Ravenelle, a statue carved from obsidian, eyes flashing like striking flint. “Detective Morris,” she purrs, venom dripping from each syllable. “Or should I say…Breckenridge?”

Breckenridge’s smile is a slash of cruelty, the revolver steady as a hangman’s noose. “Clever girl,” he croons. “Too clever by half.”

“One does try,” Ravenelle sighs, a martyr to her own brilliance. She shifts, a whisper of silk, placing Derek and his hidden heat just beyond Breckenridge’s sight. “But why the grim theatrics with dear, departed Sinclair?”

Breckenridge’s laugh is a hyena’s cackle, mad & manic. “To lure you out, my deadly darling! You’ve tangled your strings in my web once too often. Did you think I wouldn’t come collecting on that debt?”

Zealotry sparks in his gaze, a wildfire consuming reason. Derek lunges for his gun, but Breckenridge is faster, a viper’s strike. The bullet bites deep, and Derek drops like a stone.

“Derek!” Ravenelle screams, an animal howl. But even as her heart bleeds, her mind whirs, cold & calculating. In the space between heartbeats, her pistol is leveled at Breckenridge’s head, a third eye promising oblivion.

“Enough, Breckenridge,” she snarls, a saint of death & vengeance.

The standoff stretches, taut as a garrote, neither daring to twitch. Ravenelle’s brain blazes, synapses firing, options weighed & discarded in nanoseconds. Breckenridge is too far gone, madness metastasized in his marrow. This was always the inevitable end, written in blood & cordite.

“What now, Ravenelle?” Breckenridge jeers, triumphant as Derek bleeds out on Italian marble. “Shall we dance this danse macabre ’til kingdom come?”

“The dance is done,” Ravenelle hisses, a promise & a prayer. She dives, a swallow on the wing, just as Breckenridge’s gun belches thunder.

Rising like a phoenix, Ravenelle puts two in his knees, shattering bone & hubris alike. As he crumples, screaming, she glides over, an angel of annihilation, and ends it with one between the eyes. Requiescat in pace.

She’s at Derek’s side in a blink, cataloging the crimson ruin of his shoulder. “A regular red badge of courage,” she quips, but her eyes betray the tempest within as she hauls him upright.

Leaning on each other, wounded wolves licking their wounds, they stagger to the elevator. As the doors sigh shut, Ravenelle punches in a code, and they descend into the bowels of the beast, to the hidden underbelly marked “U1”.

The doors part on a grotesque of pipes & wires, a subterranean snake pit. Ravenelle half-carries Derek down the dank hall to a grey slab of a door marked “Maintenance”. She knocks a devil’s ditty: tap-tap…TAP…tap-tap-tap.

It swings wide, and faceless drones usher them into a secret sanctum, all gleaming steel & sterile light. Derek sags onto the table, life leaking between his fingers, as Ravenelle rounds on the drones.

“Breckenridge is no more. Purge the penthouse. Leave no trace.”

They nod, scurrying off to erase another sin from existence. Ravenelle clasps Derek’s hand as the nurse threads a needle through his flesh, stitching him back together.

“Sleep, my sweet. By morning’s light, Breckenridge will be but a nightmare, banished by the dawn.”

Another skeleton for the closet, another monster vanquished. Just one more secret to keep Ravenelle warm through the cold, lonely nights.

For in this city of shadows, the Raven reigns supreme, and woe betide any foolish enough to forget it.

The fever dream fragments, fractures, fades.

Reality rushes back in, cold & cruel & clean.

And Ravenelle is ready, a dark queen for a darker realm.

Long may she reign…

Not. The. End.