Chapter 54
A Crime Journalist
Elara
I am not supposed to be here.
Especially not after all that has happened; a fucking free-ticket to PTSD city.
That awareness doesn’t arrive as panic. It arrives as clarity—clean, cold, almost comforting.
The kind of certainty that sharpens the edges of the world instead of blurring them, that turns fear into something useful instead of something loud.
Every sound carries farther down here. Every shadow seems intentional, as if placed with care.
Even my own body feels foreign—too solid, too noisy—so I slow my breathing until it barely exists, until my lungs move on instinct alone.
Quiet as a mouse.
The room opens beneath me like a wound that never learned how to close.
I stand on a metal catwalk running along the upper perimeter of the space, its grated floor biting cold through the soles of my boots.
Rust flakes cling to the railing beneath my fingers, sharp and damp, staining my skin with iron.
Below me, the tanks rise from the concrete like upright coffins—industrial cylinders of reinforced glass and steel, tall enough to dwarf a man.
One is empty, drained, inert. The other is occupied.
Light pools around them in sick, deliberate halos, surgical in their precision, leaving everything outside those circles swallowed by darkness so dense it feels structural. The shadows don’t move. They wait.
Lucan stands at the center of it.
He doesn’t know I’m here.
That is the first thing that terrifies me—not that he is killing someone, not even that I am watching it, but that a man who notices everything has not noticed me. That means his attention is entirely elsewhere. Focused. Absolute.
He has removed his jacket. His sleeves are rolled to his elbows, fabric creased with care, exposing skin marked by scars I recognize too well.
His movements are slow, unhurried, almost ceremonial—the way a surgeon moves when there is no urgency, when the outcome has already been decided and time belongs to him alone.
He checks gauges with a glance. Adjusts valves with minimal effort.
Tilts his head slightly, listening, as if the machinery is capable of speech and he understands its language.
The man in the tank is unconscious.
For now.
I recognize him from photographs buried in archived case files, from footnotes in my father’s research that were always followed by speculation and never by proof, from names that surfaced in whispers and disappeared before anyone could pin them down.
Einar. Smaller than I imagined. Thinner.
The body of someone who relied more on intellect than force, now reduced to flesh that floats and sinks like any other.
His wrists are strapped above his head, cinched into steel rings bolted into the tank’s spine, his arms stretched just enough to exhaust him without tearing muscle.
His ankles are weighted, carefully calibrated, not to drown him outright, but to ensure he can never quite save himself.
The waterline rests just below his chin.
His mouth hangs open, lips pale. His chest rises in shallow, uneven pulls that tell me he’s drugged but not deeply enough to stay that way.
I catalogue the details automatically; the restraints, the angle of his spine, the way the glass slightly magnifies his face.
This is what my mind does when it doesn’t know how else to cope: it turns horror into inventory.
Lucan steps closer.
I don’t move.
I don’t breathe.
He places one gloved hand against the glass, fingers splayed, palm flat, as if feeling for warmth through a barrier that will never give it to him.
There is no hesitation in him. No flicker of doubt.
His face is calm in a way that makes my stomach turn; not blank, not empty, but intensely present.
Focused. This is not something he is enduring.
This is where he belongs.
He isn’t wearing a mask, I think that makes it worse, more personal.
He turns a valve.
The water rises.
Not fast. Never fast. A few centimeters at a time, deliberate and measured.
Just enough that Einar’s lips part instinctively, breath hitching even in unconsciousness.
Lucan watches the reaction with professional interest, head tilted slightly, eyes tracking the smallest change in respiration, in muscle tension, in reflex.
He waits until the water kisses the base of Einar’s mouth.
Then he stops.
I swallow hard, my throat tight, my mouth dry.
Minutes pass. Or seconds. Time stops behaving normally when you are watching something you shouldn’t be seeing.
Einar stirs, a low, broken sound tearing loose from his throat as consciousness claws its way back in.
His eyes flutter open, unfocused at first. Confusion registers; where am I, why can’t I move, followed immediately by fear so sharp it seems to snap his body awake all at once.
He thrashes.
The movement sends water sloshing violently against the glass, droplets streaking downward like rain trapped in a world that doesn’t need it.
His restraints hold. His ankles kick uselessly, the weights dragging him back into vertical alignment every time he tries to curl away.
He screams, but the sound comes out muffled, distorted by water and glass and distance, a terrible echo of panic that vibrates through the tank and into the floor beneath my feet.
Lucan doesn’t flinch.
“Stillness,” he says calmly, voice even, almost instructional, as if offering advice to a student who keeps making the same mistake. “You’re wasting oxygen.”
Einar’s eyes snap to him.
Recognition hits like a seizure.
“Vapor—Vapor, wait—” His words dissolve into bubbles.
He screams Lucan’s deadly name again, curses him, spits insults that break apart before they can land.
His terror is loud, animal, unfiltered. He bangs his head back against the glass once, twice, a dull, wet sound that makes my jaw clench. “Please—please—listen to me—”
Lucan waits.
Then he reaches out and flips a switch.
Electricity hums through the water—not enough to kill, for now.
Enough to teach. Enough to remind every nerve in Einar’s body who controls the variables now.
His body arches violently, muscles seizing, back bowing in a way that looks unnatural in water.
A sound rips out of him that I will hear later in my sleep, high and raw and stripped of language.
The lights flicker as the current passes through the tank, the water shuddering around him like something alive and angry.
Lucan watches.
Not with pleasure.
With attention.
When he cuts the power, Einar collapses against the restraints, sobbing, gasping, saliva and water spilling from his mouth. His eyes roll wildly, darting from Lucan’s face to the ceiling to the gauges as if any of it might offer escape. He gulps air like it’s already running out.
“You don’t understand,” Einar chokes, words tumbling over each other. “We could’ve—together—we could’ve fixed this. Controlled it. You and me—”
Lucan steps closer, his shadow swallowing the tank entirely.
“No,” he says.
One word. Flat. Absolute.
Einar babbles then, desperation erasing coherence.
He tries a different angle; names, blame, justification.
He shouts about Henrik, about betrayal, about contracts and signatures and deals made years ago in rooms that smelled like money and chemicals.
He screams that Henrik’s the enemy, that Lucan should punish him for selling the formulas to his father.
Lucan doesn’t answer.
He turns another valve.
The water rises again.
Einar screams. Pleads. Promises everything.
Money. Power. Access. He swears he can open doors Lucan doesn’t even know exist. He begs him to join forces, insists they are the same, that men like them don’t belong in cages or labs or stories written by people who don’t understand what it means to create.
Lucan leans in close, his mouth inches from the glass.
“I am not you,” he says quietly.
That is the only response Einar gets.
Lucan injects something into the system.
Clear. Colorless. It disperses slowly, blooming through the water like a thought you can’t take back once it forms. I recognize the reaction before the symptoms fully manifest; the faint clouding, the way Einar’s skin tightens as if shrinking away from itself.
My stomach twists.
But something else coils beneath the horror.
I recognize it with the same detached precision I use when a crime scene detail refuses to stay quiet in my head.
My pulse is too fast. My skin feels hot under my clothes despite the cold air.
My palms are damp where they grip the railing.
These are not fear responses alone. I catalogue them automatically, the way I always do, heart rate, breath pattern, muscle tension, searching for an explanation that doesn’t exist in any of my notebooks.
Adrenaline accounts for part of it. Shock accounts for another.
But not all.
There is something obscene about how controlled he is.
About how thoroughly he owns the space, the pace, the suffering.
I’ve interviewed killers who performed brutality like theater, who needed noise and chaos to convince themselves of their power.
This is different. This is quiet. This is surgical.
This is a man who does not need an audience to know exactly what he is.
My body reacts before my mind can censor it.
Heat pools low in my abdomen, unwelcome and undeniable, a traitorous response that makes my jaw clench in anger even as my breath stutters.
I hate myself for it. I hate the part of me that doesn’t look away, that leans into the moment instead of recoiling from it.
But hatred doesn’t stop observation, and observation has always been my first instinct.
I have written about men like this.
I have described their patterns, their rituals, the way violence becomes intimate when stripped of spectacle.
I have warned readers about proximity, about what happens when danger is allowed to feel personal.
I have always believed myself immune to it, protected by distance and language and professionalism.
I was wrong.
Especially when it comes to this man.
Watching Lucan now, I understand something I never fully articulated in print: that power exercised with restraint can feel more invasive than power unleashed.
That silence can be more seductive than noise.
That the absence of hesitation is its own kind of intimacy.
He doesn’t perform for Einar. He doesn’t perform for himself. He simply is.
And my body responds to that truth as if it recognizes it.
I force myself to stay still, to keep my breathing shallow, to remain a witness rather than a participant. This is the line, I tell myself. But I know I have already crossed that exact line, and even further.
Einar’s screams change pitch as his skin begins to blister, not immediately, but progressively, like something waking up underneath it.
The surface of him starts to fail, sloughing, the water turning cloudy, then opaque, tinged with something that looks like milk and rot.
He thrashes until his muscles give out, curses dissolving into incoherent sounds, then into nothing at all.
Lucan watches him die.
Not quickly.
Not mercifully.
When it’s over, the tank is quiet again. The only sound left is the low hum of machinery and my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.
Lucan exhales slowly.
Only then does he move.
He begins the cleanup with the same precision he applied to the killing.
Gloves changed. Tools laid out in perfect alignment.
Drains opened. The body lowered, slack and unrecognizable now, reduced to matter and consequence.
I am shaking so hard my teeth chatter, but I don’t move.
I can’t. I am rooted to the catwalk, to the shadow, to the terrible truth that I came here knowing I might see this—
And came anyway.
Defied him.
Thinking I’d even listen for one percentage to Henrik, my now-alive father, was a mistake.
That’s when he stops.
Not abruptly. Not dramatically. Just a pause. A stilling, like a predator sensing a shift in air pressure.
He straightens slowly.
I feel it before he says anything—the way the room tightens, the way gravity seems to tilt toward him. His head turns, just slightly.
He can feel it, me.
“What part of ‘stay away’ did you misunderstand?”