chapter 10

The abandoned factory groaned under its own weight, rusted staircases zigzagging up through the dark like the skeleton of something long dead. Heinz Floris stepped carefully over the debris scattered across the floor, phone pressed to his ear, voice clipped and businesslike even here, in the middle of nowhere.

"We have arri—" he started, before the call cut him off mid-sentence, forcing him to finish the conversation with a series of short, irritated replies instead.

Beside him, Mateo Stellar took one look at what waited for them deeper in the building and exhaled slowly. "My goodness..."

There, in the center of the ruined space, a man sat slumped in an old electric chair, wires coiled around his limbs and torso like something out of a nightmare, his body utterly still.

Mateo crouched beside him, checking for any sign of life, though the answer was already obvious before he even finished. "He's dead," he confirmed grimly.

Heinz pulled on a pair of gloves without being asked, his earlier phone call already forgotten. "Who did this?"

"Don't know," Mateo said, straightening up. "But it looks like he received a painful death."

"Hmm." Heinz moved slowly around the scene, eyes scanning every inch of it, searching for anything that might have been left behind—a thread, a footprint, a single careless mistake. There was nothing. There never was.

Mateo began untying the ropes and wires binding the body, his expression hardening as he worked. "Well, he deserved it," he muttered. "He abused his wife for years. Fucking asshole." He shoved the man's body off the chair and onto the ground, delivering one final, contemptuous kick to the corpse for good measure.

"I know," Heinz said quietly, crouching down to examine the body himself, running a gloved hand along the dead man's back.

That was when he saw it.

"Huh—" He stopped cold, fingers hovering just above a small, deliberate mark etched into the skin near the shoulder blade. A flower, drawn with precision, almost delicate in its cruelty. "...him again."

"Again?" Mateo leaned over to look for himself, and his breath caught the moment he saw it too.

Heinz sat back on his heels, lost in thought, his earlier irritation replaced by something far more unsettled. "Why did he..." he murmured, trailing off before he could finish the thought, his mind already circling back to a conversation he'd had with his younger brother not too long ago—light purple hair, a flower left behind, a killer no one had ever managed to catch. Elison had asked them to look for this exact signature. And here it was again, waiting for them in the dark, mocking every effort they'd made so far.

He didn't say anything else. There was nothing left to say, not with the body cooling on the ground and the same unanswered question hanging in the air it always did after encounters like this one: *who is he, really?*

---

Across the city, in a part of it that couldn't have felt further removed from abandoned factories and electric chairs, the night pulsed with music and neon light. The club shimmered in shades of violet and pink, glass railings catching the glow of a hundred shifting lights as bodies moved and laughter spilled out over the bass.

"*drags Van*" Lance Ivory tugged his best friend along by the sleeve, grinning. "Come on, it'll be fun."

"*getting dragged* Are you sure?" Van asked, clearly less convinced.

"I don't know if I'll have any fun after the marriage," Lance said, only half joking, the words carrying more weight than he probably intended.

"But you hate being in a crowd," Van pointed out.

"Yes," Lance agreed, "unless I get a handsome man. You never know." He flashed a grin that was equal parts mischief and defiance.

"Lanc—" Van started, already bracing for whatever came next.

"Come on, don't be like this." Lance tightened his grip and pulled his friend the rest of the way through the entrance, undeterred.

The moment they stepped inside, every head in the room turned.

It always happened this way, wherever Lance went. He was beautiful in the kind of effortless, almost unfair way that made people stop mid-sentence and stare—arguably the prettiest person in the entire country, though it was a title he'd never once wanted or asked for. He hated it, hated the way eyes crawled over him from head to toe the second he walked into any room, hated being reduced to something people simply looked at rather than someone they actually saw.

He ignored it anyway, the way he always did, guiding Van toward an open booth and sitting down beside him.

Everyone around them was still glaring, some more subtly than others, murmurs rippling through the crowd like static.

"...I think we should leave," Van said quietly, clearly uncomfortable under the weight of so many stares.

Lance waved the concern away without a second thought. "Ignore them. Why should we adjust ourselves for some random, useless people? Let's enjoy ourselves."

And so they did, for a while, at least, the two of them settling into easy conversation and shared laughter, the tension of the outside world fading into something almost forgettable beneath the pulse of the music and the warm haze of the club lights.

It didn't last.

Someone was approaching their table, weaving through the crowd with the kind of unhurried confidence that suggested they were used to people getting out of their way rather than the other way around. Lance didn't notice at first, too caught up in whatever Van had just said to make him laugh, the rose he always kept tucked against his side catching stray beams of colored light.

But the air around their booth had shifted, subtly, the way it sometimes did right before something important happened—the kind of shift Lance had learned, a long time ago, never to ignore completely, even when he pretended otherwise for Van's sake.

Neither of them could have possibly known that miles away, in the ruin of an old factory, a dead man's body had just confirmed the presence of a killer who left flowers behind like signatures—light purple hair, untraceable, unstoppable—and that the search for him had just quietly, irrevocably, begun to close in from every direction at once.

For now, though, the club lights kept glowing, the music kept playing, and Lance Ivory sat completely unaware that somewhere in the crowd behind him, a stranger's eyes had already found him, and had no intention of looking away.