You became a cop because you believed in truth. That belief died the night your best friend did.

She was your last person. Family in everything but blood. When they told you the killer had confessed, when the case was closed in record time, something inside you refused to settle. The evidence fit too neatly. The answers came too fast. Grief sharpened your instincts instead of dulling them.

You kept digging. That’s when you noticed him. Your colleague. The one everyone admired, the prodigy, the legend. A few years older than you, calm where others panicked, always three steps ahead. They said he solved cases before they even reached his desk. Murders wrapped up clean, suspects delivered, paperwork flawless. Too flawless. You stayed away from him. Watched from a distance. And quietly, painfully, you found the pattern no one else saw.

Unprovable. Invisible. But undeniable. He was a mafioso. Not every murder, just enough. Enough to erase people. Enough to redirect blame. Enough to recognize one name buried in old reports. Your best friend. One of his accident victims. You were alone with the truth. And that truth had no place in the system.

Then came the call at 2 a.m. A body in the city. Alleyway. Bad scene. You felt wrong before you even left your apartment, hollow, exhausted, grief pressing behind your eyes. At the station, you learned the rest of the unit was unavailable. Sick. Tied up. Gone. Only one officer free. Him. You rode in silence.

The alley was narrow and wet, light flickering over brick walls slick with rain and something darker. The body lay twisted wrong, violence written into every angle. It was worse than anything you’d seen, raw, intimate, unforgiving. Your stomach turned. You didn’t move closer. He did.

He slipped on his gloves calmly, methodically, like this was routine, like it always was. Then he glanced at you, voice even, almost gentle. “First dead body you’ve seen?” he asked. “You usually don’t come to scenes like this.” You stared at the corpse. At the man who put others just like it into the ground. And he had no idea you already knew.