Chapter 25 – The Scent of Wet Paper

The rain began before dawn, soft at first—like whispers seeping through the cracks in Hiroshi’s consciousness. By the time the sun had crawled above the skyline, the world was soaked, gray, and trembling.

He didn’t use an umbrella.

His coat clung to his shoulders, water dripping from the ends of his sleeves like blood.

Each step down the narrow alley sent ripples through puddles, through memory.

"This place…" he muttered, pausing near an old bookstore boarded shut. His breath steamed in the cold. "This place used to smell like poetry... and broken promises."

He chuckled, low and hollow, tapping a finger against his temple.

"Now it smells like you, doesn’t it?"

No response.

But he felt her. Again.

The girl with one eye missing. The one from last year. He never learned her name—didn’t need to. She’d sung to him while bleeding out, her voice like cracked glass.

He still heard it sometimes.

And today, he welcomed it.

Inside the Investigation Room

Emiko sat hunched over a new file, her eyes darting from line to line. A new victim. Similar method. Clean, elegant, cold.

She clenched her jaw.

“Same precision. Same tempo. But…”

She pulled out the old case notes Hiroshi had once handed her, scribbled in almost manic detail, diagrams and psychological sketches. There was something… off. Something new in the killer’s pattern, as if the artist had switched mediums halfway through the canvas.

A red thread connected three victims. Three names circled in ink: one of them crossed out in heavy black strokes. Why?

Nakamura entered without knocking.

"You're still chasing his shadow, I see."

Emiko looked up. “No… I think I’m chasing him.”

Back to Hiroshi

The bookstore had a back door. He pried it open with the key he hadn’t used in six years. Inside, the smell of wet paper hit him like an old lullaby.

He wandered the aisles like a ghost haunting himself.

The voices began again.

"You remember this one?” a voice whispered from the ceiling. “You left a message in it.”

He turned his head slowly. A children’s book lay on the floor, open. Page 37. A red ink line under a sentence:

“Monsters don’t hide under your bed. They sit beside you in class.”

He smiled.

“Poetic.”

Then, he sat on the floor and began to talk to the shadows.

“They think they’re catching up to me. That I’m spiraling. Falling.”

He tilted his head at an unnatural angle.

“But falling is just flying... in the wrong direction.”

His laugh echoed between the shelves.

He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper. The next blueprint. The next kill.

Or was it?

“Maybe I’ll kill no one this time. Maybe I’ll fake a murder, fool the world, and leave them all wondering if I ever existed.”

A whisper in his ear: “Do you even exist?”

He didn’t answer.

Elsewhere

Emiko stared at a photo of Hiroshi from before his promotion. Before the murders. Before the madness.

His eyes had changed.

Now, they looked like mirrors turned inward.

And behind her, the news played a new report. Another disappearance. No body. Just the scent of wet paper… and a children’s book open to page 37.