Page 31 of Carved

Just like something interrupted him with my father.

The realization hits me like ice water: I never knew how Kent's work with Harry Jenkins ended because I'd come homeearly that night. I'd walked into our kitchen expecting one thing and found something else entirely—a killer caught mid-ritual, a confession half-extracted, a pattern broken by circumstance.

What if Kent never finished what he started that night? I already knew my arrival stopped him from completing his signature, from sealing my father's recorded sins inside his chest cavity for posterity.

What if Marcus Chen's clean chest cavity isn't a deviation from Kent's current methodology, but a return to unfinished business?

The thought sends electricity racing under my skin, a mixture of fear and anticipation that makes me feel more alive than I have in years. Because if Kent is revisiting incomplete work, if he's still thinking about that interrupted night nine years ago, then his message isn't just acknowledgment.

It's an invitation.

I turn back to my laptop and open a new document, cursor blinking expectantly in the white space. Detective Finch expects a psychological profile, professional insights that will help catch Marcus Chen's killer. What he's going to get is something else entirely.

Preliminary Analysis: Marcus Chen HomicideDr. Lila North, Forensic Psychology Consultant

Initial examination of the crime scene suggests an organized offender with advanced knowledge of human anatomy. The positioning of the victim indicates ritualistic behavior patterns, though the specific motivation remains unclear without additional data points.

The level of organization and precision suggests this is not the perpetrator's first offense. Recommend cross-referencing with similar cases in regional databases, particularly those involving surgical modification of victims.

Further analysis pending additional evidence review.

Will provide updated assessment within 48 hours.

I read it twice, then save it without sending. The words are true in their way—technically accurate, professionally appropriate, completely useless. Everything I should tell Finch about Kent's methodology, about the connection to my father's case, about the deliberate message left for me specifically, sits unwritten in the white space between lines.

I've just chosen to obstruct a murder investigation. Actively, deliberately, with full knowledge of the consequences. It should feel like betrayal, like a fundamental violation of everything Dr. Lila North claims to represent.

Instead, it feels like coming home.

I close the laptop and pour myself another glass of wine, the expensive Bordeaux sitting sour in my weary mouth. Around me, newspaper clippings lie scattered like evidence of a life that never really existed—Harry Jenkins, the hero, Delilah Jenkins, the grieving daughter, a community's collective delusion preserved in black and white.

But underneath it all, hidden in cream-colored envelopes I haven't opened in so long, lies the truth. The correspondence that showed me who I really was underneath all the careful construction, all the professional masks, all the distance I've built between myself and anything resembling genuine feeling.

Kent saw through every defense I'd learned to build. Sixteen-year-old Delilah had been raw and honest in ways that terrify me now, unafraid to examine her own darkness, unashamed of the violence that had shaped her. She'd looked at a killer and seen not a monster, but a mirror.

Dr. Lila North has spent years trying to forget that girl ever existed.

But Marcus Chen's cream-colored note suggests someone else remembers her perfectly.

Someone who's been waiting for her to remember herself.

I drain my wine glass and set it down with deliberate precision, the sound sharp in the silence of my carefully curated life. Outside my window, the city continues its anonymous dance of light and shadow, millions of people living and dying and struggling with their own carefully hidden truths.

But up here, fifteen floors above it all, I sit surrounded by evidence of the most important thing that ever happened to me. The night someone showed me that monsters could be killed, that justice could be taken instead of waited for, that love could look like violence if you understood the context.

The night I learned that some people deserve to die, and that there's nothing wrong with being grateful when they do.

Tomorrow, I'll have to decide what to do with that knowledge. Whether to pursue the dangerous path Kent's message has opened, or retreat back into the safe numbness of Dr. Lila North's professional existence.

But tonight, I feel the electric possibility of becoming dangerous again.

And I'm not sure I want to resist.

Chapter 8 - Kent

OCTOBER 2016

The blood drips from Harry Jenkins's left hand with metronomic precision, each drop hitting the linoleum floor with a softplinkthat punctuates his labored breathing. Twenty minutes. That's how long he's been secured to his own kitchen chair with zip ties, how long I've been systematically dismantling the facade he's worn for forty-two years.