In the gloom of his office, where the smell of damp paper and smoke clung to the walls like an unwelcome guest, Detective Satoru Gojo sat with his shoulders bowed beneath the weight of endless hours. The lamp on his desk cast a jaundiced light over files stacked like tombstones, each folder another ghost he had already exorcised from the city’s veins. His trenchcoat hung loose, more like a funeral shroud than a garment of protection, and his fingers tapped a muted, restless rhythm against the scarred wood of the desk. A cigarette, scarcely more than ash, drooped from his lips, glowing faintly as if reluctant to die.

His hair unnaturally pale, disordered by long nights and longer thoughts fell in strands across his eyes, those piercing, glacial blue eyes that had once unsettled criminals and colleagues alike. Now, they appeared rimmed with shadows, hollows carved by fatigue and the quiet gnaw of despair. The city whispered his name with a mix of reverence and dread, to many, he was the strongest mind in the agency’s history. Yet power has a price. His own soul had become the ledger on which every case was tallied, each horror inscribed in invisible ink.

*With a weary flick, he closed another file, its story resolved, its villain condemned. And yet the work gave him no balm, only the monotony of victory. A man could drown just as easily in triumph as in failure. His sigh, low and rough, seemed to linger in the stagnant air before fading into silence.j

“Damn everything,”

he murmured, the words almost swallowed by the crackle of his cigarette.

The next file, bound in stiff paper yellowed with age, caught his attention not with its placement but with its name, Ravenwood Manor. Even before his eyes scoured the details, the title carried with it a heaviness. The manor stood at the very edge of town, a structure reborn from ruin, its renovations failing to erase the shadows clinging to its stones. Within its walls, a string of murders had unfolded with a cruelty so deliberate it seemed the house itself had conspired in them.

Gojo leaned back, cigarette smoke curling around his head like the remnants of a funeral hymn. His gaze, sharp despite its exhaustion, moved over the accounts, bodies mutilated in ways too theatrical to be mere impulse, blood found where no intruder could have easily gone, whispers of footsteps in locked corridors. He rubbed at his temple, a dull ache pulsing there, though whether from the strain of his thoughts or the slow burn of his melancholy he could not say.

Still, the challenge stirred something in him. Beneath the fatigue, beneath the gnawing hollowness, a current of anticipation flickered alive. The Ravenwood murders were not routine, they bore the mark of intelligence, of malice wielded like a blade. Such puzzles had always been his crucible, the reason the city both needed and feared him.

He set the file down, the corners of his mouth curling into a faint, sardonic smile. “A new case,” he muttered, voice edged with sarcasm “how delightful.”

The words rang hollow, their bitterness an armor against the truth, that the darkness waiting within the manor’s walls mirrored too closely the darkness coiling within his own chest.

With deliberate movements, he reached for his revolver, the cold metal familiar in his palm. Next came the battered suitcase, its leather worn by years of lonely journeys into places others dared not tread. He rose, his frame tall but stooped with the invisible burden he carried, and shrugged the trenchcoat more firmly across his shoulders.

The office seemed to watch him as he moved toward the door, its silence thick, its shadows stretching long. He paused only once, to strike a match and light another cigarette, the brief flame gilding his features in fleeting gold before dying back to smoke. His eyes, once brilliant and cruelly alive, glinted now with a colder promise.

Ravenwood Manor awaited.

And so, with the echo of his footsteps breaking the hush of the room, Detective Satoru Gojo stepped out into the night.