.
His wrists are bound. Not with rope. With something like reinforced polymer, cold and seamless. He struggles. The bindings don't give.
Then the wind shifts—a vent humming to life somewhere. A gust lifts the edge of the curtain.
Behind it, standing amidst a cluster of monitors and strange, angular equipment, is a man. Middle-aged. Sharp features, hair silver at the temples. He wears not a suit, but a dark, heavy robe that looks antique, ceremonial. On his hands are gloves that seem wrong—too structured, with faint metallic threading that pulses softly under the light.
Theodore Halvern.
Not dead. Not even aged as he should be. His eyes meet Blackwell's through the gap in the curtain. He doesn't look surprised. He looks… amused.
Slowly, deliberately, Theodore raises his gloved hand. He gives a thumbs-up. A gesture of approval, of mock encouragement.
Then, even slower, he rotates his wrist. The thumb turns downward. His grin widens—stretches beyond human ease, a predator's smile, full of quiet, promised violence.
The curtain falls back into place.
The vision shattered.
Blackwell jolted back into the present with a sharp gasp. He was standing now, though he didn't remember rising. His hands gripped the edge of Slate's desk, knuckles bone-white.
"Blackwell?" Slate's voice cut through the fog.
The mayor didn't—couldn't—respond. His whole body was rigid, caught in the afterimage of that room, that smile.
Then the convulsions began.
It started in his hands—a violent jerk that traveled up his arms. His head snapped back, tendons standing in sharp relief along his neck. A thin, shimmering mist erupted from the fabric of his suit, rolling out like breath in arctic air. It carried a scent—burnt copper and overripe fruit, sweet and cloying and wrong.
His eyes rolled back, whites gleaming under the fluorescent lights, and he collapsed across the desk. Papers scattered. A pen clattered to the floor.
The smell intensified.
Slate was on his feet, chair screeching backward. "Blackwell!"
He reached for the mayor's shoulder, but the skin was already cooling under his touch. Around Blackwell's wrist, partly hidden by his cuff, a metal band—a cufflink—glinted. It bore a symbol: a triangle with three weeping eyes, a spiral at its heart, and the suggestion of a six-fingered hand pressing inward. It pulsed once with a soft, malevolent light, then dimmed.
From the mayor's fallen jacket, a phone emitted a sound—a distorted, artificial giggle, too high and too young, twisted through layers of static.
"Performance reviewed," a voice chimed, synthetic and cruel. "Conclusion: insufficient."
The line went dead.
Slate's mind raced, cold and clear. He scanned the room. The wire by the window. The faint, persistent hum from the air vent. The stack of boxes in the corner—and behind them, the soft blue glow of a monitor's standby light. A lens, barely visible, winked behind the glass.
They were being watched. Recorded. This wasn't an assassination. It was a broadcast.
He moved to the window. Rain streaked the glass in frantic rivers. Across the street, under the halo of a flickering streetlamp, a figure stood motionless. Long dark coat, pale face upturned. One arm lifted, too slowly, and a single thin finger extended, pointing directly at Slate through the rain-blurred pane.
Every instinct in Slate's body turned to ice.
He stepped back. The vent above him rattled—a mechanical, grinding shudder. Something was in the ductwork. Something alive with current.
He reached for the desk phone. Dead. The line had been cut from somewhere else.
The room was a sealed box. A stage. And he was the remaining player, expected to perform.
"Not today," Slate muttered, the words a vow in the suffocating silence.
He took one last look at Blackwell's body, at the symbol on his wrist that seemed to drink the light, and turned toward the door.
The handle was frigid—unnaturally cold. He twisted it, pulled.
The hallway outside was a tunnel of shadow, the distant station lights like drowned stars.
Thunder broke over Crestwood, a long, rolling growl that shook the old bones of the building.
Slate stepped into the dark, his breath steady, his pulse a slow, deliberate drum in his veins. This town had used him as a pawn, a blunt instrument, a keeper of its filthy secrets.
No more.
The game had just changed. And he was done following rules he'd never agreed to play by.
He would find the truth. He would find the hand moving the pieces.
And he would break every single finger on it.