The stench hit her before she stepped into the room.
Detective Mara Veil paused at the threshold of the abandoned industrial building, her hand still resting on the doorframe. The air was thick,blood, rot, and chemical antiseptic woven into a nauseating cocktail. She breathed through her mouth, not because she had to, but because it helped her focus. Smell was memory. She didn't want this one etched too deep.
The scene was on the lower level, beneath a shuttered textile factory that hadn't produced anything in over a decade. There were signs of recent entry,a broken lock, fresh footprints in the dust, a trail of red that led down into the dark. Officers had cordoned it off, but they waited for her to go first. They always did.
Flashlights flickered. A generator hummed. The sound was swallowed by the weight of the space.
She descended the staircase slowly, boots landing soft on concrete steps. Each one brought her deeper into the quiet, into the place where something had ended.
And when she saw the table, she stopped.
The body was a man, stripped down to his boxers, spread out on a rusted medical slab. Dried blood painted everything,walls, floor, even the ceiling had arterial splatter. His chest had been flayed open, the ribs slightly cracked outward like a grotesque book. But it wasn't the gore that caught her attention.
It was the message.
Three letters had been carved into his abdomen. Deep, deliberate:
S - E - N
She stared at them for a long time.
"You ever seen anything like that before?" asked Officer Lomas, a young recruit trying too hard to sound composed.
"No," Mara lied.
She stepped closer. Everything about the killing screamed ritual,but not in a religious sense. This was personal. Controlled. Obsessive.
The edges of each incision were clean. Scalpel work, likely surgical steel. No hesitation marks. Whoever did this had done it before. And enjoyed it.
"Victim's ID?" she asked, already examining the man's face, what was left of it.
"Wallet says Jared Linwood. Corporate lawyer. Lived uptown. No priors. We contacted his firm. He didn't show up to work yesterday, and no one's seen him since Friday."
Mara circled the table.
There were no defensive wounds. No signs of a struggle. His wrists and ankles were bound,cleanly. Surgical tape residue suggested they'd been removed or adjusted post-mortem.
The walls were bare, save for one patch behind a curtain of black plastic. Something glinted in the flashlight beam.
"Move that aside," she instructed.
Lomas peeled back the curtain.
Behind it was a crude collage of pinned-up items,photos, maps, handwritten notes, and one long red thread that spidered across the center like veins. It was a timeline. No… not a timeline.
A storyboard.
And at the heart of it, pinned dead center beneath a long, vertical thread was a photo.
Mara's breath caught.
It was her.
A surveillance shot. Grainy, but unmistakable,her face, her badge, her jacket. Taken from a distance. Watching her while she worked a scene. She remembered that night. A different case. A different body. Months ago.
She didn't move. Just stared.
"What the hell…" Lomas whispered.
"Get forensics down here," she said, voice sharper than she meant. "Now. Don't touch anything else."
He scrambled off. Mara kept staring.
The message on the body.
The photo on the wall.
The way the killer worked.
This wasn't random.
And more terrifying than anything,she'd seen this before. Not these victims. Not this setup. But the style. The method.
Ten years ago. The Valentine Murders. Four victims, all mutilated, each carved with a single letter. Each tied to Mara's own past...schoolmates, mentors, family friends. The case went cold. The only suspect? An unnamed psychiatric patient from Saint Lorenz Institute who disappeared shortly after.
She'd always believed the killer was dead.
She might have been wrong.
She knelt beside the body, eyes locked on the letter "S." The way the blade had entered the flesh,there was almost reverence in it.
Not a message.
A signature.
Suddenly, the metronome sound,faint, mechanical,caught her attention.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
She followed it to the corner of the room. There it was: a small, antique metronome sitting on a stool. Still ticking.
It hadn't been left by accident.
Mara stared at it, chilled to her core.
Then, at the base of the stool, she saw something else,an envelope. Her name written across it in black ink. Sharp. Elegant.
She didn't touch it. She called for the photographer, demanded gloves, protocol, everything. But she didn't need to open it to know what it would say.
Whoever this was, they weren't just back.
They were talking to her.