Page 19

??Obsession, Tension, and Something Wicked

Dorian

Ember Carr had a voice like a slow blade.

Smooth.

Lethal.

Seductive in its certainty.

I listened to one of her recent podcast episodes with the lights off, sprawled in a leather chair that still reeked faintly of old blood and sin.

The title: “The Ones Who Never Went Away.”

Clever.

Her voice crackled through my speakers, low, calm, curious. But there was an edge beneath it.

A hunger. One I recognized.

“They want you to believe he vanished,” she said. “The man who murdered my mother. Who carved me open and left me to die. But people like that don’t vanish. They rot in place. They burrow into systems. Into suits. Into courtrooms.”

My jaw clenched.

I leaned forward. The shadows curled tighter around my legs like they sensed the shift in my pulse.

“And here’s the part they never reported. My mother was onto something when she got a phone call. A warning. Someone told her to drop what she was searching for. Said: ‘If you go through with this, they won’t even see the body before the vultures get to it.’ ”

My fingers twitched.

That line.

That exact line.

Kreed said it. To me right before I took his case.

Cocky bastard. Thought he was being clever. He didn’t know I’d seen what he left behind.

Didn’t know I could smell the death still clinging to the air long after the crime scenes had been scrubbed.

He said it like a joke. She’s quoting it like scripture.

My fangs pressed sharp against my tongue, drawing blood. The shadows pulsed.

She’s too close. Too fucking close.

I rose from the chair and vanished through the walls like smoke. It didn’t take much effort to get into her building. Her wards were human. Alarms. Deadbolts. A lock that took me less than two heartbeats to break.

Her apartment smelled like books, dried herbs, coffee, and paper cuts. I wanted to see what she was without performance. Without the teeth in her voice.

What I found?

Was obsession.

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 for her . 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 to understand me.

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.

She found me.

Tonight, I’d let her dream.

Because when I confronted her… She wouldn’t just be documenting monsters.

She’d be sleeping beside one.