CHAPTER 12 — THE FOURTH LAW: WHAT NEVER COMPLETES
The Fourth Law was different from the previous three.
It did not deal with the outside world, but with the gap between what a person says and what they allow themselves to feel. An internal space that is never resolved.
Aurelian had observed this dissonance in thousands of people: the accumulated tension that is never released, the thought that never finishes forming, the emotion that is cut halfway through by fear, shame, or a simple inability to process it.
It was the quietest form of noise of all.
And for that very reason, the most destructive.
---
During the three weeks of "silence" after the Mikkelsen case, Aurelian had not been inactive.
He had been observing. Refining.
And, for the first time, experimenting with something unplanned.
---
[The Unplanned Incident — 11:47 PM, Two Weeks Earlier]
Aurelian was following one of his potential candidates—a university professor with a fascinating history of ethical contradictions—into an old residential building.
He intended only to observe. To measure behavior patterns. To verify routines.
But in the silent hallway of the third floor, something outside the plan occurred: a door opened unexpectedly.
---
The man who stepped out was around fifty. Strong build. Direct, confident gaze. The kind of person who has constructed himself as "the pillar" of his environment—the one who solves problems, who never shows weakness, whom everyone seeks in a crisis.
He stopped when he saw Aurelian in the hallway at that hour.
—"Are you looking for someone?" he asked in a firm but not aggressive voice.
Aurelian did not answer immediately. Silence was a measurement tool: it allowed people to fill the void with their own projections.
The man frowned slightly.
—"It's almost midnight. I don't recognize your face. Do you live in this building?"
---
In that moment, Aurelian made an unplanned decision: to turn the witness into an improvised experiment.
He analyzed him in two seconds: a confident adult, internally structured, held together by decades of being "the strong one." The hardest type of person to fracture psychologically.
And therefore, the most interesting as an accidental proof of concept.
—"What exactly do you believe you just saw?" Aurelian asked in a tone so neutral it was unsettling.
The man answered quickly, with the certainty of someone used to being right:
—"A stranger lurking around a neighbor's door in the middle of the night. That's not right. I'm going to call—"
Aurelian interrupted him with glacial softness:
—"Your tone does not match what you're actually feeling."
---
The man froze, disoriented by the abrupt conversational shift.
—"Excuse me?"
—"Your words are firm," Aurelian continued, taking an almost imperceptible step forward, "but your breathing isn't. Your jaw is tense, but your hands don't know where to rest. Tell me… when was the last time you were truly, genuinely certain about something important?"
The man opened his mouth to respond, but no sound came out.
That was where the Internal Interval began to crack.
---
Aurelian continued, like someone reading faulty lines of code:
—"You define yourself by what you hold together for others. By being 'the strong one' of your family, of your circle. And that strength depends entirely on no one noticing how tired you truly are. How exhausted. How empty."
The man took half a step back, shaken by how a stranger could read something so intimate.
—"You don't know me. You don't know anything about—"
—"Three years," Aurelian interrupted with surgical precision.
"About three years ago, something broke inside you. Not something big. Something small. A microscopic fracture. But ever since, you've been accumulating tension. Small. Silent. Constant. The Internal Interval that never closes."
He pointed to the man's chest without touching him, his finger perfectly steady.
—"Right there. And you don't know how to release it. Because if you let it go—if you admit it exists—everything you've been holding together for decades might collapse."
---
The man blinked several times in rapid succession. Something in his face began to unravel in a way that probably hadn't happened since childhood.
It wasn't fear of Aurelian specifically.
It was fear of himself. Of the truth that had just been spoken out loud.
—"You didn't encounter me tonight," Aurelian said calmly.
"You encountered yourself in the worst possible place: in front of someone who can see the fracture."
The man stood completely still.
Not with anger.
Not with the intention to fight or flee.
Only with a sudden emptiness where certainty used to live.
The tension accumulated over three years had reached its forced release point, and the entire self-deception system had abruptly shut down.
---
Aurelian waited exactly seven seconds, watching the internal collapse reflect itself through micro-expressions.
Then he simply turned and walked toward the stairwell at a normal pace, as if nothing had happened.
The man did not follow him.
Did not shout.
Did not call the police.
He remained there in the hallway, staring at the empty space where Aurelian had been—yet truly staring at the void inside himself that he could no longer ignore.
---
When Aurelian reached the street, he heard a door close softly in the distance.
The witness would not be a problem.
He had been fully neutralized—not by physical threat, but by the collapse of his own internal structure.
Aurelian walked toward his car with the calm of someone who understands that even errors can be productively integrated into a system.
The witness had not been an obstacle to eliminate.
He had been an accidental proof of concept for the Fourth Law.
---
The Fourth Law could function without physical death—simply by exposing the Internal Interval with such brutality that the person became functionally silenced.
But no.
That would break the system's consistency.
The Twelve Laws required completeness.
The silence had to be final, not temporary.
The witness lived—but he would live broken. That was sufficient as an experiment.
The true victim of the Fourth Law had to be someone else.
---
[The Correct Victim]
Over the following days, Aurelian reviewed his candidates with renewed focus.
He needed someone who lived in constant internal contradiction: someone who projected intellectual and emotional clarity, yet carried perpetually unfinished thoughts. Someone trapped in permanent tension between what they were supposed to be and what they truly were.
He found:
Clara Neumann, 41 years old. Clinical psychologist.
Highly respected in her field.
Publicly composed.
Excessively organized in every visible aspect of her life.
That kind of extreme order almost always conceals unresolved spaces.
---
Aurelian observed her for five consecutive nights through the windows of her office (from a nearby building using high-definition binoculars):
• She reorganized the same books twice within one hour
• She wrote long text messages and deleted them without sending (six times in a single session)
• She stared at specific objects for full minutes, mentally frozen
• She breathed in an irregular pattern indicating chronically suppressed anxiety
Every micro-gesture confirmed that she lived in constant tension between two identities that never fully met:
the perfect therapist and the broken person who needed therapy herself.
---
In his notebook, Aurelian designed the complete scene:
---
FOURTH LAW: THE INTERNAL INTERVAL
Orientation: Northwest (continued rotation)
Object angle: 15° (interruption, not direction)
Central element: An object split into two halves
Tape: An incomplete stroke that does NOT fully cover
Time: 04:11 (the threshold between night and dawn)
Lighting: A single lateral source — interrupted shadow
Distinctive detail: Something must be visibly INCONCLUSIVE
---
Every element followed a fundamental principle:
Nothing should be complete.
Nothing should finish.
Nothing should close.
It was the antithesis of the previous three Laws, which possessed perfect geometry.
The Fourth Law had to feel broken.
---
The phantom object would be perfect:
Clara's professional business card, split cleanly in half.
Her name.
Her professional identity.
Her public façade.
Cleanly fragmented.
The perfect representation of the Internal Interval that never closes.
---
[04:07 — The Transition]
The early morning was motionless.
Clara Neumann entered her office after hours of persistent insomnia, believing that reviewing patient notes might help her process something internal she couldn't name.
She turned on only the desk lamp. Lateral light. Asymmetrical shadows.
She checked her digital schedule. Empty of personal commitments. Only work.
She reviewed deleted messages on her phone. Conversations she had started and never completed.
That was her internal interval: thoughts that should connect and didn't. Emotions that should resolve and remained suspended.
---
[04:10 — Aurelian Enters]
The office door—forgotten unlocked in her anxious distraction—opened silently.
Clara looked up.
Aurelian was inside.
Unhurried.
No explicit threat in his body language.
No definable expression.
He simply observed her with a calm that had no logical right to exist at that hour.
—"What… are you doing here?" she asked, trying to activate her professional voice but sounding far too fragile.
Aurelian examined her like the final piece of a complex puzzle.
—"There is something in you that never ends."
The tone was neither aggressive nor accusatory.
It was purely diagnostic.
---
Clara tried to stand. Tried to mentally classify the intruder using her professional behavioral frameworks.
She couldn't.
Aurelian existed in an impossible intermediate point. A point she did not know how to process.
—"If you want to talk about something, we can schedule a proper appointment—"
Aurelian interrupted her with a minimal movement of his head.
—"I didn't come to talk. I came to complete what never completes in you."
That was the last moment Clara had control of the situation.
---
[04:11 — The Silence]
Aurelian advanced with absolute precision.
There was no physical struggle.
No screams that might alert neighbors.
Clara simply lost her mental balance before her physical one—as if her own Internal Interval, carried for decades, the space between the perfect therapist and the broken person, suddenly tore open and consumed her from within.
The rest occurred without visible chaos. Without graphic violence.
Only a controlled slide into silence, sustained by hands that knew exactly how much pressure to apply and where.
---
[The Scene — 04:14]
The orientation:
Clara lay with her body pointing northwest, but with her left shoulder rotated just a few degrees off that exact line—creating the visual sensation of a trajectory interrupted halfway through.
The tape:
A dark strip crossed part of her right cheek but did not reach the end of her face. It stopped abruptly midway. An unfinished line. A mind permanently paused.
Light and shadow:
The desk lamp, slightly repositioned by Aurelian, cast a shadow of Clara that began sharply at her torso… and then broke off before fully reaching her face, fragmented by the angle of the light.
An incomplete shadow.
The perfect conceptual signature of the Fourth Law.
---
The split object:
On the floor, at exactly 15° relative to the wall, lay Clara's business card.
Cleanly split in half.
One half placed perfectly horizontal.
The other tilted at 15°, as if one identity were stable and the other deviated, incapable of aligning with the first.
Dr. Clara Neumann | Clinical Psychology
Her full name fragmented precisely at the point of identity.
---
The final detail:
Before leaving, Aurelian moved Clara's desk chair exactly three centimeters to the left, out of its habitual position marked by years of use (visible in the wear of the carpet).
A minimal deviation. Enough for Alistair—with his obsession for order—to immediately notice and deduce:
Something here was deliberately interrupted, not casually concluded.
---
Aurelian exited the office through the same door he had entered, with the same silence.
He did not look back.
He felt no guilt, no celebration.
Only technical satisfaction: the Fourth Law did not feel finished—and that was exactly the point.
He walked into the still-dark street, where the first traces of dawn were beginning to filter between the buildings.
—"The Fourth Law must not feel complete," he whispered to himself.
"It must feel interrupted. That is its nature."
And he continued toward his car.
The Fifth Law awaited its turn.
And with it, the system would enter an entirely new phase.