Page 36 of The Madness Within

It washim.

The same feeling from the alley surged through me, pressure, heat, like being watched by somethingancient. Like prey in a predator’s dream.

I pushed away from the desk, hands clenching my scalp.

“Holy shit.”

I’d been right.

I wasn’t crazy.

Dorian Vale wasn’t just defending monsters. He washuntingthem. And the scale wasn’t just his calling card.

It was his judgment.

Justice. Drenched in blood. Burned into bone. Hidden in plain sight by a man who wore sin like silk and smiled while the world looked the other way.

I looked back at the wall, at the pattern, the names, the faces, the impossible timeline.

He wasn’t random. He wasn’t reckless. He was building something. And if I was right… Then I wasn’t just uncovering a killer.

I was stalking a god.

Chapter Thirteen

??Her Name Was Ember

Dorian

Cassian’s voice still echoed in my skull long after he left. He hadn’t said much. He never did when the truth was heavy enough to drown a man.

“She’s called Ember Carr.”

That was all it took.

The name tasted like iron and ruin in my mouth.

Carr.

The name of the woman Kreed murdered. The academic. The heretic. The expert in Pre-Abyssal Lore. It seemed she had a death wish, and found exactly what she was looking for.

Dr. Kira Carr.

Gutted in her own home. Throat slit from ear to ear, sigils carved into her flesh with precision only madness or prophecy could deliver.

I leaned back in the leather chair of my office, one hand curled tight around a glass of something I couldn’t taste. The ice was melting fast, and so was I.

He’d missed.

Kreed had missed.

The night in the alley… I trailed him, watched through the veil of shadows as he perched on the rooftop, finger on the trigger like a goddamn cartoon villain.

I’d watched the bullet explode through the air. Watched the man crumple at her feet. Watchedherscream, blood in her hair, death in her eyes.

I hadn’t recognized her then.

But now?

---