Chapter 11 - "Solo Kill"

Eloise kills alone. Vega makes a call he can't take back. And someone survives just long enough to speak.

The house was quiet, but Vega wasn't listening for noise-he was reading the dust.

No sign of a break-in, but the edge of the bedroom window had been freshly wiped. The latch was loose. There were faint grooves in the carpet, drag marks, maybe. But the most telling sign was on the mirror.

A fingertip swipe.

A tiny drawn shape.

Secondhand.

He stared at it, heart tightening.

"She said she couldn't remember," the officer had told him. "The girl who got out. Too much shock, maybe. She just kept whispering, 'he wasn't alone.'"

Vega didn't think it was trauma-induced confusion.

He thought it was the truth.

Tick.

Tock.

She woke to the sound of her own breath choking her awake. The room wasn't hers. The chair wasn't hers. The straps were.

The smell was sterile, alcohol, and something that burned.

She couldn't see his face, not clearly. Just gloves. Just the glint of a blade. But there was a voice-not the one with the knife.

A second one. Female. Younger.

"I'll watch this time."

Amy didn't remember how she got free. Only that her left arm was bleeding, the skin split shallow where a half-finished clock had been started. Just the outline. No numbers. No time yet.

She ran until her lungs felt like they were on fire, and she couldn't get a breath in.

And now, hours later, she couldn't explain what she saw. Not clearly. Only that he hadn't been alone. And something in the woman's voice-detached, observant, clinical-haunted her more than the scalpel.

Tick.

Tock.

The echo of Amy's words played in Vega's mind as he stared at the partial drawing on the mirror.

He should've known this once. Years ago.

He'd made a call, then, turned away from a girl in the system who reminded him too much of a case gone wrong. They said she was unstable. He let her fall through the cracks. He still had the complaint letter, unsigned, in his desk.

Sometimes the justice system worked.

Sometimes it protected itself.

He wouldn't make the same mistake now.

"Detective," an officer called from the hallway, "we've got a Jane Doe in the city morgue. Found off I-80 near Fremont. No ID, but there's a carved clock."

Vega's eyes narrowed.

"Numbers?"

"None," the officer said. "Just hands. Three of them."

Tick.

Tock.

He watched the empty chair.

The one she was supposed to use.

It had blood on it now, but not from one of his kills.

She had cleaned it herself. Burned the rags. Washed the floor.

No notes. No tools left behind.

Just silence.

She was testing boundaries.

He ran a finger along the spine of his notebook, the one she hadn't seen. He'd documented every tick, every impulse. Every betrayal.

This wasn't about control. Not anymore.

She was mimicking him-yes-but with her own cadence.

He had taught her time.

Now he would teach her consequences.

Tick.

Tock.

The woman's name was Linda Trent. A therapist. Retired. Once assigned to teenage girls in temporary psychiatric placement. She probably didn't remember Eloise. But Eloise remembered everything.

The way Linda called her Ellie, even when corrected.

The dismissive sigh when she refused to speak.

The forced smiles. The clipboard. The silence, when Eloise cried herself hoarse, and there was no response.

Linda died in her sleep.

That's what the autopsy would say.

No struggle. No sign of intrusion. The small pinprick on her neck would be missed. The vaporized sedative would fade. But the clock on her wrist, perfectly carved with surgical precision, would not.

7:06

Eloise cleaned the scalpel and folded the cloth. She didn't hum. She didn't breathe hard. She didn't shake.

She left the scene exactly how she arrived:

Deliberate. Invisible.

Alone.

And for the first time, unafraid.