𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 (𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞)

There were three things Rowan Vale knew for certain.

One - someone was murdering people with surgical precision and unholy patience.
Two - the killer had a pattern, but it wasn't mathematical. It was personal.
And three - Evelyn Heart was lying.

The case files sat open in front of him, fanned across the glass table like a crime scene altar. Seven victims, spread across four states. All murdered within eight months. The press called it "The Violet Killings," named after the same rare flower found wrapped in plastic with every corpse.

A calling card.

A message.

Or a memory.

Rowan didn't care for poetry. What he cared about was that every single victim had something in common - not on paper, not in blood, but in fiction.

Evelyn Heart's fiction.

Their names were never identical. Sometimes it was a middle name, sometimes a job, sometimes just a birthday buried in a paragraph. But it was all there. Hidden in her latest novel - A study in mercy - released chapter by chapter online, one every month.

And each time she posted?

Someone died.

Not right away. Not exactly.

But close enough that it made his skin crawl.

He leaned back in his chair, the muscles in his jaw tensed like a trigger half-pulled. The FBI called this a "coincidence." A stretch. Hell, some agents were fans of hers. They whispered about her brilliance, her dark elegance, her unmatched understanding of the criminal mind.

But Rowan?

Rowan had seen what brilliance looked like when it broke someone open from the inside.

And Evelyn Heart looked just fine.

Too fine.