Page 46 of The Madness Within

The murder board spanned two entire walls, webs of twine, photographs, court transcripts, hand-scrawled notes and headlines all stitched together like a madman’s quilt.

Victor Mendez. Brielle Vaughn. Malcolm Deen. Richard Langston.

Names I knew.

Faces I remembered.

Clients I freed.

Monsters I later destroyed.

She had newspaper clippings of their deaths. Theories. Patterns. Timelines. One headline circled in red read:“Another High-Profile Acquittal Found Dead in Ritualistic Scene.”

But it was what sat beneath the pinned articles that made my stomach twist.

A small, black box. Velvet-lined.

Inside were small, flat objects.

Scales.

Just like she said.

Obsidian. Gleaming. Each one laid carefully in a row, tagged with a location, a time, and a name.

She kept them.

She saw them.

No one else ever had. They’re meant to vanish after a day. An enchantment. A calling card only creatures of the night understood. A reminder to the world:Justice was here.

But she found them.

I moved closer to the wall, scanning her notes. Each string led to a central photo: Me.

Courtroom candid. Slight smile. Expensive suit. She’d underlined my name with a marker.

“Dorian Vale, Defense attorney for the damned.”

I laughed. Once. Quietly. At least she had the tagline right.

Suspicion was a dangerous thing when you were clever enough to chase it.

I stood in the middle of her apartment, eyes sweeping over her words, her wall, her truth.

She wasn’t doing this for clicks. She was doing this forher. For her mother. For that little girl who bled out on a grimy floor and lived.

Ember Carr doesn’t just want to uncover me. She wants tounderstandme.

Which was worse. Far worse. Because she’d never stop.

I placed one hand against the edge of her desk and left behind a single, untraceable shadow, one that would whisper to me the moment someone else entered the room. A tether. A thread.

Then, before I left, I opened her journal.

The last page read:‘It’s him. I know it. I can feel it. The Devil wears a suit. And I want to know what he looked like, soaked in blood.’

I smiled.

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