I haven’t left the motel room in two days.
I’m sitting where she sat on the floor. Same angle toward the wall, back pressed against the same cracked bed frame. The evidence is still here—thumbtacked, curling at the corners like dried leaves. Dalia’s handwriting wraps around pushpins and red thread like a language only we could read, each notation a breadcrumb she left in case I had to follow alone.
I trace it all with my eyes. I don’t touch it. It feels too close to touching her.
The motel room still smells faintly like her shampoo. Maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe I need to be imagining it because the alternative is accepting that even her ghost is fading from this place.
Seven days ago, she sat right here—sleeves rolled, reading out loud pieces of the case as if assembling a prayer. Connecting threads between Ruth Quinn’s disappearance and the Church of Reclamation’s logistics network, her finger tracing delivery routes. Now she’s gone, swallowed by the same darkness that claimed Ruth, and I’m stuck in the echo.
I flip through the case folder again. It doesn’t help. None of it does. Every file looks like a warning she tried to leave me. Every scrawl, a whisper I should’ve caught. Her analysis of Vale’s recruitment patterns. Notes about the spiral symbol appearing in locations spanning four years.
I close my eyes and she’s right here again. Sitting cross-legged, hair tied up in that messy knot that always came loose by evening, pen between her teeth when she was thinking through a piece of evidence. That sharp “hmm” she made when connections started forming. The slight crinkle between her brows when she was fighting off sleep but refusing to stop working.
My hands shake. Just a little. The kind of tremor that comes from too much caffeine and not enough sleep, but really it’s the weight of knowing she walked into that commune alone while I went to work.
I press my palms flat to my knees.
Get it together, Wexler.
I open my laptop. Not because I expect to find anything new, but because this is what I do now—refresh my mailbox, pull the same surveillance captures, comb the same digital graveyards like some modern-day archaeologist of loss. Pretending if I stare long enough at the monitor, she’ll claw her way back through the screen.
The Amberfield Logistics trail went cold the day she disappeared. No trucks. No deliveries. The commune’s supply chain vanished like it never existed, which tells me they knew someone was watching. They knew something was off.
The problem is I’m looking for a needle in a haystack when I don’t even know what the needle looks like anymore.
The room gets quieter and I’m not sure how that’s possible in a place that already feels like a tomb. Or maybe I just get louder inside, my thoughts rattling around like loose coins in a glass jar.
I scroll back to a saved batch of scene photos—shots from her last undercover visit to Dunhaven Glade. Cult members gathering at the fire, their faces slack with that particular emptiness that comes from surrendering your will to something bigger and hungrier than yourself. A single woman kneeling beside the altar, hands raised in supplication or surrender.
She’s in two of the photos. Mid-motion, like she’s caught between identities. Her head turned away from the camera, but I can see the tension in her shoulders, the way she holds herself like she’s ready to run or fight. She looks like a ghost haunting her own crime scene.
I close the window. Reopen it again thirty seconds later. I don’t know what I expect to change. The pixels don’t rearrange themselves into hope.
I sit back, drag my fingers through hair that feels like it hasn’t seen a shower in longer than I want to admit.
A notification pings from my phone. Kelsi.
No news. Are you coming in today? Locke is furious.
I don’t reply. Let Locke be furious. Fury might actually improve her personality.
Instead, I drag open the drawer of the nightstand beside the bed. Inside is a crumpled notepad and a half-spent pen. I don’t really know what I’m doing until I’ve already started sketching.
A hill. Blue sky rendered in ballpoint scratches. Narrow tower rising like a finger pointing at heaven or hell. No door—that detail comes back to me with crystalline clarity. A staircase climbing upward, defying architecture and physics in the way only a child’s imagination can. Clouds around the spire like a ring of cotton candy. And at the top—just like in the original—the spiral.
A child’s drawing. Wren’s castle. Her “queendom,” as Markus had called it with that indulgent smile parents wear when they think their children’s nightmares are just imagination.
But this time I don’t see a fairy tale. I see a warning.
I shift to my laptop again, fingers clumsy with sudden urgency. Open the archive from the farmhouse case. Cross-reference the spiral—charred lines, thick and deliberate, burned into floorboards like a brand. The clockwise motion. The way the lines taper at the end like they’re being pulled into something unseen.
I don't think that drawing was an invention. It was memory.
Wren saw this place. Or something like it, before she disappeared. Before her mother started chasing ghosts through farmhouses and cult gatherings.
I start laughing, and it comes out maniacal, the kind of sound that would make Dalia look at me with those sharp eyes and ask if I needed to step outside for air. I may have completely lost it. In denial of the loss I have suffered, I’m conjuring up threads that don’t exist, all in an effort to save someone who’s probably already gone.
Tears threaten to come spilling out, hot and shameful and utterly useless.
No.
I don’t know what this means yet. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Perhaps I’m delusional, seeing patterns because the alternative is admitting that some darknesses are too deep to illuminate.
But I don’t care. And I’m done pretending we’re not already deep inside something none of us understand—something that’s been hunting in these woods longer than any of us realized.
I redraw the spiral half a dozen times, each version a bit different but fundamentally the same. The same coiling symbol that showed up at the farmhouse, at the church, carved into trees around the commune. A portal. A target. An eye. Something pretending to be benign while it marks its territory.
The queendom, Markus had said that night at dinner, gesturing at the framed artwork with paternal pride.
And the way he laughed. Like it was just a kid’s game. A throwaway line. But Wren didn’t draw castles with no doors for nothing. That girl didn’t scribble for fun; she recorded. She documented. She was, after all, Dalia’s daughter—born with that same investigative instinct that turns observation into obsession.
The thought makes my stomach turn over like I’ve swallowed something rotten.
I’m more and more certain Wren drew the symbol of the cult. Years before her mother started hunting them. Years before any of us knew they existed.
The implications crash over me like cold water.
I push off the floor, pacing now. Barefoot on creaky carpet, motel room static clinging to my skin. My breath’s ragged in a way I try not to acknowledge because acknowledging it means admitting how close I am to the edge.
I haven’t shaved in two days. My phone’s buzzing with messages I’m ignoring, save for Kelsi’s increasingly worried check-ins. Locke’s name lights up the screen twice. She can wait.
The motel room feels cold despite the heater’s mechanical wheeze. Maybe it’s the rain seeping into the corners through gaps in the window frame, or maybe it’s me—what’s left of me, stretched thinner every hour like evidence tape over a wound that won’t stop bleeding.
I spread the photos from the cult gathering across the bed with methodical care. These images are all I have left of her alive and moving in the world.
The faces are the same as they were: blurred, bowed, anonymous in their worship. Dim torchlight creates more shadows than illumination, barely enough definition to catch anything useful. I go through each individual person—checking shadows, background details, posture, anything that might tell me who these people were before they became a part of Vale’s salvation project.
My hand hovers over one shot—low-res, grain sharp enough to cut. The central figure is Dalia. She’s turned slightly away, speaking to someone off-camera, her mouth half-open in what looks like conversation. Her eyes are narrowed in that particular way that means she’s processing information, sorting truth.
One by one I go through the rest of the prints, refusing to stop now, refusing to let the pain in before I’ve extracted every possible piece of evidence from these images. A dozen scenes from the gathering, a hundred blurred faces, anonymous in the orange firelight that makes everyone look like they’re already burning.
Then I freeze.
Bottom-left corner of one frame. Face somewhat obscured by shadow and the bill of a baseball cap. Standing just outside the main ring of cultists, like he’s not quite in the circle but not outside it either—hidden by the crowd but positioned with careful attention.
The posture triggers something in me. Familiar in the way a scent can transport you back to a specific moment. The slight hunch of shoulders. The way he favors his left leg when he stands for too long.
I pinch to zoom, and the image pixelates. I scan the enhanced shadows again. My brain is already screaming denial before I finish processing what I’m seeing.
I scramble for my phone, fingers shaking with the kind of adrenaline that comes when you realize you’ve been walking through a minefield without knowing it. Snap a photo of the photo. Text Kelsi:
“Need your best zoom enhancement of the original.”
A beat. Then another. I’m pacing, the phone nearly slipping from my sweaty grip.
She sends back the enhanced version in less than three minutes—Kelsi’s magic with image processing that can pull features from shadows and grain.
I stare at the result, feeling the world tilt sideways.
Markus.
The weight of recognition lands slow and hard, like someone pulling a curtain back on a stage I didn’t realize I was standing on.
Markus Rowe. Dalia’s husband. Ex-husband. Wren’s father. The man who brought her breakfast at work because he was all concern. The man who cooked dinner and complained about his job and hung his daughter’s drawings on the wall like proud family totems.
What the hell?
I send a quick thanks to Kelsi, then stare at the enhanced image until my eyes water. My thoughts spiral into dark territory. I keep returning to that photo, to his careful positioning just outside the firelight. Am I completely off the rails? Making connections because of Wren’s strange drawing and my own desperate need to find patterns in chaos?
But then I remember Markus’s bitter words from the other day, the way he talked about Dalia.
She disappears into her investigations, into whatever case has captured her attention, into some mission she’s decided is more important than everything else. She forgets other people exist unless they’re standing directly in front of her demanding attention.
My head falls back against the wall with a dull thud. A week ago, she was in my arms.
I reach for my phone again and dial Locke, fingers clumsy with rage and terrible certainty. She answers on the first ring, all clipped breath and irritated authority.
“Wexler. You finally remembered you’re employed.”
“The husband is involved,” I say without preamble, my voice steadier than I expected. “I have photographic evidence. He was at the gathering Dalia infiltrated.”
There’s a pause long enough for me to hear the machinery of her calculating mind.
“I assume this is your attempt to push a narrative without substantial proof?”
“I have a goddamn image. Enhanced by our tech analyst. Ask Kelsi if you don’t believe me.”
“Images don’t constitute conviction, Detective. You know that. They barely constitute probable cause.”
“For fuck’s—” I snap, then stop myself. “I thought you believed I was good enough for D.C., Major Crimes material.”
The words taste like ash, but I need her cooperation more than I need my pride.
I grit my teeth so hard my jaw clicks.
“You’re crossing a line, Wexler. Personal investment compromises judgment.”
“Then fire me.”
I hang up before she can respond, before she can turn this into another lecture about proper channels and procedural compliance.
The phone clatters onto the floor. My heart’s racing in a way that feels like warfare—too fast, too loud, too much all at once. I grip the edge of the bed to steady myself, shoulders heaving with the effort of not screaming.
I think about Dalia’s laugh. How rare it was, like finding a perfect piece of evidence in a contaminated crime scene. How she only ever let it out when she was surprised by joy, when something broke through her defenses.
The spiral. The cult. The fake identity. The commune swallowing people like a black hole. It was all pointing here, and somehow we missed the biggest red flag of all—the man sleeping next to her every night.
How long has he been involved with them?
Was he part of the Church of Reclamation before Wren disappeared?
Did Dalia spend six years hunting her daughter’s killer while living with him, trusting him, letting him comfort her in her grief?
I don’t want to ask those questions. But they’re there, pounding against the inside of my skull like prisoners demanding release.
The case files stare back at me from their scattered positions across the floor—evidence of a hunt that’s lasted years, a pattern of disappearances that stretches back to before any of us knew to look.
It’s time I paid Markus another visit.
ns216.73.216.176da2
