Chapter 5 - "Inheritance"

Eloise sharpens her blades in shadows of the original design-born not of chaos, but of mimicry.

The rasp of steel on stone filled the small, dim room. Eloise's fingers worked with a practiced precision. Tracing the edge of each blade until it sang under the whetstone's bite. Her breath came shallow and fast, like a tick of a hurried clock, but her hands never trembled.

They said she was a copycat, a shadow following too close behind a master. Maybe they were right. But to Eloise, this wasn't mimicry. It was inheritance. Each stroke was a claim on a legacy she barely understood, but fiercely wanted to own.

She glanced down at her wrist. The clock carved there was crooked, 12:03, but she'd carved it herself. Different from his neat numbers. Her hands had faltered once, twice. She hated that.

His Law of Precision was a creed whispered in the dark. Time was a mechanism, broken by chaos and repaired by order. Eloise only wanted to fit the pieces together, but every cut she made risked shattering the whole clock.

His work was art; cold, clinical, measured to the second. Hers was a mess, frantic and jagged. But it was hers.

She hated it. She hated that she was a copycat. That she was inheriting a machine that demanded perfection. And not chaos.

He said that time was not a river, flowing endlessly. It was a clockwork mechanism, with gears that must fit perfectly or break the whole. Every cut, every carving was a tick. Every slip was a tock.

Eloise pressed the knife edge harder against the whetstone, sparks barely visible in the dimness. She needed more control. More order. Less chaos. But his shadow loomed, distant but sharp.

Tick.

Miles away in a cluttered office lined with evidence boards and crime scene photos, Detective Mason Cole studied the latest reports. The pieces were there, fragmented, disjointed, and maddeningly elusive.

"They're working from the same blueprint," Mason muttered, eyes narrowing at a diagram connecting the victims. Lines stretched between crime scenes, carving times, and the various methods of death. "But someone's changing the design."

Vega sat across from her, flicking through coroner notes. "And whoever it is...they're getting sloppy. The last few victims don't match the old pattern."

Mason's gaze lifted. "But why now?"

The room felt heavier than, as if the very walls were winding tighter around the secrets they chased.

Tick.

Back in her sanctuary, Eloise’s eyes flicked to a yellowed photograph pinned crookedly on the wall. A man’s face, sharp and unreadable, frozen in time by a faded snapshot. The mentor. The architect of the original machine. The ghost that whispered laws in the dark.

She traced the outline of his face with trembling fingers, then looked down at her wrist again. The crooked clock mocked her. A symbol of the legacy she wanted.

The Law of Precision was his creed, a rigid machine built to perfect time, to correct the disorder. But Eloise didn't want order. She wanted power. She wanted to break the clock, bend the rules, and carve he own time.

She was no rust in the machine. She was the spark that shattered its gears.