The door slid shut behind Aldric with a muted thump, sealing out the night.
The inside of the van smelled faintly of leather, metal, and something bitter—coffee long gone cold. The engine idled low, a constant hum beneath the silence that followed. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Aldric noticed it immediately.
Ms. Vos sat angled slightly toward the window, her posture composed out of habit rather than comfort. Her eyes were dry now, but the redness hadn't faded. Not exhaustion. Not allergies.
Crying.
Not openly. Not recently. But enough that it had left its mark.
He didn't comment on it right away. He never rushed grief—especially not the kind that had been carried for years.
Instead, he said softly, "How can I be of help, Ms. Vos?"
She exhaled through her nose, a short breath that almost turned into a laugh and didn't.
"Eight years ago," she began, "President Elijah Raktomb was assassinated."
Aldric nodded. Everyone knew the official story. The headlines had burned themselves into public memory.
Home invasion.
Political instability.
Unknown assailant.
Case unresolved.
"But that's the version they printed," Ms. Vos continued. "Not the one we buried."
She reached into her coat and pulled out a tablet. Her fingers hesitated for a fraction of a second before she activated it.
"This was recovered from a drive found at the scene," she said. "Eight years ago. We couldn't crack it. Not with our best cryptographers. Not with off-grid systems. Not with black-site hardware."
She looked at him now. "We decrypted it two hours ago."
The screen lit up.
Grainy footage filled the tablet—night-vision green, timestamped, slightly warped at the edges. A private residence. Marble floors. Tall windows.
Security footage.
A man appeared on screen.
President Raktomb.
Alive.
Talking to someone just out of frame.
The audio crackled to life.
"…you're making a mistake," Raktomb was saying. His voice wasn't afraid. It was tired. "This doesn't end the way you think it does."
A shadow moved.
Then the other man stepped into view.
Aldric felt something tighten in his chest.
The man was calm. Too calm.
No mask. No distortion. He wasn't hiding from the camera—he was indifferent to it.
"You always believed the law was protection," the man said. "But it's just a curtain. And curtains burn."
The footage shook.
A gunshot echoed—sharp, final.
Raktomb fell.
The man approached the camera, leaned down, and for just a second, looked directly into it.
The video cut to black.
Silence swallowed the van.
Ms. Vos stared at the screen, unmoving. "That face," she said quietly. "I've hunted it for eight years."
Aldric didn't respond immediately.
He was watching the final seconds again in his head. Not the gunshot. Not the killer's expression.
The timing.
The way the image distorted when the man leaned forward.
The timestamp flicker.
He leaned closer, holding out his hand. "May I?"
She passed him the tablet without a word.
Aldric replayed the final ten seconds. Once. Twice. A third time.
Then he froze the frame.
Zoomed in—not on the man's face.
On the reflection.
The polished marble floor beneath him.
There.
A shadow.
But not his.
A second silhouette—faint, elongated, out of sync with the man's movements.
Aldric's breath slowed.
"That's not a compression artifact," he said calmly.
Ms. Vos turned sharply. "What?"
He pointed. "The lighting source doesn't match the shadow's angle. And it lags half a second behind the primary subject. Which means—"
"There was someone else," she finished.
"Someone standing outside the camera's visible frame," Aldric said. "Close enough to cast a reflection. Close enough to be real."
Her eyes widened—not in fear.
In realization.
"But the report said—"
"—lone assailant," Aldric said. "Because no one was looking at the floor."
Ms. Vos let out a breath that trembled despite her effort to steady it.
"That detail," she said slowly, "would've been dismissed as noise. Visual corruption. Especially eight years ago."
"And it would've stayed dismissed," Aldric replied, "unless someone was trained to assume that what doesn't matter is often where the truth hides."
She studied him now differently.
Not as a prodigy.
Not as a student.
But as an equal mind.
She reached into her pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it without asking. The flame briefly illuminated her face—hard lines, sharp focus, and something raw underneath.
She exhaled smoke toward the ceiling of the van.
"So," she said quietly, eyes fixed forward, "how do we solve it, Aldric?"
He didn't answer right away.
Outside, the city kept moving, unaware that a buried truth had just shifted.
Finally, Aldric said, "We stop assuming the murder was the beginning."
She turned to him.
"It was the middle," he continued. "And whoever pulled the trigger wasn't the architect. He was the demonstration."
Ms. Vos smiled faintly—grim, appreciative.
"That's what I was afraid you'd say."
The van began to move.
And somewhere, far beyond the reach of cameras and law, someone who had been watching for a very long time finally realized—
Aldric Benedict had seen him.