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I paused halfway through one of the stacks, my fingers lingering on a report that felt…off. Male, late forties, found outside town limits, cause of death listed—but beneath it sat a second note, typed with a precision that felt too intentional.

Dentition absent.

I frowned. That was…a strange way to phrase it. I flipped to the attached report, scanning faster now and it clarified my question in colder terms. All teeth missing. My stomach tightened slightly, but I shook it off. Maybe it was animals or something environmental. Maybe…

I set it aside and kept going.

The next few were uneventful. Then another one caught my attention—female, early thirties, found near the creek—and as I skimmed the report, I went still. Her ocular tissue had been removed.

“What the hell?” I muttered under my breath.

That one went into a separate pile.

I kept going, slower now, working through more files and reports until the pattern started to form. Another note about teeth. Then another about eyes. Not all of them, not even most, but enough that it no longer felt like coincidence. Not in a town this small.

Not in a town known for serial killers.

I leaned back in my chair, staring down at the small cluster I’d unconsciously created, my pulse ticking up as my brain tried to make sense of it.

Serial killers had patterns. Everyone knew that—whether from documentaries, podcasts, or the unsettling amount of casual expertise people seemed to carry around about murder. They had an MO, a signature…something that tied the cases together. All of these deaths seemed to have signature patterns.

I reached for one of the reports again, scanning the victim details more carefully this time, my eyes tracking over occupations, backgrounds, and notes about prior arrests or charges.

There were crimes listed for each victim, every one of them different. The first guy I’d looked at had done time for assault. The woman with the missing eyes had been accused of abusing her children. Another victim had a record involving embezzlement and another had been accused, after their death, of killing someone. There was no overlap between the victims that I could see, no shared thread or obvious connection.

They were just all…people who had done something wrong.

But that was too common, too broad. Even vigilante killers had a type.

I exhaled slowly, rubbing my thumb along the edge of the paper, then looked back down at the files, at the pattern…at the fact that as far as I knew, this town full of people obsessed with serial killers had never flagged this. There were no bold red stamps or urgent notes or indications that the town had ever collectively gone, hey, maybe we should be concerned about the teeth-and-eyes situation.

I sat there for a long moment before shaking my head, forcing myself to look away, to break whatever line of thinking I was starting to slip into. It didn’t make sense, none of it did. And maybe that was the strangest part of all.

Because if there was a pattern…Blackwood didn’t seem afraid of it.

And maybe the fact I was intrigued by this discovery today rather than afraid of it said more about me than it did this town.

Blackwood was feeling less and less like a roadside attraction I’d accidentally stumbled into and more and more like…fate.

Sterling

She’d been talking for the last five minutes straight.

Nothing she was saying begged for interruption, either. It just…kept coming. A steady stream of words, half of them circling back on themselves, the other half jumping ahead like her brain was trying to outrun something.

“And I know I said I wasn’t leaving Albert, but I don’t think he actually knows I work there, so ethically I feel like that’s a gray area,” she was saying, her hands moving as much as her mouth. “Also, what if they ask me real questions? Real legal ones. What if I accidentally agree to represent someone and then I’m suddenly in court and⁠—”

I wasn’t listening, not really. I caught pieces of it. The rhythm, and the cadence. The way her voice lifted at the end of certain words when she was working herself up.

But most of my attention was somewhere else entirely.

On the way her hair kept slipping over her shoulder when she turned her head. On the soft line of her neck when she tipped her chin up to look at me. On the fact that I could still feel her in my hands from last night, like my body hadn’t quite let go of the memory.

She was close enough that I could reach out and touch her. Close enough that I had to make a conscious decision not to.

My mouth flattened as I forced my gaze forward, dragging my attention back to the path in front of us instead of the very real urge to pull her against me and remind her exactly what she’d felt like wrapped around me.

“…and then he gave me files,” she was saying now, her tone shifting just enough to catch. “Which, fine, that’s normal. Except they were all about deaths, which felt…ominous, but I was like, okay, I can handle that⁠—”