5. Giselle
GISELLE
This morning is a thousand miles away from last night, but the feeling lingers.
I don’t dream often, but when I do, they’re always the same.
Hands reaching for me through water. A scream trapped in my throat. Serena, somewhere just out of reach, always walking away. Always barefoot.
And last night… blue eyes in the dark.
Before I can even drop my bag at my desk, a shadow blocks the sun from the windows. It’s Captain Russo, equal parts boss and adoptive father-figure since the day I became a homicide detective.
His tie is already loose, five o’clock shadow clinging to his jaw despite how early it is, and his voice comes at me sideways.
“My office, Cantiano. Now.”
There’s a rhythm to the summons: a demand, a name, and no wasted syllables.
I don’t argue as I follow him through the glass-walled corridor, past the photo array of dead and retired cops and into his office. In true Russo fashion, its walls are plastered in degrees rather than family photos.
The man has lived an efficient life.
He doesn’t sit, but stands behind the desk and gestures for me to close the door. I obey, and he waits until the click.
“Have a seat, G.”
I drop into the battered vinyl chair, posture stiff and at attention as he pulls together a stack of papers.
“Councilman James MacDougal,” he says, finally, and the name lands on the desk like a stone. It’s early, but already I feel a day’s worth of tension and anger flood into my body. Just his name makes me tighten and coil, a painful and unsatisfiable anticipation. My jaw clenches hard enough to cramp.
I nod. “Didn’t show for the gala last night. I know.”
“Well, turns out there’s a reason why.” Russo grunts as he pushes a folder my way. “He’s dead.”
“You serious?” I guess, fighting desperately to keep a grin from spreading across my face.
Fucker probably died in his sleep, or dick-deep in a teenage girl fighting back tears. Both of those options are too good for him.
Russo nods. “Someone made a goddamn mess of him.”
“Where?” My voice is flat, but there’s static in my skull. Or maybe it’s applause. Something flushes down my spine. Something… sweet.
“His penthouse on Billionaire’s Row. Housekeeper found him this morning. Scene is locked down. No forced entry, nothing that would make it an easy case.”
“Why us, Captain?” I shake my head, trying to hide the tendrils of pleasure that are sweeping across my nerves. “Manhattan murders aren’t exactly Bronx jurisdiction.”
He points to the file folder that I’ve yet to open. “See for yourself.”
Slowly, I open the folder. The first photo is what’s left of MacDougal’s face. The skin is gray, the jaw slack. His eyes are open and ringed with bruises, but it’s the throat that draws my focus.
There’s a precise, horizontal slit. And the blood has dried into a black scarf.
I can’t help but remember my own gesture last night outside of the gala.
On the next page, a picture of his corpsesplayed on a mattress, wrists bound, torso scored with a grid of fine puncture wounds. He is naked, and I’m shamefully gratified to see that he’s missing at least one organ—the one usually menacing the world from between his legs.
A single, ecstatic pulse of relief overwhelms me. My head doesn’t hurt, my teeth don’t grind, and my joints relax. For a moment, I feel happy. Genuine, uncomplicated, liberating contentment.
Almost as good as an orgasm.
But my satisfaction is cut short when I see the next page. On MacDougal’s chest, the flesh is flayed back to reveal three little words gouged into the flesh.
Deliberate.
Neat.
TO DETECTIVE CANTIANO .
The blood drains from my face, and I feel the world spinning under my toes. If it isn’t for the scowl on Captain Russo’s face, I might’ve believed that this was just a sick joke.
Some kind of twisted prank.
I think about the cold joy that bloomed in my chest last night when I imagined someone doing something almost exactly like this. Did I wish this into being? Did the universe overhear my craving for violence, and then gift-wrapped it just for me?
I slam the folder shut.
“Manhattan wants us at the crime scene,” Russo says, leaning forward, both palms braced on the desk. “Well, they want you. ”
“I didn’t know the victim, sir,” I say, but it sounds thin. “You know that.”
He studies my face, looking for the lie. “What about the M.O.? Any of your old perps? Think of anything at all, G?”
“No,” I say.
I don’t tell him about the uncanny coincidences. About the massiveman with glacier eyes. About the way his gaze followed me into my dreams.
About the flash of a camera last night outside of my building.
Most importantly, I definitely don’t tell him how much I wanted this, or that it feels like it’s better justice than anything we can dole out. My hand instinctively reaches up and starts twisting Serena’s earring, sharp enough to draw a bead of pain.
Russo sighs, suddenly more tired than angry. “Let’s get going, then. Crime scene isn’t gonna traumatize itself.”
There’s a warmth in his voice that he tries to hide. I recognize it anyway.
I nod. “I’ll drive.”
The elevator is lined with gold leaf, the kind that peels if you scrape it with your thumbnail. It reminds me of scraping the silver off gum wrappers in school and collaging it onto my binders.
Serena taught me that trick.
I stare at a singular gold leaf the whole ride up, thinking about MacDougal, the neat slice in his throat, the way he must have been so sure of his own importance right up to the last second.
Captain Russo stands beside me in silence, hands tucked in the pockets of his raincoat.
The doors open directly into a foyer larger than my entire apartment. Light bounces off every surface—gilded walls, a glass sculpture in the shape of a depressed swan, and marble floors so polished I can see up my own shirt.
It smells like iron and lavender.
Two men are stationed at the double doors ahead. One of them blinks at Russo and steps aside, careful not to touch anything. The other gives me a nod, low and almost apologetic. I resist the urge to punch him lightly on the shoulder and tell him to nut up.
In a few years, he’ll look back and remember this as a good day, an easy shift, all things considered.
The penthouse is a showroom for the worst kind of narcissism. Everything looks staged and unlived in, and from the moment you step inside, you know exactly what it’s used for.
Sex.
Custom velvet couches, a wet bar stocked with $30,000 worth of vodka, and two crystal bowls in the open-floor kitchen. One is filled with condoms, and the other with varying sizes and styles of butt plugs.
In the corner, a professional-grade sex swing dangles from a reinforced beam. Mirrors on every wall and the ceiling, some angled so the only thing you see is yourself, multiplied and refracted until the room feels crowded.
In every reflection, Serena’s earrings glint dully.
Professionalism dictates that I imagine MacDougal in here, naked and sweating. But right now, professionalism is the last thing on my mind. Because the only thing I can imagine is myself .
Not as homicide detective Giselle Cantiano.
But as a nameless murderer with glacier eyes.
If I were you, where would I have stepped? Where would I have waited? Where would I have hidden?
My mind wanders too far, until I’m seeing myself through someone else’s eyes and imagining him standing right where I’m standing right now.
And just like last night in my dreams, all I can see is blue.
Captain Russo and I make our way down to the bedroom past a series of locked doors. There’s the familiar buzz of crime scene chatter. Evidence techs in paper booties, a photographer clicking away, and a small, bespectacled man hovers over the corpse.
The body is exactly like the photos. But no printout can ever prepare you for the full, live-color obscenity.
The mattress, once white, is now mostly red. His skin is mapped with tiny, precise incisions. The only major wound is the one where his dick used to be.
And there it is.
TO DETECTIVE CANTIANO.
The message on his chest is tidier than any tattoo I’ve ever seen. The blood in the letters has dried, turning rust at the edges. And with every second I spend staring at it, I can’t help but feel like someone is watching me.
The forensics specialist, Arata, looks up when Russo and I walk in.
“Vocal cords were severed first.” He jumps right to business, pointing to the throat and the neat, surgical slit. “He was alive for the rest. Forced to watch that .”
He gestures towards the groin. I think, again, of the fate I’d imagined for MacDougal.
My eyes dart around the rest of the grisly scene and settle on the bowl of condoms and the bottle of roofies on the nightstand. Whatever sympathy—not that I felt any—for MacDougal evaporates in an instant.
This is better than I could have ever asked for.
Someone out there heard my wish and delivered it with interest.
A thrill sparks in my fingertips. Suddenly, I want to touch everything: the words, the wounds, the violence.
“Think the killer used those?” Russo points to the bottle of roofies.
Arata shakes his head. “I’ll know more after tox. But based on the abrasions around his wrists, I’m thinking the roofies belonged to the good councilman.”
“Fucking figures,” I whisper under my breath.
I step closer to the bed, and slip on a pair of evidence gloves to avoid contaminating the scene. MacDougal’s face is twisted, not in pain, but in a kind of slack resignation. Whatever mask he used to wear in life, it got stripped away here and replaced by something close to fear.
I turn his face, and it’s like I can almost feel the hands that did this to him.
Those hands must be steady, practiced, and full of purpose. They’re hands that I can trust to do any number of things, violent and otherwise.
Hands that I won’t mind holding my own. Hands that I want wrapped around mine so that they might guide me into replicating their work. Hands that will slowly dance along my body until strong powerful fingers close around my throat and?—
Jesus Christ, Giselle, get it together.
Russo’s lips press into a thin line. “Any prints?”
“Nothing yet,” Arata says. “We found a wipe rag, but it’s new. No DNA, no fibers.”
“Anything on the security systems?” I ask.
“Disabled for two instances last night. Whoever did this was fucking prepared.”
I look back at the message on MacDougal’s skin.
TO DETECTIVE CANTIANO.
Not For .
To .
The best boyfriend I ever had couldn’t even remember my favorite color, never mind give me a gift I actually wanted. He said I was hard to shop for. And maybe he was right. They don’t sell justice at Nordstrom’s.
But someone heard me last night. Someone saw me draw my own thumb across my neck.
And someone remembered.
Hands down, this might be the best present I’ve ever received.
Arata’s name is called from outside the room, and he leaves me and Russo alone with the body. Russo moves to the window, and stares out over Central Park. His voice is quiet and meant for me alone.
“This isn’t random. This is targeted.”
“Obviously,” I say.
“Not the murder, G.” He leans in close so only I can hear as he points at those words meant for me and only me. “ This . If you know something or if this is someone from your past, you let me know now.”
“It’s not,” I say.
But I’m lying, because I have the vaguest of suspicions—nothing but a gut feeling, mind you—that this is the works of a shadow who is hovering close by. The masterpiece of a pair of eyes that seem to watch me everywhere I go.
“Thought you two might be interested in this,” Arata says when he re-enters the room with an envelope in his hands.
I glance at Russo, who’s already pinching the bridge of his nose, resigned to whatever new hell is about to surface.
Arata slides the envelope open and shows me a dozen photos.
I pick up the first. It’s MacDougal, alive and well, leaving a Russian bathhouse in Brighton Beach by the name of Faberge with a young woman on his arm.
I flip through the stack. He’s with a different woman in every picture. Some are in gaudy makeup and diamonds. Others blank-eyed and barely out of school. The timestamps jump around.
The photos span months, but the location stays the same.
But it’s the last photo that stops me cold.
It’s me .
I’m standing at the bottom of my building’s stoop last night, head turned as I look across the block moments before I go inside. The flash. The car. The eyes.
This photo was taken by my blue-eyed shadow.
He killed MacDougal.
But you already knew that, didn’t you, Giselle ?
Russo’s voice is low, taking on the old-school cop cadence he saves for death notifications and personal disasters. “What is it, G?”
I show him the photo. He studies it, and then me.
Silence stretches between us.
“You see what’s happening here, right?”
I nod, but I can’t speak. Something sharp shivers up my spine, radiating electricity to every nerve ending.
“I’ve seen this before. Unhinged psychopath gets a fixation on a young detective. Starts leaving breadcrumbs. Testing boundaries. Nothing good comes of this. Trust me.”
I stare at my own face in the photo, the rigid line of my spine, the blank, angry stare while my hair blurs from my mid-turn.
The framing feels intimate. Deliberate.
Like I’m being touched without permission.
Like I’m being chosen.
I turn it over and my stomach fills with disappointment when I see nothing but white.
“I can pull you off the case,” Russo says. “Kick this back to Manhattan. Let them handle it.”
“No,” I say.
“You sure, Giselle?”
I look at the photo until the details burn into my retinas. In the photo, Serena’s earring is visible, and it practically gleams in the dim light. I wonder if he understands the significance. If he understands my own need for control.
But one thing is for sure.
The words on the body are an invitation. This photo is an RSVP.
Someone is reaching for me from the darkness, and like a madwoman, I’m responding yes, I’ll be there.
Wouldn’t miss it for the world.
“I want to find him,” I say. “Before he decides to escalate.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” His voice softens.
But I don’t listen. Not anymore.
I hand over the photo to be bagged and dusted, even though I know there won’t be any prints.
When Russo and I leave, I’m careful not to look back.
I know what I’ll see. Myself, reflected in a thousand mirrored surfaces, and my name carved into the world.
And lurking in the darkness, a pair of blue eyes staring at me.
Slowly, something quieter stirs in my chest.
Not fear.
Something worse.
Curiosity.