Chapter 15 Dante #3
I shake my head, the words slipping through my mind like oil spreading over water. Something feels wrong. Too much effort has been poured into painting him as squeaky clean, untarnished.
Nobody is perfect.
Especially not the men who usually need to be described that way.
I scroll further, searching for information about her mother, but find barely anything. A grain of detail with her name and a single photograph that looks decades old. She’s beautiful, with the same bone structure, the same quiet fire in her eyes that Estella had.
According to the report, she was a housewife, another adored figure in that picture-perfect village. Then a tragedy happened—a fire caused by a gas leak during a quiet night, which killed her instantly.
I freeze, my chest tightening as my eyes lock on the date—a full year after Iris’s supposed death at Gravemoor Asylum. A slow, deliberate chill snakes down my spine, curling through every nerve.
Somewhere deep, a warning whispers that this isn’t a coincidence.
My focus drifts back to the father’s file.
Without thinking, I click open the crime scene photos.
His body sprawls across the floor of their living room, limbs twisted at unnatural angles.
A vast pool of blood thickens beneath him, dark and congealed.
The report lists the details in neat, detached lines—twenty stab wounds to the stomach, ten to the genitals, and two to the palms, one in each hand.
Christ.
I can’t even bear to imagine the weight she must have felt while delivering the stabs. A sick twist coils in my stomach as a thought sparks in my mind, refusing to be ignored.
My hand moves to the back of my neck, fingers grazing the skin, prickling under my touch, as I run through every possible reason she could have done this.
It’s so violent, so personal. The stomach wounds—maybe just pure, blazing rage as a result. But the palms and genitals…
A blast of white-hot fury tears through me, sharp enough to blot out everything else. My jaw locks, muscles straining as the truth edges closer, forming a shape I already recognize too well.
If it’s what I think it is, then I wish I had been the one to do it. In fact, I would have put him through far worse.
I tear my gaze from the photos before the thought festers, finding her eyes again. But now, behind the rage, I see something else.
A glint of despair. A shadow of helplessness buried deep beneath the violence.
I know that look. Not the full depth of it, not the horror she must’ve lived through, but the feeling of being lost, broken, unsure how to move forward. I remember the fog after the car accident, when I didn’t know what to do with myself, what the world wanted from me.
Iris had no one. No one to stand between her and the world that kept trying to break her.
No one to guide her back to her feet. She was dragged into a cell, forgotten, and then delivered into the asylum that consumed what little she had left.
Two years she endured there—two fucking years—before The Order claimed her.
The realization tears straight through me, leaving a hollow ache in its wake.
Something opens in my chest, vast and echoing, a void too deep to measure. It pulses like an old wound that never learned how to close, one that cries out into the dark with a voice no one ever answered.
What comes back is nothing at all.
Only silence.
My fingers shift back to her prison file. I scroll through the dense pages, letting the words pull me in as they lay out the fragments of her early life in school, each line painting her behavior in vivid, unforgiving strokes.
Impulsive. Constantly in fights with classmates. Broke a girl’s finger at the desk next to her. Stabbed a boy in the eye with a sharpie.
Aggressive. Uncontrolled. Chaotic.
The words repeat, etched into the file like a scratched record stuck on the same note.
I lean back slightly, another thought crossing my brain.
I’m glad I chose to explore this on my own.
I can almost hear the mental gasp of my team if they ever saw this—their wide eyes, their jaws slack with disbelief.
They’d be disturbed. I, on the other hand, am not.
I’m captivated. Each word strikes like a live wire humming through my veins.
There has to be a reason she moved through the world like this—a reason behind the wreckage and the fury, hidden beneath the calm, razor-edged mask she wears now.
Something buried deep, something that shaped her, forged her, carved her into who she became.
I click on her school records, my gaze sliding over less dramatic, more formulaic information. Repetition of the same descriptors: anger, impulsiveness, need for guidance, lack of control.
I scroll down, close to abandoning the foolish hope that anything good might surface, when something catches my eye.
A note, tucked between the reports, written in the careful hand of a teacher named William Johnes.
My chest pulls tight as I stare at it, a faint constriction settling over my ribs.
I read his words slowly, letting each one settle, each one unravel the narrative carved before it.
He writes about her as if he’s seeing a different child entirely.
Capable. Fascinating. A mind that sharpens itself on languages, literature, history, and the arts.
He claims she could have been the brightest student in her class, a quiet brilliance waiting to ignite—if only she learned to steady herself, if only her emotions could be reined in rather than left to burn unchecked.
I shake my head, just barely, as a thin thread of pride slips through me, subtle and unexpected. All this chaos, all this violence, all this raw, untempered fury—and beneath it lies something sharp and luminous. Brilliance buried under ruin. Genius wrapped in scars.
The more these fragments fall into place, the more the layers of her life peel back in slow, deliberate reveals, the stronger the pull becomes.
I find myself wanting more, needing more, drawn to the contradictions that shaped her, compelled to chase the truth of the woman who rose from all that wreckage.
I switch back to the previous tab, letting my gaze sweep over the teacher’s note once more.
Something tightens in my chest, a strange tension I can’t quite name, stretching thin beneath my ribs.
Before the thought fully forms, my hands are already moving, instinct taking over.
My fingers glide across the keyboard, typing out his full name, his workplace, and his old address.
The keys strike in a steady rhythm, each click a small vibration in the quiet, a mechanical heartbeat pulsing through the room.
Leaning back into the chair, I wait for the database to work its magic. My joints crack as I flex my hands, the dull pain reminding me I’m still flesh and bone. Somewhere in this obsessive spiral, I’ve lost track of time, of hunger, of everything that marks a man human.
A soft chime breaks through, and I straighten in my seat, fully focusing on it. The program spits out a large tab of information, and my eyes land instantly on the red letters under his picture.
Deceased.
For some reason, it doesn’t surprise me.
I study his photo carefully, letting each detail settle in my mind.
His eyes are dark and steady, the kind that miss nothing, framed by faint crow’s feet that hint at years of watching too closely.
His nose is sharp, almost aristocratic in its angles, balanced by black, slightly wavy hair and a full, thick beard that gives his face weight.
My hand drifts unconsciously to my own beard, brushing over the coarse stubble as a faint pang coils in my gut.
Jealousy. That was the feeling I couldn’t name before—the one that had eluded me. The strange familiarity it carries. The way his words about her radiate warmth and fascination, an intimacy that should never exist in a teacher’s report, yet pulses clearly through every line.
Was there something between them? Or am I letting my mind crawl down a wrong, dangerous path?
I scroll through the report, eyes scanning the lines until they catch on another word, bolded in black.
Cause of death: Suicide.
The folder expands, and I click without hesitation. The photos load in slow sequence, each one more disturbing than the last—the limp body of William hanging from a rope, the wooden chair toppled beneath him, faint scuff marks on the floor where he must’ve struggled before giving in.
Why would he kill himself?
My jaw clenches as I lean over the table, shoulders tense, eyes scanning every detail with surgical focus.
Every file, every note, every tenuous thread of connection demands my attention.
I pull them in, piece by piece, needing it all, craving it all.
The curiosity inside me refuses to ebb. It grows, searing through my chest, gnawing at my thoughts.
I open an archived article, one of those old digital clippings buried deep in forgotten corners of the web. The text is brief, impersonal, like the reporter is afraid to touch the story too closely.
He hung himself not long after his daughter drowned in the lake. A single sentence that says everything and nothing at once.
He’d been a single father, doing his best after losing his wife to illness. Trying to build something human out of grief. Trying to live.
But the words slip through me like smoke. The article says the daughter drowned, yet it never mentions how or why. No details. No clarity. Just another tragedy smoothed over with empty phrasing.
It leaves me restless. Something doesn’t fit, like many things in Iris’s past.
Gravemoor unfurls in my mind as I scroll through the few sparse images attached to the file.
A desolate place perched on the northern edge of the world.
Grey skies stretch endlessly, a ceiling of cold that presses down on everything beneath it.
Trees stand skeletal and bare, stripped of life, their branches forever reaching for a spring that never returns.
Snow drifts across the landscape, fleeting yet persistent, never truly gone, leaving the ground a patchwork of white and decay.
The air itself feels heavy, thick with silence, impossible to warm against, as if the land refuses the touch of life.
A truly depressing place to live in.
The drowning happened in spring, the article reports. The river ran free, not frozen, but its waters always cut cold, biting like knives. Who would willingly dive in? Especially a child?
A warning flashes in my skull, screaming Code Red, urging me to stop, to step back before I fall too far into this pit. I ignore it. My hand moves on its own, pencil scratching across a scrap of paper, jotting down names, dates, fragments of a story that refuses to align.
The case is marked solved. Nothing suspicious, nothing between the lines of the polished, official words. A dead wife, a drowned daughter, and then a man who couldn’t bear the weight anymore.
A chain of sorrow stretching across one family like a curse.
I collapse nearly all the tabs on William, leaving only his original file open. His photo lingers on the screen, frozen in a stillness that unsettles me. There’s a strange peace in his face, as if the worst had already come and gone long before the rope ever found his neck.
The file lists a next of kin—a brother, Bennett Johnes. It takes only seconds to pull up his record. The truth flickers through me like a single, sharp beam cutting through thick fog when I see that he’s alive.
Not everyone who touched Estella’s past ended up dead.
Bennett’s profile fills the screen. Professor at the University of London.
His photograph captures a man sculpted by time and intellect—features cleaner, sharper than his brother’s, glasses perched neatly on the bridge of his nose, a faint, controlled smile brushing his lips.
He has traveled far from that frozen, forgotten village that once held him in its grip.
I scribble his address, university, and contact details into my notebook. Then, I close every tab except the one that ignited this spiral, the one that started it all.
The printer hums to life when I press the button, a low, steady roar filling the quiet room as paper slides out, one sheet after another.
While it runs, I open a drawer and pull out a new yellow folder, empty and clean.
On the blank sticker at the top, I take a pen and write her name with slow, deliberate strokes.
The printer keeps spitting out pages of her records, photos, fragments of a life torn apart and reassembled in secrecy.
I gather them all, stacking them neatly before sliding them into the folder.
Then, I plug in a flash drive and transfer every file, every scan, every digital trace, cutting and pasting them all in one place.
No one else will ever see this. This will remain my investigation—mine alone.
As the final file loads, I lean back, my eyes flicking down to the notes beside the keyboard.
Time to go to London.
But first, I need to put my cash to proper use.