Chapter 20 - "Where the Law Begins"

The original clockmaker is still out there. Watching. Measuring. Preparing.

It began with silence.

No new victims. No clocks carved in skin. No second-hand twitching into sight. The press took it as a victory. The city needed a story with an ending, and they chose one.

Detective Mason Cole didn't believe it.

Vega, for once, agreed.

They kept going back to the files. Back to the first carvings-Erik Paulon, Joyce Van, the ones who died so cleanly it had fooled everyone. They looked for more. Anomalies. And they found them. Quiet cases, scattered years apart. Always the same craftsmanship. The same immaculate control.

He had been working long before Eloise.

And now, he had gone silent again.

Tick.

Tick.

He knew what silence meant.

It was the resetting of gears. The pause before the pendulum swung again. Eloise's removal had brought him time-not much, but enough to begin refining the doctrine. The Law of Precision.

She had broken it. Her hands had slipped. Her lines were not clean. Her time had not been earned-it had been imitated. And imitation rusts quickly.

He had seen it before. Young followers, too quick to impress. Too desperate to bleed. But this new man, Michael, was different. Older. Methodical. Patient.

A man who understood that death is not a punishment. It is correction.

Tick.

Tick.

In an anonymous post on a private forum under a pseudonym, Michael had asked a single question:

"Do the hands always point to the same hour in every cycle, or does the cycle shift?"

It was a test. A single line of insight into the real philosophy behind the carvings.

And the clockmaker had responded-not with an answer, but with a mark.

He left a page torn from a watchmaker's manual on a bench in an old subway station. Annotated. Highlighted. Just enough to say: I saw your question.

Michael would understand.

No names. No contact. Not yet.

The Law of Precision would grow-but slowly, like a patient disease. The first generation of followers had proven fragile. This one would be engineered.

Tick.

Tick.

Mason stared at her wall, cluttered with photos and scribbled notes. Eloise was only ever a cracked reflection. The real killer...he was still writing his story.

But stories leave shadows.

And she'd seen his.