Page 53 of Daggermouth

The scanner flickered, went dark, then began its reboot sequence. In that gap, she worked the knife into the lock, feeling for the tumblers, applying pressure with the accuracy of someone who’d done this drunk, injured, and in complete darkness.

The lock clicked open just as the scanner came back online and Shadera grinned to herself.

Fucking idiots.

She grabbed the vodka and slipped inside, closing the door behind her with barely a whisper of sound. The room was exactly what she’d expected—immaculate, organized to the point of pathology. The bed was made with military precision, corners sharp enough to cut. A desk sat against one wall, papers stacked in perfect alignment. The closet door was closed, but she could see the edges of clothing through the glass, everything arranged by color and purpose.

This was a room of someone who needed control, who used order to hold back chaos.

A psychopath and a murderer, cute.

She started with the desk, setting the bottle and blade aside to free both hands. The drawers slid open on silent runners, revealing more organization—pens in one section, official documents in another, personal correspondence in a third. She rifled through them, fingers sliding under drawer bottoms to check for false panels, testing the weight distribution for hidden compartments.

Nothing. Just execution orders, supply requisitions, the bureaucracy of murder filed alphabetically.

The nightstand yielded even less—a watch, reading glasses he apparently needed but never wore in public, a knife that was more decoration than weapon. She checked behind the lamp, under the drawer’s bottom, inside the base of the table itself. Her fingers traced every surface, searching for irregularities, for the telltale seams of concealment.

Still nothing.

She moved to the closet, pushing aside the perfectly arranged clothes to check the walls behind them. Her hands ran along the baseboards, pressed against panels that might swing open to reveal secrets. The man who’d removed his mask for her, who’d practically begged for death, had to have something hidden. Some evidence of the conflict she’d seen in his eyes.

The clothing itself told her things—multiple Executioner’s uniforms, of course, but also casual clothes that had never been worn, their tags still attached. Gifts, probably, from someone who didn’t understand that Greyson Serel was not human.

Frustration built in her chest, making her movements sharper, less careful. She yanked open a drawer full of undergarments, tossing them aside to check the bottom. Another drawer, this one containing documents that looked personal—birth certificate, education records, medical files. She scanned them quickly, looking for anything that might be leverage, might be weakness.

A medical report from three years ago caught her attention. Multiple fractures, internal bleeding, organ damage. The injuries were extensive,brutal. The cause was listed as “training accident,” but she knew wounds like that. Someone had nearly beaten him to death. Someone with strength and skill and intimate access.

She dug deeper, pulling out more files and walking back into the bedroom, spreading them across the floor as she searched for patterns,for secrets, for anything she could use to destroy him. There had to be something. Some proof of corruption, some hidden shame, some vulnerability beyond the obvious damage his father had carved into him.

A picture slipped out from between the pages, small, crumpled, and fading. Two unmasked men, one she recognized as Greyson. She studied it, spotting the similarities in the features, the same crooked smile and large blue eyes. It had to be his brother.

She stared at it for a moment longer, something familiar about the second man scratching at the back of her mind. She recognized him, knew that face from somewhere but couldn’t place it. She’d never seen any of the Serels unmasked until Greyson, until yesterday when Maximus showed his face. But she knew this man, she was sure of it.

She folded the picture, shoving it into the breast pocket of her T-shirt, and kept digging through the other papers. She would come back to it later, but at least it told her one thing. Greyson Serel was sentimental. Having a picture of an unmasked elite was a crime, and he’d stashed it away.

The sound of papers rustling filled the room as she worked, so absorbed in her search that she’d stopped listening for footsteps, stopped checking the door, stopped maintaining the vigilance that had kept her alive this long.

“Looking for something?” Greyson’s voice cut through the silence.

Shadera froze, her hand clutching documents, papers scattered around her. She didn’t turn immediately, didn’t scramble for excuses. Her mind calculated distances—to the door, to the window, to the vodka bottle that could become a weapon yet again with one sharp break against the desk’s edge.

Slowly she turned to face him.

He stood in the doorway, still in his Executioner’s blacks, though the mask was gone. Blood spotted his collar—not his own, she realized.From this morning’s execution. He hadn’t even bothered to change before coming home, hadn’t tried to wash the evidence of murder from his clothes.

Shadera grimaced at the word. Home.

This wasn’t her fucking home.

His blue eyes tracked over the chaos she’d created, the violated privacy spread across his floor, then settled on her face with an expression she couldn’t read. Not anger, exactly. Something so complex it felt dangerous.

She let the silence pulse between them, let him wonder what she’d found, what conclusions she’d drawn from the documents clutched in her hands.

“You need a better lock,” she finally said, voice flat.

“Clearly.” He stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him. The click of the latch made her muscles coil in preparation. “Though I’m curious how you managed the biometric scanner.”

“I have my ways,” Shadera answered, refusing to give him any of her secrets.