The stillness was wrong.
Rain had been hammering the windows for hours—steady, relentless, each drop striking in perfect time. Not the gentle patter of a storm to lull you to sleep. No. This was a beat. A measure. A metronome keeping time for something I didn't yet understand.
The room was perfect. Too perfect.
Wallpaper without a crease. Fireplace embers still glowing, but no poker in sight. One locked door. A high, barred window. Six people here, counting myself. One dead.
The corpse lay in the center of the carpet, a man in a dark waistcoat with the King of Spades pressed to his chest. His watch still ticked. His eyes were glassy, fixed on the ceiling as though waiting for a revelation. The others avoided looking at me—or him.
My mind shifted into gear before I could think about it.
Six suspects. One victim. Locked room. Means. Motive. Opportunity.
I started with names, alibis, habits. Circled the perimeter. The bottom shelf of the bookcase had a strip free of dust, like something had been slid out not long ago. I knelt by the window—cold enough to bite my skin. Frost bloomed under my palm, delicate and sharp, despite the fire's warmth.
Static flickered in my head. Not in my ears—in my thoughts. A crackle. A break. Like something was trying to crawl back into my memory. Another place. Other faces. A flicker of—gone.
I kept working. Kept thinking.
The liquor cabinet: three empty glasses. Two smelling faintly of alcohol. The third… clean. Too clean. The wrong kind of spotless. I crossed suspects off in my head, ticking mental boxes. My brain moved faster than I remembered it could, sharper—but the speed only deepened the pit in my stomach.
Whisper.
I spun, scanning the room. Everyone was still in their places. No one had spoken. The rain was louder now, the rhythm accelerating—beating like a heart in panic.
I called them together. The conclusion was clear. Neat. Elegant. Order.
The killer was the quiet young woman in the corner—the one who swore she'd never met the victim. Her hands looked unmarked, yet when I'd shaken hers, I'd felt it: the faint burn of frostbite under her skin.
I laid out the reasoning, the chain of evidence. It fit too well.
She smiled.
And the room tilted. Not in the way a ship lists, but as though the laws of reality leaned away from me.
The wallpaper smeared into shadow. The rain turned to whispers. The corpse collapsed into black ash, curling in the air like snow that wanted to choke me.
"You follow the thread well," a voice said—not from her, but from everywhere at once. "But threads are fragile. Chaos will cut them."
I opened my mouth to demand answers—
—when the window shattered inward, and I fell into darkness.