Cassian pov
Monsters don't hide under beds. They sleep in them."
I watched the husband cry.
Snot dripped from his nose. His hands trembled like brittle paper caught in the wind. His voice cracked as he begged me to believe he hadn't done it.
I believed him.
Because he hadn't.
But I didn't care.
This wasn't about the truth.
It was about patterns.
Structure.
Symmetry.
Something in this scene didn't belong.
His wife had been murdered. Brutally.
Surgically.
But his grief wasn't shaped for that kind of violence.
Guilt has a scent. Fear has a rhythm.
This man reeked of neither.
He was just… broken.
Useless.
I leaned forward across the table. Our eyes locked.
"You said she took the dog out around nine."
He nodded, voice shaky. "Y-yes."
I tapped the file. "There was no dog."
"What?"
"No hair. No paw prints. No food bowls. No collar. Nothing. Not even a leash."
His mouth opened, then closed. Silence. Thought.
"She must've—she—she walked it without—"
"No one walks an invisible dog."
His eyes widened. Panic blossomed behind them. I leaned back, unflinching.
"I don't think you killed her," I said.
Relief flooded his face.
"But I think you're lying. And that makes you useless."
He flinched as if I'd struck him. I hadn't.
If I had, he wouldn't still be talking.
I left the interrogation room. The air was too clean in here—like the building was trying to pretend it wasn't full of monsters.
I passed the trainee room. They stared as if I were a legend. The profiler who "gets inside their heads." The one who closes impossible cases. The Bureau's golden boy.
They don't realize what it takes to catch a killer.
You have to already be one.
The file waited on my desk.
Red seal. Special access. No name. Just an ID number.
I opened it with gloved fingers.
One glance was enough.
I recognized the handwriting scrawled on the crime scene wall. Slanted. Sharp. The "e" always curled up at the end like a smile.
My smile.
I didn't kill this woman.
But whoever did… wanted me to know it was personal.
I closed the file and stared out the window. The city blinked beneath me—thousands of lights, thousands of bodies.
One of them was trying to play my game.
Amateur.
My phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
I answered.
Silence.
Then a voice, low and distorted, soaked in static:
"Hi, Cass."
I froze.
No. That's not right.
I don't freeze. I calculate.
But for one second—one heartbeat—my grip tightened around the phone.
"Who is this?"
A laugh, wet and cruel.
"I'm hurt. Don't tell me you just forget me like that, Cass."
Click. I ended the call.
Silence.
I sat in the dark.
Lights off. Curtains drawn. My Glock on the table. Beside it, a scalpel. Clean. Sharp. Familiar.
"No. It can't be."
"He's dead."
Then why—
"That wasn't possible."
Unless…
"He survived."
"He fucking survived."
Something like happiness—something dangerous—wedged itself into my chest.
I got up and hurriedly move to my hidden desk.
At 3:17 pm, I opened my private ledger.
The one the Bureau doesn't know about. Buried deep behind triple firewalls and offline encryption.
I scrolled past the familiar names.
The dead.
The forgotten.
The ones who bled.
And then I saw it.
Cassius M. Wolfe
Status: Unknown
Affiliation: Declared dead in 1999… or so I thought.
I remembered the stories from the lab.
Twin subjects. Identical DNA.
Split at five years old.
One subject vanished during early testing.
I was told he died.
They lied.
I stared at the old photograph.
Two boys. Same eyes. Same hair.
One smiling.
Cassius.
My twin brother.
The other?
Blank.
Me.
Emotionless.
Like looking in a mirror that never learned to reflect anything human.
I'm not alone.
I never was.
My phone buzzed again.
This time, the voice was closer. Sharper.
"Did you think you were the only one left alive?"
"Why are you doing this?" I asked, voice low but steady.
"Because you left me to die."
I closed my eyes. The memory hit like a knife.
The lab. The cold. The betrayal.
"You're wrong," I said. "I survived. You disappeared."
"Not disappeared," Cassius corrected. "Hiding. Watching. Waiting for you"
"So, what now?"
"Now? We will finish this."
"No, I don't want involved in this."
"Don't tell me what to do, she is also my mother and they damaged not only you but me too and I had it way worser than you."
"Together or apart?" I asked?
There was a pause, heavy with meaning.
What do you think? He replied.
I didn't answer.
Because I didn't know.
The mirror doesn't bleed.
But sometimes, it cracks.