Christopher stepped out into the center of the stone corridor with measured, calculated strides, attempting to conceal the violent storm raging within his chest behind the mask of unyielding ice everyone was accustomed to seeing. He did not return to his private office, nor did he vacate the precinct station as the Chief had so furiously demanded. Instead, he headed straight toward the archives and records section buried in the damp basement, cold-bloodedly exploiting what remained of his active authority as a detective inspector before the verbal decision to remove him from the case could solidify into an official, written suspension order.
He was greeted below by a heavy, suffocating atmosphere, thick with the stagnant stench of rising dampness and decaying, ancient paper, making the subterranean vault feel like a forgotten mausoleum for the city's sins. The elderly records clerk raised his head the moment Christopher entered, but the polite words died instantly in his throat when his eyes met the inspector's piercing, hollow gaze. The old man remained silent, prudently sliding the massive, leather-bound detention log across the battered counter without being asked.
Christopher sat before a scratched wooden table beneath a single, buzzing electric bulb and slowly opened the heavy ledger. His eyes traced over the names, official signatures, and ink-stamped timestamps with lethal, clinical precision.
On-duty guards: Constables Thomas, George, William.
On-duty physician: Dr. Hill.
Official visits: None.
His eyes locked onto that single word for a long, agonizingly heavy moment. Then, his lips parted into a faint, mocking smile.
— "None?" he whispered to the empty room.
The deduction had begun to form with terrifying, unassailable clarity inside his skull. If Julian Mortimer had possessed that lethal vial from the start, their fingers would have extracted it at the colliery. They had stripped him of almost everything—every coin, watch, and hidden lining—before transferring his heavy frame to police custody.
Therefore, the poison was never on his person. The poison reached him here. Inside this very station.
Christopher slammed the massive ledger shut with a resounding force that echoed through the silent stone vault like a gunshot. He leaned back against the creaking wooden chair for a brief moment, staring into the dark void with shadowed, unblinking eyes.
The traitor was not a nameless phantom slipping through the barred windows at midnight. The traitor held an official access permit. Wore a silver police badge. And moved through these high-security corridors without a single soul daring to question his presence.
Christopher felt a sharp, freezing chill course through his limbs, but his inner rage remained too still, too deeply buried to be seen on the surface. He knew all too well that confronting the suspected guards directly would achieve nothing but burying the evidence even deeper into the mud.
Serpents only coil deeper into the dark when they sense the hunter's breath.
He rose from his seat, returned the heavy log to the silent clerk without another word, and left the damp archives with heavy, purposeful steps.
When he finally stepped out of the police station's grand stone archway, evening had begun to settle slowly over the labyrinthine streets of London, casting a pale, sickly light upon the wet pavements and the thick, coal smoke rising from the city's endless chimneys. Christopher paused for a moment before the ancient, soot-stained building, looking back at the official seal carved into the stone with eyes filled with something close to absolute disgust.
The institution he had spent his entire adult life believing in—the very altar of justice he had served—was rotting from the inside out.
He drove in absolute silence toward the safehouse. Home was no longer a safe sanctuary; it was a target. The war had become too vast, too corrupt to fight within the boundaries of a badge.
He arrived at the abandoned factory safehouse to find a heavy stillness filling its corners like a physical shroud of melancholy. Edward had woken a short while ago. He was sitting in the cramped, shadow-drenched living room, holding a chipped mug of black coffee that had already gone half-cold, while his late wife Julia's gold ring remained nestled safely inside his waistcoat pocket, pressed close to his beating heart.
Edward raised his hollow eyes the moment Christopher pushed the heavy metal door open, immediately noticing a grim darkness in the inspector's features that made him knit his heavy brows in silence.
Christopher took off his damp leather coat, tossing it carelessly onto a wooden chair, and spoke directly in a low, flat voice:
— "Julian Mortimer is dead."
Edward froze in place, his hand halting halfway to his lips with the cold mug.
— "What?" he breathed, his eyes wide with utter disbelief. "How? We left the bastard breathing in the dirt!"
Christopher sat across from him slowly, resting his elbows on his knees and locking his gaze onto his partner.
— "The precinct division claims he committed suicide inside his solitary confinement cell."
A suffocating silence prevailed over the room for a few ticking moments. Then, Edward let out a short, hollow laugh, saturated with a bitter, dangerous anger.
— "Suicide?" Edward shook his head violently, slamming the mug onto the table. "Chris... we turned his pockets inside out ourselves at the mine. That aristocratic bastard didn't even have a brass pin left on his suit."
Christopher nodded slowly, his eyes dropping to the floor between them.
— "I know."
Then, he raised his burning gaze to meet Edward's and said with a grim, freezing calmness:
— "Therefore, the poison was never with him."
The remaining traces of confusion gradually vanished from Edward's weathered face, replaced by a heavier, more cataclysmic shock as the pieces clicked together.
— "Someone brought it into his cell..."
— "Yes."
— "From inside the bloody station?"
This time, Christopher did not answer immediately. He merely looked at him for a few agonizing seconds before saying:
— "The Chief officially removed me from the files this morning."
Edward's features hardened with a brutal, protective ferocity, while Christopher continued in a flat, mechanical voice:
— "He stated that I am psychologically compromised... unfit to handle the nobility because of what they did to my brother Ronald twenty years ago."
Edward gripped the edge of the wooden table so tightly his knuckles turned a bloodless white, nearly splintering the dry wood.
— "So they are involved... all of them. The high hats, the turnkeys, the whole bloody system." He stood up agitatedly, pacing like a caged animal across the concrete floor before turning around in pure fury: "Everyone is protecting one another's pockets, Christopher! While my Yara is still out there in the dark with those monsters!"
Christopher stood up as well, approaching him with slow, deliberate steps.
— "Calm down, Edward."
Yet, his voice carried no genuine reassurance; it was the voice of a man who had already stepped over the precipice—a man who had signed his own death warrant. He looked into Edward's eyes with absolute, unyielding steadfastness, and murmured:
— "If they own the law... then we own something far worse."
He paused for a brief, heavy second to let the reality settle between them. Then, he completed the sentence:
— "We own the streets."
Silence fell over the safehouse once more—a heavy, absolute quiet that made the very air seem stagnant and thick with destiny. Christopher finally spoke in a voice that was faint, yet terrifying in its absolute stillness:
— "We will hunt down the traitor within my precinct... and we will reach Yara. And anyone who dares stand in our path from this moment on... will pay the ultimate price."
The two men's gazes locked amid the deep gloom of the hideout, and in that exact, freezing moment, it felt as though the last remaining threads of their civilian lives had snapped forever.
From this night onward, this was no longer a war fought with warrants and badges. This was a war of blood.