Leo didn't speak when Maisie walked away. Her boots hit the pavement with sharp, even beats, swallowed by the rain before she turned the corner and vanished into the mist.
He stood alone outside the café, hands in his coat pockets, watching the glow of traffic lights smear across wet asphalt. It wasn't just the weight of what she'd said pressing against his ribs, it was the look in her eyes, the certainty, the way her voice didn't waver.
Like she'd already decided he wasn't worth lying to anymore. He didn't blame her. But it still stung.
The city pressed in around him, all smeared lights and rain-slicked concrete. Traffic hissed by in slow, steady pulses, the occasional horn carving through the damp air.
Leo barely noticed. His mind spun backward, caught in loops. Not just on Maisie, though her words still clung like static, but on his mother, Mara. On that night.
The lamp glowed like an open wound. Her study door was locked from the inside, no signs of a break-in, no note, no sound. She'd simply vanished.
The police shrugged. Harry had muttered something about nerves, about her needing space. Leo hadn't asked.
He stood now outside the Lennox estate, the gate blinking red before sliding open with a mechanical sigh. The place loomed darker than he remembered, its manicured hedges soaked and drooping under the weight of the rain. Lights were off in most of the house, just the dull glow from the upstairs corridor, and the flickering sensor light by the garage.
Leo didn't head for his room. Instead, he moved quietly through the hallways, past old portraits and still air, until he reached the second floor. Mara's study remained untouched.
A soft layer of dust coated the doorknob as if no one had dared enter since she disappeared. He didn't knock. He never needed to. Not with her.
The study greeted him with that familiar scent, bergamot, paper, and something floral that lingered even after all this time. Leo stepped inside, shutting the door with a careful hand. The room was orderly, unnervingly so.
Shelves stacked high with case files, family records, and decades of archived research stood untouched. Her favorite tea mug still rested on the desk, faded lipstick print like a ghost's fingerprint on porcelain. He crossed to the far wall, fingers brushing against the seams of the paneling until they found the false edge.
A push, a click. The drawer slid open with a reluctant groan. Inside: fragments. Torn pages, frayed corners of folders with Lennox insignias, and tucked at the back, an old memory crystal, its surface dulled with age.
Leo turned the crystal over in his hand, its weight unexpectedly dense for something so small. Memory crystals were an older tech, outdated but still functional.
Before neural syncs and cloud-stored consciousness backups, these crystals had been the standard for private memory preservation. Not secure by today's standards, but still nearly impossible to fabricate. The way it droned faintly in his palm meant it still held a charge.
A real memory. Someone, likely Mara, had wanted this moment recorded. Leo crossed to the desk and pulled out a playback reader from the bottom drawer.
Dust clung to the casing. He hadn't used one of these since he was a teenager. He slotted the crystal into the reader, the screen flaring to life with a flicker. The image stuttered.
A room appeared, this room, but lit by daylight, and Mara stood at the center, holding something close to her chest. She was mid-sentence when the playback glitched. Static tore across the screen.
The screen flickered to life with a low buzz, revealing Mara, not as Leo remembered her at the end, but younger, sharper-eyed, seated at her desk with papers spread around her like puzzle pieces. "They told us it was a behavioral correction," she said, voice tight, recorded in a room too quiet.
"But it wasn't rehabilitation. It was suppression. Subject Eight wasn't meant to recover. He was meant to forget." Leo leaned in, throat dry. The image wavered slightly, but her words stayed clear: "Harry signed off on it. I tried to stop them. I did." She glanced off-camera, her eyes reflecting guilt or fear.
The crystal stuttered. A shimmer of corrupted data tore across her face before the screen cut to black. Not a message about her disappearance, no. It was older. A confession, sealed away, pointing directly at the same description as Igor: Number Eight.
This might have been right after their dealer found Igor in the coal mines, ten years ago. Leo had not paid a lot of attention to the circumstances surrounding Igor at the time because he was going to school to get his master's degree and did not think anything of it.
The Lennox family was always buying and selling alucard servants.
The Lennox family was always buying and selling Alucard servants, silent, blood-bound, blank-eyed. It was just one of the quiet atrocities baked into their wealth, like fine rugs woven in sweatshops or wine imported from occupied borders. At the time, Igor had been fifteen, small for his age and thin, one eye swollen shut, collar already fused to the skin at his neck.
Leo remembered signing one of the intakes logs half-asleep during winter break, then heading straight to the airport. No one asked where the boy had come from. No one cared. Just another Number on a ledger.
But now, now he couldn't stop thinking about how Mara's voice had shaken when she said Subject Eight. How she had tried to stop them.
Leo had thought he was outside of all that. Removed. Too busy with term papers and lab hours to get his hands bloody. But maybe that was the worst lie of all.
Leo shifted the memory crystal in his hand, the flickering image of Mara long since faded back into a dormant shimmer. A numbed silence settled over the study, the air stale with disuse and dust drifting through slats of low lamplight like suspended time.
He stared at the faint glow between his fingers, remembering the grainy footage of a gaunt, dirt-smudged boy, barely fifteen, led down a corridor under heavy restraint. That had to be Igor. He looked nothing like the towering young man Leo knew now.
Back then, he'd been more bones than flesh, his eyes sunken and dazed, yet burning with a defiance that seemed too large for his frame. Leo hadn't cared much at the time; he'd been drowning in thesis deadlines and Harry's endless expectations.
Alucard trafficking was just part of the family business, faceless and far away. He hadn't realized that the boy from the mines would grow into the one person Leo now couldn't stop thinking about, an echo of a brother, a mirror of everything the Lennox family wanted to erase.
Leo stood slowly, setting the crystal on the edge of Mara's desk with a reverence that bordered on caution as if it might whisper secrets or burn if held too long.
The silence pressed harder now, not empty, but alive with the residue of things left unsaid. His gaze swept the room, taking in the shelves lined with journals, old lawbooks, and forgotten keepsakes.
In one corner, a glass display case still held an old brass key and a child's broken toy, Maisie's, maybe. Or his. Or Dash's. He wasn't sure anymore. Time had warped those years, blurred their edges until the memories no longer fit neatly into place.
What gnawed at him most wasn't the footage itself. It was the fact that his mom had saved it. Hidden it. Preserved it, as if she had known one day someone would come looking.
She hadn't just been trying to save Igor; she'd been documenting it. Preparing for something. For this.
Leo's fingers lingered on the edge of the desk, hesitating before he finally pushed back the worn leather chair. The room felt colder now, shadows stretching longer as the evening crept in through the tall, narrow windows draped with dark curtains that absorbed the fading light.
The scent of old paper and faint traces of cold tea lingered, mixing with a metallic tang. Bookshelves lined the walls, their spines cracked and faded, sagging under the weight of secrets long buried.
The desk itself was a war zone, scattered papers torn and frayed, ink stains bleeding across yellowed pages, a half-empty cup tipped sideways and stained with dried tea rings. He knew Mara hadn't left these pieces behind by accident.
Somewhere between the torn documents and the cracked crystal was a truth she had wanted to preserve, something worth remembering, even if it was too volatile to speak aloud.
Leo's eyes scanned the scattered papers, some curling at the edges, others ripped with hurried force.
Faint handwriting sprawled across the pages, notes, calculations, names that twisted in and out of focus.
He pulled one closer, catching fragments of phrases: "Project integration," "containment protocols," "unauthorized extraction." The language was clinical, sterile, but beneath it pulsed a quiet urgency.
His heart picked up, sensing the invisible threads Mara had been unraveling threads that connected the family's polished facade to something far darker, far more tangled. Somewhere in this chaos, the truth waited, fragile and flickering like the failing light outside.
Leo's fingers loomed over the papers, reluctant to upset the delicate order of Mara's work. The soft glow of the dim lamp cast long, lingering shadows across the cluttered desk, mixing with the sharper tang of spilled tea, a silent echo of moments frozen in time.
The room seemed to hold its breath, caught between past and present, as if Mara's presence lingered in the soft pool of light and the slow tick of the wall clock.
He swallowed hard, knowing that every piece of this puzzle was a step deeper into a web he hadn't wanted to enter, but one he couldn't turn away from now.
He reached out hesitantly, fingers brushing the edge of the journal. The leather cover was cracked and softened by time, worn smooth where hands had turned its pages countless times.
Pulling it free, he felt the faint imprint of Mara's careful handwriting on the first page, words written in a steady hand, yet lined with urgency. As he leafed through, the scent of old paper and faint traces of lavender filled the room, like a ghost of her presence lingering still.
A loose photograph slipped from between the leaves, fluttering to the desk with a soft thud. It was an old family portrait, Mara at the center, her smile warm and unguarded, her eyes bright with hope.
Around her stood faces Leo recognized but hadn't seen this way before: younger versions of Dash, Maisie, Harry, even himself as a boy. The photo felt like a fragile window into a time before the fractures, before the silence had settled so thickly over their lives.
Leo stared at the image, the faint glow of the desk lamp casting long shadows across the grain of the wood. For a long moment, the weight of the past pressed down on him, more suffocating than the cold night air creeping through the cracked window.
These weren't just secrets Mara had hidden away. They were pieces of their family; fragments of identity and memory that shaped everything they'd lost.
Without her, the picture was incomplete, a story left painfully unfinished.
Leo's fingers hovered over the playback controls, hesitating before pressing play again. Mara's face flickered onto the cracked screen, her eyes wide and sharp, voice steady but laced with urgency.
"If you find this… know that they're closer than we thought. I'm not safe. And neither are you."
The memory glitched, the image flickering and distorting, static swallowing her words mid-sentence. But just before the screen went black, a shadow passed over Mara's face, something or someone unseen, moving too fast to be caught.
The room grew colder, the dim light of the desk lamp casting long, wavering shadows across the cluttered walls. The silence was thick...too thick. Then, from somewhere outside the study, a sudden, sharp crash echoed, a sound too deliberate to be accidental.
Leo's heart hammered in his chest. Someone had been here. Someone was watching. And whatever had taken Mara wasn't finished yet.