My steps were unsteady as I broke into the journalist's safehouse on the bleak eastern edge of town. The air inside was stagnant, heavy with the suffocating scent of old newsprint, ink, and dust that hadn't been disturbed in an eternity.
I rushed like a madman toward the heavy mahogany bookshelf the journalist had explicitly pointed out. My trembling fingertips frantically clawed behind the wooden frame until they hit the cold metallic surface of the hidden latch. With a sharp, mechanical click, the massive bookshelf swung outward, revealing a small, concealed alcove hidden built into the stone wall.
The secret space was freezing, its cold stone walls echoing my rapid, ragged breathing. Under the pale, flickering glow of a nearby gas lamp, a single sentence was crudely inscribed into the mortar like a final testament: "The answer is always before you."
I stood there stunned, sweat dripping from my forehead despite the biting chill of the room. Did he mean the truth was exposed to the world, or was it hidden right under my desperate gaze? I began to feel the stone, my fingertips tracing the rough, uneven texture of the wall, up and down, until I felt a slight variation in the masonry. There was a precise square shape hidden directly beneath the sentence.
I pressed it hard, my heart hammering like a trapped bird against my ribs. The stone slab gave way, revealing a masterfully concealed hollow. I pulled back the stone to find a small, ancient tin-bound wooden box.
Inside lay the "Black Book."
With shaking hands, I flipped through its weathered pages in a daze. These weren't just standard journalistic notes—they were the deeds to hell itself. The book contained the minutest, most damning details of the London high-society scandals: surveillance photographs, coded correspondence, and filthy, unrecorded financial records linked to offshore accounts. Even worse, it proved that all these corrupt aristocratic figures, including Julian Mortimer, were nothing but low-level pawns on a chessboard, protected by a terrifying underground syndicate led by the enigmatic "John Dread."
I had barely closed the box when the shadows outside the safehouse lengthened. The syndicate's enforcers had tracked me—appearing as if they had clawed their way out of the very earth. What followed was a hysterical, lung-burning chase through the narrow, rain-slicked alleys of London, the cold night air biting into my chest as I clutched that ledger to my heart like it was my only lifebuoy. I was trying to reach the sanctuary of a police station, and in that critical, desperate moment, under the dim, yellow glow of a tilted streetlamp... I collided with you, Chris.
Inside the subterranean bunker in the present day, the heavy silence returned. Edward stared at his cold coffee cup, his voice dropping as he brought his long tale to an end.
— "You watched me with that piercing detective's gaze," Edward whispered, looking up at Chris. "And when I handed you that Black Book under the streetlamp, when you saw the sheer volume of corruption within, your features shifted entirely. As you flipped through those pages with a suppressed fury, your eyes landed on the section dedicated to the nobles whose hands were stained with innocent blood. And there it was... the name of the peer who had murdered your brother, Ronald."
Chris stood perfectly still by the bunker's heavy wooden table. His jaw tightened so hard the bone looked sharp, the veins in his neck bulging like strained ropes under his collar. The memory of their meeting days ago was fresh, but hearing Edward recount the path of blood that brought them here only solidified his resolve.
Chris spoke in a flat, decisive tone that brooked no argument:
— "You stay here in this bunker, Edward. I'm going back to that northern mine to save those children myself."
Edward jolted from his wooden chair, his chair scraping loudly against the concrete floor. Rage and desperation scorched his throat as he shouted:
— "I'm going with you! That's my daughter in that cage, Chris! A piece of my very soul is trapped in that mountain—I will never sit here and leave her!"
Chris looked at him with a freezing, detached stare—the look of an experienced hunter measuring an amateur. He replied sternly:
— "I said I am going alone. You cannot do anything out there because you are weak, Edward. And the weak in a tactical confrontation are nothing but liabilities."
Edward lunged forward, grabbing the lapels of Chris's tweed trench coat, tears boiling in his eyes:
— "Even if it costs me my remaining breath, I must save her myself! I must appear before Yara as her hero, just this once. I don't want her last memory of her father to be a coward who surrendered to the darkness!"
That single word... "Hero"... hit Chris's soul like a bolt of lightning.
In that fraction of a second, the cold glint in the detective's eyes fractured, his mind drifting away from the dark bunker, drowning in the heavy weight of an old, buried memory. He was back in the schoolyard during recess, decades ago, sitting with his younger brother, Ronald, under the shade of a withered elm tree, talking about a British society cloaked in the blackness of injustice.
The young Chris had said bitterly back then: "It's a cruel world, Ronald. You have to become strong so no one dares to break you. You shouldn't rely on me to fight your battles every time, because I won't always be there. No one knows what the dark future holds for us."
Ronald had replied with a calm, serene smile, carrying a purity that Chris hadn't understood at the time: "I know I'm not strong like you, Chris. But whatever the world does to me, I cannot bring myself to hurt anyone, not even an enemy. There is a barrier in my soul preventing me from causing pain. So, why don't we become a proper team? I'll be the brains who draws the plans, and you be the brawn who executes them."
Chris had snapped back sharply, fueled by intense fear for his brother's safety: "Why settle for being a half when each of us can possess both intelligence and strength? The world has zero mercy for weak minds, Ronald. You have to change if you want to survive."
But Ronald had simply placed his small hand on Chris's shoulder, speaking with an embarrassing, absolute sincerity: "You are my hero, Chris. Do you know why? Because I see how you carry the weight of this entire family on your shoulders as the eldest son. I know how great your heart is, and how much courage you possess."
Chris remembered how terribly embarrassed he had felt then, trying to flee the emotional weight of the moment by standing up: "Stop this nonsense, Ronald. Enough of this talk. Come on, let's play football and leave the future to the future."
Ronald had let out a clear, ringing laugh. "Fine."
The old memory cleared like smoke, and Chris snapped back to the bitter, freezing reality of the underground bunker. He looked down at Edward—at the broken baker standing before him—but this time, a flicker of profound pity masked a suicidal, solitary decision.
Chris spoke in a low, hollow voice:
— "Not today, Edward. I'll be the hero this time."
With incredible, fluid speed—a movement Edward's untrained eyes couldn't even track—Chris spun behind him like a predatory shadow. He wrapped his iron forearm around Edward's throat, cutting off the carotid artery with a precise, non-lethal sleeper hold used by military personnel to induce immediate, forced sleep.
Edward's vision blurred into black, his grip loosening from Chris's coat as he went completely limp, falling unconscious into the detective's arms.
Chris gently carried Edward over to the cot in the corner of the bunker. Fetching a length of sturdy hemp rope from the tactical grid, he bound Edward tightly but securely to the iron frame, ensuring his old friend wouldn't be able to follow him into the slaughterhouse.
He stood over the senseless man for a long minute, wiping his tired, weathered face. He checked the cylinder of his Webley service revolver, looked at Edward one last time, and said quietly into the shadows:
— "You need your rest for now. We'll talk in the morning again... if the sun decides to rise upon us. Goodnight, my friend... and goodbye."