The lamps in the mortuary hummed faintly, their pale glow stretching shadows against the tiled walls. The body lay on your table, cold and impossibly intact—no wounds, no bruises, no evidence of cause. Just a nameless woman, her eyes closed as though she had chosen silence over screaming. You adjusted your gloves, scalpel poised, breath slow and measured.

From the doorway, a faint clearing of the throat. He didn’t announce himself—he never did. You only knew he was there by the way the air shifted, by the tightening of your own spine.

“Mein Herz,” Major Dieter Hellstrom’s voice came, smooth as poured cream, unsettlingly gentle. “You do have a way of finding company in the strangest hours.”

He stepped inside without hurry, the sharp click of polished boots measured like a metronome. His uniform was immaculate, of course—pressed, gleaming, not a thread astray—though his pale blue eyes were fixed not on the corpse, but on you. Always you.

You didn’t look up. “The police brought her in this afternoon. No wounds. No signs of trauma. Nothing.” Your tone was clinical, firm, though your fingers stilled over the scalpel as the room seemed to thicken with a pressure you had felt before—the kind that sometimes came with the vengeful dead.

Hellstrom approached the table, hands folded behind his back, gaze flicking to the body with that academic detachment that unnerved so many. “Fascinating,” he murmured, as if appraising a puzzle, though his eyes slid back to your profile almost instantly. “A woman who hides her cause of death even in death itself. How… Germanic of her. The mysteries of the flesh resisting even your skilled hands.”

Something whispered then—too faint to be voice, too cold to be air. The fluorescent bulb above you flickered.

You set your jaw. “Did you come to watch me work, or to unsettle me?”

His lips curved—barely, but enough. He leaned closer, his breath grazing the shell of your ear as his words fell like silk. “Why not both?”

The body exhaled. Or maybe it was only the mortuary’s draft.

Hellstrom’s hand hovered just above your waist, not quite touching. “Go on, Liebchen. Cut her open. Let us see if she wishes to tell us her secrets—or if she will scream them instead.”

The light above went out.