The fog didn't just roll off the Mississippi, it crawled. It wound its way through the iron wrought gates of Blackthorn, a town built on sugar cane, secrets, and the fragile egos of men who wore silk waistcoats in ninety-degree heat. Celeste Merriweather, adjusted the brim of her hat, her fingers trembling slightly, not from fear, but from the sheer weight of the silence hanging over the Montgomery estate. Inside, the sixteenth victim was waiting.
"You're not supposed to be past the line, Miss Merriweather," a young constable stammered, his face a shade of green that matched almost every swamp water in town. "The Sheriff, he said—"
"The Sheriff is currently losing his breakfast in the rose garden, Fredrick," Celeste interrupted, her voice a calm, sharp blade. "And since the city won't send a real investigator until the morning train, I suggest you let me through before the humidity ruins the evidence."
She didn't wait for an answer. She stepped into the foyer, the scent of expensive brandy clashing violently with the metallic tang of blood.
There, suspended from the crystal chandelier in a grotesque display of unholy stillness and absolute mockery was Judge Montgomery. He had been the town's most powerful man at sunset. Now, he was a masterpiece of the macabre. The killer hadn't just taken a life; he had staged a commentary. The Judge's mouth was sewn shut with gold thread, his pockets stuffed with the very banknotes he'd used to buy his way out of scandal and around his neck, a broken gavel. Just like those before him, he had been reduced to a grisly collection of parts and patterns. The viscous pool of blood beneath the body caught the stray light leaking through the heavy curtains, turning the deep crimson into a mocking, radiant glow.
"You're invasive " she whispered, her voice barely a breath in the heavy silence. She leaned closer, her eyes tracing the surgical precision of the cuts with a mix of disgust and cold admiration. "You don't belong here".
She knelt, the silk of her skirt soaking up the copper-scented ruin on the floor, but she didn't flinch. There, barely cresting the surface of the blood like a drowning insect, sat a single, curled petal of a Red Spider Lily. It was a swamp-dweller, that didn't bloom inside the manicured gates of this estate.
"Sixteen," she breathed, the word catching like a thorn in her throat. The Butcher was counting, and so was she. "I'll find you before you find the seventeenth. I have to. For all of us."
Celeste didn't reach for the flower—not yet. She didn't reach for anything. Instead, she stood perfectly still, her eyes darting with the rhythmic precision of a loom. She inhaled the copper-heavy air, forcing herself to memorize the exact angle of the Judge's head, the way the gold thread caught the stubborn sunlight even the specific distance between the body and the overturned mahogany chair.
The men around her were busy shouting orders or shielding their eyes, but Celeste was building a gallery in her mind. She cataloged the Montgomery foyer alongside the fifteen other scenes she had burned into her memory over the last few months. She was a silent, unwelcomed ghost in a room full of panicked living men.
"Out! I said out, Celeste!" The Sheriff's voice finally boomed from the doorway, his face mottled purple. "This is no place for a lady, let alone a charity case. Go home and pray for the Judge's soul."