Page 149 of Jayson
56
JAYSON
The city looks cleaner now. Not safe—just quieter. The kind of quiet that comes after a storm guts the skyline and leaves everything humming with aftermath.
And I know the difference. I know what silence means.
I used to think fate was a myth. A fairytale comfort for people who needed to believe suffering had purpose. I didn’t believe in destiny. I believed in violence. In control. In the things you can grip between your fingers and bleed dry.
Then I met her. Keira.
The girl fate handed to me not with a whisper, but a scream. The girl who showed up with fractured memories, haunted eyes, and the kind of truth that could crack this entire city in half if anyone ever listened.
But I listened. And now we’re here. And they’re not.
Richard Maddox disappeared three months ago. No note. No trace. His townhouse burned down in the middle of the night—no body recovered, just charred bone fragments too damaged for DNA. Investigators called it an accident. A gas leak. Tragic.
No one believed it.
And no one looked too hard.
Not after the story broke.
THE AVIARY SCANDAL: Deepening Corruption in the city’s Power Elite
By L. B. Marrington – Investigative Journalist
In a breaking development linked to the ongoing Aviary investigation, new evidence has emerged implicating former Police Commissioner Richard Maddox in a high-level cover-up spanning over a decade.
Documents leaked to federal agents indicate Maddox was not only aware of the Aviary’s existence—a now-dismantled trafficking and political blackmail ring—but actively participated in obscuring investigations linked to several of its most brutal enforcers.
A voice recording authenticated by FBI forensic labs includes Maddox discussing “erasing liabilities,” including multiple missing persons reports and connections to the late Mayor Simon Bishop, who vanished under similarly mysterious circumstances earlier this year.
With Maddox’s sudden disappearance, theories abound, but one thing is clear: the city’s elite are no longer untouchable.
“This is only the beginning,” said an unnamed federal agent close to the case. “We’re cleaning house.”
Already, a second wave of arrests has swept through the legal and business communities. Property seizures. Indictments. Retired judges. CEOs. Even another former police commissioner now under investigation for evidence tampering.
Survivors of the Aviary’s victims gathered yesterday in quiet protest, placing white flowers on the courthouse steps. Among them was Maxine Andrade, whose sister Sophia died as a result of the Aviary.
“This was never just about one girl,” Andrade said. “And now the whole city knows it.”
We made him disappear, all right. But not in his own damn housefire. That was just the show.
Richard Maddox died screaming.
Not in some penthouse. Not in a courtroom. Not behind a podium, flanked by microphones and false morality. No.
He died in a warehouse an hour outside the city—bare concrete, rusted chains, the scent of gasoline and vengeance thick in the air.
He was strapped to a chair bolted to the floor, wrists bound in industrial cuffs, ankles tied so tight the bones turned purple. The last chair he’d ever sit in. Steel biting into skin. Back pressed to a cold wall stained with the confessions of better men.
He pissed himself when he woke up. Didn’t speak at first. Just whimpered. Looked around with that same smug entitlement he wore in that uniform. Like maybe someone would walk in and call it off. Like maybe we’d been bluffing.
But no one came. Just me. Scar. Kanyan. A camera. And the ghosts of every girl he erased.
We gave him time. Not out of mercy—but strategy. We wanted names. And he gave them.
