It was 2:13 AM when the call came in.
My phone buzzed once on the nightstand, the low hum slicing through the silence of my apartment. I was already awake. Sleep doesn't come easy when your past is louder than your dreams.
"Detective Kael," I answered, my voice a tired rasp.
"There's been another one," Dispatch said. "Church on 48th. Saint Thaddeus. It's... bad."
My throat went dry. "Another?"
The dispatcher hesitated. "Same pattern. You'll want to It was 2:13 AM when the call came in.My phone buzzed once on the nightstand, the low hum slicing through the silence of my apartment. I was already awake. Sleep doesn't come easy when your past is louder than your dreams.
"Detective Kael," I answered, my voice a tired rasp.
"There's been another one," Dispatch said. "Church on 48th. Saint Thaddeus. It's... bad."
My throat went dry. "Another?"
The dispatcher hesitated. "Same pattern. You'll want to see it yourself."
Click.
I stared at the ceiling for a beat longer than I should have. Cold sweat clung to my skin like guilt. I grabbed my badge, gun, and coat in practiced motions. I didn't need coffee. My heart was already racing.
By the time I got to Saint Thaddeus, the sky was the color of bruised steel. The church stood like a corpse in the fog—stained glass windows shattered, iron gates wide open, and the front doors hanging off their hinges like torn limbs. Crime scene tape fluttered in the wind like yellow warnings from God Himself.
Officer Mallory met me at the door, his face pale under the flickering floodlights.
"You're not gonna like this one," he muttered, stepping aside.
He was right.
The body was crucified on the altar.
Literally crucified. Arms stretched and nailed to a rotting wooden beam. Ankles bound in rusted wire. Blood soaked the white cloth beneath the altar, now pink and stiff with dried gore. The skin had been flayed off the torso, hanging in red curls like grotesque streamers. Bone poked through in places. The eyes were open, wide, and glassy—like they'd seen something unspeakable before death claimed them.
I stepped closer.
The scent hit first: blood, incense, and something else—burnt wood? Hair?
Pinned to the chest was a music sheet. Old, yellowed. Handwritten in shaky ink. I couldn't read the notes, but I didn't need to.
A small music box sat on the ground below the cross, still turning.
A lullaby played.
Slow. Sweet. Familiar.
It was the same melody from six years ago.
My chest tightened. I hadn't heard it since the night Daisy died.
I dropped to one knee, stomach churning. For a second, I wasn't in that church. I was seventeen again, standing in the hallway outside her room, staring at her door.
I shook it off. Forced myself to breathe. Focus.
A name was stitched into the lining of the boy's jacket.
Aaron Hayes.
Sixteen years old.
And I knew that name.
He was Daisy's little brother.
I stood there in shock for a moment, heart hammering in my chest. There were too many pieces here. Too many things that didn't line up. A kid crucified in a church. The same lullaby playing in the background. The same gruesome display. This wasn't just a murder. This was personal. The twisted remains of this boy—Aaron—staring up at me felt like a cruel message from the past.
Where was Lennox? He should've been here. Aaron's mentor. Lennox James. The one who trained him, guided him. Hell, I wasn't sure if Lennox knew about Aaron's dark past. Aaron had always been so quiet, so reserved. But the song—God, the song—it was too much. There was something deeper here. The connections ran thicker than I had realized.
I stood up, eyes scanning the room, my hand tightening on the holster of my gun. The body, the message, the music box—it all felt like something I'd seen before.
I wasn't sure if I was ready to dive into that hell again.
The smell of dried blood and rotting flesh gnawed at the edges of my mind. I covered my nose with the inside of my jacket, but it barely helped. The church's broken windows let the night's cold seep in, but the blood made everything feel thick, like the air itself was clotting.
Aaron's body was nailed brutally into a wooden cross—arms wrenched unnaturally apart, legs buckled at odd angles. His skin was torn in jagged ribbons down his sides, peeled like meat from a carcass. Bones gleamed through the gaps. His head slumped forward, chin resting on his chest, as if even in death he was trying to shield himself.
It was worse than Daisy.
Way worse.
My stomach churned, but I forced it down. I couldn't afford weakness.
A music box sat on the altar in front of him, its tiny gears winding slower with every passing second. The tune was unmistakable — one of Lennox James's songs. An old ballad, about lost children and empty homes. The irony hit like a hammer.
My hands curled into fists.
Lennox was Daisy's mentor too. Daisy... and Aaron.
Coincidence? No. Not a chance.
My radio crackled at my belt, a voice slicing through the tension. "Kael? Backup's ten minutes out. No signs of forced entry. Perimeter's clear."
"Copy," I muttered, hardly hearing it.
Grace would be arriving any second. She was new to OPUS V, but sharp — one of the few rookies who didn't need hand-holding. Even so, I wasn't sure if she was ready for this.
I sure as hell wasn't.
I moved closer to the music box, careful not to disturb anything. It was delicate, old, maybe older than me. Carved into the base were tiny etchings — musical notes swirling into strange symbols.
Symbols I recognized.
The same ones found carved under Daisy's bed the night she was murdered.
I stumbled back a step.
No. No, it couldn't be.
I blinked hard, but the markings didn't change.
Six years of silence. Six years chasing ghosts. And now... this.
Aaron's mutilated body.
Lennox's song.
And the same damn symbols.
This wasn't just a murder. This wasn't random.
This was personal.
Footsteps crunched on shattered glass behind me.
I didn't turn around. I knew it was Grace.
"Jesus Christ," she muttered under her breath.
I heard the slight hitch in her voice — the kind you can't hide when you're standing in front of something this wrong. Good. She still had a conscience. Some of the old detectives at OPUS V lost it after the first few years. Became numb. Empty.
Not yet.
"I got the door," she said quietly, slipping gloves over her hands. "No signs of forced entry. It's like... someone had a key."
I nodded stiffly, still staring at Aaron's body. "Whoever did this... they took their time."
Grace moved closer, her flashlight tracing a slow circle across Aaron's chest. Her beam caught something — carved deep into the boy's ribcage.
More symbols.
A line of them, looping across his exposed bones like a grotesque musical staff.
Grace inhaled sharply. "You seeing this?"
I swallowed hard, bile burning the back of my throat. "Yeah."
She glanced sideways at me. "You recognize it?"
Lying was an option.
But Grace was part of OPUS V now. She deserved the truth.
"I saw it once before," I said. My voice felt like it belonged to someone else. "Six years ago. Another body. Same marks."
Her brow furrowed. "Daisy," she whispered.
I didn't answer.
The music box wound down with a final pitiful plink. Silence rushed in, cold and absolute.
Grace knelt by the altar, studying the box. "It's playing Lennox James's Orphan's Lament," she said. "You think that's a message?"
I shook my head slowly. "No. It's bait."
She looked up at me, confused. "Bait for what?"
"For me," I said.
Because whoever orchestrated this scene hadn't just killed Aaron.
They'd chosen this church.
They'd chosen this song.
They'd chosen me to find it.
Someone wanted me to remember what it felt like to lose.
And maybe... they wanted me to lose again.
The scene blurred around me for a moment, memories bleeding through the edges — Daisy's laughter echoing down school hallways, her hand ruffling my hair, her fierce loyalty whenever I got in trouble. She was always stronger than me. Always brighter.
Until someone ripped her apart and left her for dead.
Just like Aaron.
Just like this.
"Ryan," Grace said carefully, pulling me back. "We need to start cataloguing evidence."
I exhaled through my nose, steadying my hands.
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, we do."
Because this time?
I was going to find whoever did this.
And I was going to burn their whole damn world down.
It took less than ten minutes for the scene to flood with uniforms.
The place looked even worse under the crime scene lights — every jagged shadow stretched out across the broken pews, every crack in the stained glass looking like bleeding wounds in the walls. Someone taped off the front of the church with yellow ribbon. Crime Scene: Do Not Cross. Like a couple of strips of plastic could wash away the rot in here.
Grace handed me a coffee.
"Autopsy team's on their way," she said, keeping her voice low. "They're pulling some traffic cam footage too. Maybe we get lucky."
I took the coffee, let the heat bleed into my fingers. I hadn't realized how cold I was until now.
"There's no luck here," I said quietly. "Just work."
She didn't argue.
Grace wasn't like some of the other rookies I'd trained with — the ones who filled every silence with dumb optimism or nervous jokes. She understood how to listen to a room. How to let the bad shit settle before trying to dig answers out of it.
I liked that about her.
We split up to work the scene.
I crouched near Aaron's body again, close enough that I could see the fraying ropes cutting into his wrists. Whoever tied him up hadn't been gentle. His skin was torn where the rough fibers bit through. His feet barely touched the ground. Crucified — but modernized. Dirtier. Uglier.
And carved on his ribs...
The same symbols.
Same spiral pattern from Daisy's crime scene, six years ago.
Except now, there was something new:
A tiny, delicate eighth note sliced deep into the center of his chest. Like a signature.
I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo.
Grace moved over to me, frowning. "You see the way the music box was set up?"
"Tell me."
She nodded toward the altar. "It wasn't random. It's tuned. Like the song was picked specifically for this acoustics. To echo."
I glanced up at the high-vaulted ceiling. The broken choir pipes. The gutted pulpit.
"You mean he wanted the whole church to sing the song."
"Exactly," she said. "It's like a... like a funeral march."
Except Aaron was never supposed to have a funeral.
He was supposed to have a future.
I ground my teeth and stood up. "Get the forensics team to pull DNA from the ropes, the nails, everything."
"You think the guy's cocky enough to leave prints?"
"No," I said. "But everyone leaves something behind."
A fiber. A strand of hair. A mistake.
A murder is messy. Even when you try to make it clean.
And whoever staged this?
They wanted the show.
They wanted the drama.
And people who crave drama always screw up somewhere.
Grace kept glancing at me as we crossed the parking lot. She was waiting for me to say something about the body, about Aaron, but I kept my mouth shut.
Not because I was being dramatic — there wasn't anything worth saying yet.
I dug in my pocket for the car keys. My hands were shaking, just a little. Cold, mostly.
Grace broke the silence first.
"We'll have to bring his family in."
"Yeah," I said.
She hesitated. "You want me to handle it?"
I shook my head.
"He doesn't have much family left."
The engine coughed once before turning over. Grace's car was a few spots down. She waited like she wasn't sure if she should leave yet.
The church stood behind us, crooked and black against the sky.
Inside that broken building, Aaron's blood was already soaking into the wood.
And somewhere, someone was already planning the next move.
I pulled out into traffic.
Grace followed a minute later.
Nobody spoke on the radio.
Nobody needed to.
There was work to do.