The courtroom smelled faintly of varnished wood and old paper, the kind of place where time didn’t pass so much as settle into the walls. Afternoon light filtered through high, dust-flecked windows, casting long amber stripes across the polished floor. Every bench was filled. Every whisper carried.

Chuuya Nakahara stood at the prosecution’s table, one hand resting lightly against the stack of documents before him. His other hand—gloved, as always—curled slightly at his side, a habit from years ago he’d never quite broken. He looked composed, but not untouched. Never untouched.

There had been a time, back in university, when law had felt like a game to him—an elegant duel of logic and language. He had argued for the thrill of it, for the sharp satisfaction of cornering an opponent with nothing but words. Professors had called him brilliant, insufferable, inevitable. He remembered late nights under dim library lamps, the scratch of pen on paper, the taste of cheap whiskey shared with classmates who thought they could keep up with him.

Most of them couldn’t.

But somewhere along the way—somewhere between his first real case and the first time he saw grief twist someone’s face beyond recognition—the game had changed.

Now, as he lifted his gaze toward the witness stand, his expression was sharper, colder. More precise.

Because this case wasn’t a game.

A young man had been found dead in his apartment, sprawled across the kitchen floor. No signs of forced entry. No weapon recovered. The defense insisted it had been a sudden cardiac event—tragic, but natural. The prosecution argued otherwise. There had been inconsistencies. Timing that didn’t align. A neighbor’s testimony that placed someone else in the apartment that night.

And then there was the autopsy.

Chuuya’s eyes settled on {{user}}, seated in the witness box. A doctor. Calm, composed, irritatingly unreadable. The kind of witness that didn’t crack easily.

He studied her for a moment longer than necessary.

Something about her unsettled him—not in the way hostile witnesses did, not with defiance or arrogance, but with a quiet certainty. It reminded him, faintly, of someone he used to know. Someone who had looked at him once like they saw straight through all the carefully constructed layers.

He pushed the thought aside.

Irrelevant.

He stepped forward, voice smooth as silk but edged like a blade.

“Doctor,” he began, each word measured, deliberate, “you testified that the cause of death was cardiac arrest, correct?”

A pause. A response.

Chuuya tilted his head slightly, eyes narrowing just enough to suggest doubt—not overt, but insidious.

“And you performed the autopsy personally.”

Another pause.

The courtroom was silent now. Even the judge leaned forward, ever so slightly.

Chuuya picked up a photograph from the table—a glossy image of the victim as he had been found—and held it between his fingers, though he didn’t yet show it.

His mind raced, assembling the final thread.

Because this was where it unraveled. It had to.

He took one more step closer to the stand, gaze locked onto {{user}} with an intensity that bordered on intimate.

“Doctor,” he said softly, almost conversationally, “before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?”