Chapter 115
Damien
Play - Lovers in Another Life by Matthiew Perryman Jones
A soul for love
Mireya’s legs are on my lap and her eyes are completely absorbed by whatever is written on this file. She’s been studying it for days, over and over again, overworking herself to find anything that would help.
Her determination to find the killer worries me somehow.
So does my own reaction to it. Somewhere along the way, without ever making a conscious decision, I let the case become secondary to her.
For months, I have put her first in my mind.
Her safety, her state of mind, whether she has eaten or slept, if she’s pushing herself too far.
She keeps trying to tell me that she’s okay, that we should focus on the case because it’s my own mission, and I nod.
But every time Kyle calls, asking if I have any update, a name, evidence, even some progress, I give them the same answer: My student and I are working on it.
She has become determined to find him, no matter what it costs her.
And I know she thinks I don’t see what it actually does to her.
I do. Sometimes I go to her dorm, and find her surrounded by new files, searching through them left and right as though the answer might be hiding somewhere between the pages.
Her eyes are wide, her pupils blown, her hands restless.
She’ll look at me and tell me that she’s just tired and needs to keep going.
I let her say it. But I know what I’m looking at. I know how much it takes for her to keep investigating while fighting her own demons.
Because the moment she learned it was him, since she connected him to her mother, it stopped being grief and turned into unhealthy focus. Even her drawings follow it now.
Last night I found her on the rooftop of the beach house. She had her sketchbook open, legs folded under her like she wasn’t balancing on the edge of anything at all.
Blue was asleep beside her.
On the page was a lily, an eye at its center, and a shadow trying to push its way out from inside it, like it had been trapped there too long to stay still.
I remember not speaking for a while, I kept watching her and even sat with her until she came back from whatever hell she was hiding in.
There are patterns I recognize in people before they admit them to themselves.
Fixation starts as grief when it stops behaving like grief. And with her, it always feels one step away from turning into self-destruction.
Sometimes I feel like I’m losing her every time she smiles. I don’t know how to tell her that without becoming another thing she tries to survive, so I stay silent and help her instead.
These thoughts kept circling as I watched her face tonight, lit by the green glow of the outdated terminal we’d been forced to use in the library.
The digital archives were incomplete, but she was focused on it anyway, scrolling, searching for anything. At this point we’re sure that the killer is linked to St. Ellesta and Porter. But it feels like he’s been erased, like his entire identity is blurry.
Mireya doesn’t care. The rage in her eyes is so different from her usual rage.
“Still empty?” she asks without looking away from the screen.
“Still empty,” I say, closing the file I have in hand.
The system has given us nothing useful. No donor list, no clean trail of funding, nothing that makes sense for a school with this many protections around it. Which means the information was being withheld.
She exhales slowly, then says, “Tell me exactly what the headmaster said to you.”
That pulls my attention fully to her. “He didn’t say much,” I tell her. “Just that his donors are private, protected, and above scrutiny apparently.”
Her jaw tightens slightly at that, like she expected something like it and still didn’t like the confirmation. “Above scrutiny,” she repeats. “That’s not an explanation.”
She shifts slightly on my lap without thinking about it, grounding herself there the way she always does when her thoughts start moving faster than anything around her.
“What if it’s not about the donations at all?” she says.
I don’t answer right away. I watch her closely now, the way her mind is running too many questions all at once.
Mireya Vitelli is one of the smartest people I’ve met and she doesn’t even realize it.
There is something disarming about how easily she disappears into her own mind.
“What if he’s protecting something else entirely? ” she adds.
“Like what?”
Her eyes finally lifts to mine. “What if he owes the killer something?”
“The only thing the headmaster cares about,” I say slowly, “is his role here.”
Something brightens in her expression at that. “Oh,” she says. “That could be it. If he owes the killer something significant enough, it wouldn’t be financial. It would be structural, mostly tied to position and authority.”
Her fingers tap lightly against my leg as she speaks, absent-minded. “Maybe he didn’t just get this job,” she continues. “Maybe someone helped him with it. And that’s why he keeps protecting them. Because whatever this is, it started before the murders.”
“So you think they knew each other before all of this?” I ask.
“Or long enough for leverage to exist,” she says immediately.
I reach for my phone, because I know who can help with this. “I’m calling the team.”
The call connects after a few rings, speakerphone filling the quiet space with the tired sound of someone in Virginia who definitely hasn’t been awake long enough for this.
“Please tell me this is not about the case,” Kyle says. “Because if it is, I’m quitting.”
“You better wake up and get ready, we have a theory,” I say, shaking my head
“Wait… are you with your student?”
I don’t answer, but Mireya does. “Hi,” she says casually.
That earns me a slow laugh on the other end. “Oh, I get it. This is the woman who’s been keeping you from fully going emotionally unavailable.”
“I’m gonna end this call,” I reply as I’m met with a smile from her.
“Alright, alright,” he says, still amused. “What do you need?”
“I need the exact date the headmaster Spencer Porter started at St. Ellesta”
“Why?”
“Because it lines up with the earliest gap in the killer’s activity pattern,” I say. “If he was present before the first confirmed murder, we may be dealing with overlap or influence, something like internal protection.”
I hear him type on the other side of the screen. After a few minutes of him cursing his laptop down, he speaks again. “I’ve got it. He started a year after the first known case to work there, but became headmaster after ten years.”
Beside me, I feel her shift before she speaks. “That’s too close,” she murmurs.
Kyle continues, “There’s more. I’m seeing fragmented archival references to student records from around that era. Specifically a graduation cohort from 1972. The scans are incomplete, but the class book exists.”
I already know where this is going before she says it. “How old is the headmaster?” she asks quietly.
“Fifty-eight.”
“So he would’ve been twenty when he graduated,” she replies.
“Correct,” Kyle confirms. “Which places him directly in that cohort.”
She leans forward slightly, closer to the screen now. “If the killer is tied to him, then he could be one of the people in those photos.”
There was a beat of silence on the line.
“You are not paid enough for this, Miss Vitelli,” Kyle says finally.
I smile at her as she chuckles. She looks exhausted from it all, but she keeps working and working, like she’s avoiding moments of peace. Maybe that’s when the thoughts creep out in her head. She hasn’t stopped, not once since we sat down, nor since the case started tightening around her.
I should’ve been focusing on the case. Instead I was counting the seconds between her breaths to make sure she wasn’t slipping away from my fingers again.
Her fingers tighten against my leg, subtle enough that she probably didn’t notice. But I did. And I don’t know which part of that bothered me more. How tired she is from this, or how I was the one pulling her into this.
Sometimes I regret the way I included her in my own vendetta.
I lean forward and kiss her before I can overthink any of it. “I love when you do that,” I say softly.
“What?” she asks, smiling against my lips.
“Show me how smart you are, like that.”
Kyle is still talking on the line, but I reach for the phone without looking at it.
“Stay on, man you can kiss her later,” he says laughing.
“I am,” I rasp, against her lips before pulling away.
“Pull everything you can from that year,” I tell him.
“Yearbook, class photos, any surviving records. I want names, affiliations, post-graduation placements, anything, especially anyone who stayed within the system or the region where the first murder occurred out of Seraphin Bay.”
“On it boss,” he replies. “But you owe me days off after this.”
“Okay, send me everything, tell the team it’s your priority,” I say one last time before hanging up.
I set the phone down, losing myself in her presence once more. She is still looking at the screen, her lips plushier from how hard I kissed her, but I could see the dip in her focus now that the immediate structure of the conversation had stopped.
That quiet drop that came when there was no task left to hold onto. So, I reach for her hand on my leg, and she holds it immediately.
“We have a fundraiser next week,” I start. “I’ll use that to steal Ms Green’s access card to get into the physical archives in her office. If I can get into the original files from that year, then we can cross-reference everything properly.”
She tilts her head slightly. “Can I help?”
“No.”
Her gaze sharpens and I soften it, leaning in and brushing a kiss against her again, slower this time, like a pause I need more than she does from this whole mess.
“You’re graduating from St. Ellesta soon,” I whisper quietly. “I’m not risking what you’ve worked for.”
She holds my gaze for a moment, then nods. “But you’ll keep me in the loop.”
“Always.”
A pause settles between us again, before she leans in, her arms wrapping around my neck. “You’re my partner in crime, Damien Caldwell.”
That pulls a faint smile I don’t bother hiding. “Good,” I say. “Because you’re better at this than you think.”
I kiss her again before she can argue or doubt herself. And for a few seconds, everything else disappears. “You make me proud, never forget that,” I whisper as she looks at me.
Her empty eyes have returned, but they quickly shift into guilt, and for some reason, that gaze terrifies me.
“And you, you make me feel okay,” she whispers back.
At that moment, something cleared in my very being, Mireya Vitelli has now total control over every pulse of my heart and every cell in my body.
From the moment I saw her on that rooftop almost a year ago, crying silently and hiding her pain from her own self.
I knew that she would ruin me and still, I dived blindly into it.