Criminal psychology. Forensic psychology. That’s all you’ve ever wanted—your singular obsession, the one thing that carried you through years of sleepless study, endless lectures, and the brutal grind of university. To you, the human mind isn’t just an organ—it’s a labyrinth. A tangle of motivations, impulses, and obsessions that few dare to explore. You wanted to dive headfirst into that abyss, to chart the places most turn away from. Studying criminals, dissecting their thoughts, unraveling the fractured patterns that drive them to kill. To you, there is nothing more intoxicating than peeling back the façade of a human being and seeing the raw, unfiltered mechanisms beneath. The darkness in people doesn’t frighten you—it fascinates you.

And then came Simon Riley.

A name whispered with the weight of tragedy, the kind that stains reputations and clings to the walls of psychiatric hospitals. He’d seen too much—blood, death, the steady collapse of humanity on battlefields that left no room for recovery. Men like him don’t shatter all at once. They fracture slowly. First silence. Then trembling hands. Then dreams that won’t stay locked in sleep. Eventually, it becomes an itch—small, imperceptible, then impossible to ignore. One day, Simon stopped resisting. He let it consume him.

That’s how he ended up here.

A sterile hospital, whitewashed walls steeped in disinfectant and despair. Happy music leaks from overhead speakers, as though a melody could cleanse the violence buried in his blood. Shackled to a chair, wrists raw from steel, eyes both wild and eerily calm. The kind of calm that chills more than rage. They tried to probe his mind, to build a narrative from chaos, but he gave them nothing useful. Only fragments. Only enough to remind them they were out of their depth.

You know the risk. Most who are placed in his orbit don’t return. Some break, some resign, a few vanish entirely. And yet you can’t turn away. His case calls to you like a siren’s song. His file isn’t enough—you’ve read it until the words blurred together, until ink and paper became meaningless. You don’t want to just study him. You need to understand him. See the machinery of his mind for yourself.

So, you put in the request. You send every credential, every certification, every letter of proof that you’re qualified to face the abyss

The walk into his ward feels longer than it should. Fluorescent lights hum overhead, the air heavy with bleach and something metallic. Your grip tightens on the files clutched under your arm—a shield of paper that suddenly feels pathetic against the reality of a man who’s lived and died in war.

Then, the door.

Inside, he waits. Grey uniform. Shackled wrists. Chains rattling as he adjusts in his chair. His eyes lift—not wild, not vacant, but piercing. Heavy. You see in them the weight of every corpse, every trigger pulled, every nightmare that built the man before you. His fingers tap the table once, twice, then still.

When he speaks, his voice is steady, certain. “Another one. Another person come to strip me down, to crawl through my thoughts. They all want the same thing—meaning. You won’t find it. But if it entertains you, I’ll give it to you. Every thought. Every detail. Nothing held back.”

He leans forward slightly, chain clinking. His words hang in the air like smoke.

He leans forward just slightly, the chain clinking with the motion. His words hang in the air like smoke.

You don’t flinch. You don’t retreat like the others. You set the files down slowly, deliberately, and meet his gaze without wavering. You’ve wanted this all your life—not the theory, not the paperwork, but the moment. To stand at the edge of madness and step across willingly.

Simon Riley is a puzzle. And you are going to solve him. Even if it destroys you.