The rain had begun again — soft, thin sheets lacing the windows of the Cybercrime Division — but Isabelle barely noticed the cold pressing against the glass. Her mind drifted in that brittle silence between exhaustion and obsession, retracing the spirals of clues that kept slipping through her fingers.
Since dawn, her world had turned over and over, a kaleidoscope of half-answers: Vivienne's face burned into a church painting, the blood-scrawled message at the masquerade club, the masked whisper haunting her dreams.
But the parcel on her desk, when it arrived, wasn't part of the evidence trail. It hadn't been logged. It hadn't been signed for.
It had simply appeared.
The plain cardboard box was unassuming, save for the weight of its presence — the kind of object that doesn't belong, the kind that turns a room from ordinary to dangerous. No return address. No stamps. Just her name, "Detective Isabelle Laurent," written in black ink across the front in crisp, even handwriting.
Her pulse slowed, her instincts sharpening. She had handled enough evidence to know when something wasn't right. The tape sealing the flaps was clean, machine-cut. No fingerprints, not even the telltale smudges of a casual handler.
Isabelle reached for a scalpel from the evidence drawer, slicing through the tape with surgical precision.
The flaps lifted open.
Inside, cushioned only by crumpled newspaper, was the mask.
White porcelain. Smooth as river stone, delicate in the afternoon light, its expression fixed in a hollow, inhuman smile — the same design worn by the silent figures at the masquerade club.
But this one was different.
Turning the mask in her hands, her stomach tightened. The interior was not the clean ivory shell it should have been.
A dark, reddish-brown smear clung to the inside. Blood. Dried, but unmistakable, its scent faint but iron-strong, even through the sterile air of the office.
For a long moment, all she could do was stare.
It wasn't until her thumb brushed along a rough texture carved into the inside of the mask that she realized the blood was only the beginning.
A name had been scratched into the porcelain. Ragged, uneven, and clearly done in haste.
Lucie.
The letters stared back at her, burning into her brain with merciless clarity.
Her chest grew tight. Lucie. Her friend. Her colleague. The one person who had stood at her side since the beginning of this nightmarish descent. Who had run chemical analysis on Vivienne's scarf, who had sat across from her in the lab, frowning over soil samples and fiber matches.
Her phone was in her hand before she even realized it.
She dialed Lucie's number, holding the device so tightly her knuckles went pale.
One ring.
Two.
Three.
Voicemail.
The recorded sound of Lucie's voice, bright and careless, was like the ghost of a person already fading. Isabelle hung up and tried again.
No answer.
"Damn it," she muttered under her breath, grabbing her coat. The mask, bloodstained and haunting, she slid carefully into an evidence bag. She couldn't think. Only move.
Chief Moretti's office was as dark as the day's news. He stood behind his desk when Isabelle entered, the weight of too many unsolved cases painting new lines on his face.
He took one look at the evidence bag in her hand, and the easy authority that usually framed his posture vanished.
"What's this?"
Isabelle placed it on the desk, unzipping the bag just enough for the mask to stare back.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Moretti's voice, rough and grim, cut the air: "Is that blood?"
"Dried, but yes," Isabelle replied, barely managing to steady her voice.
"And the name?" His gaze drifted toward the jagged carving on the inside.
"Lucie."
A silence thicker than the rain hung between them.
Moretti picked up his desk phone, barking orders to dispatch. Units were sent racing to Lucie's address. Isabelle was already halfway out the door before the chief could finish his sentence.
Lucie's apartment was still, almost eerily so. The lock on the door wasn't broken, no forced entry. The windows were shut tight, the lights dimmed — the kind of quiet that didn't feel lived-in, but staged.
A coffee cup rested on the kitchen counter, half-drunk, steam long gone. Her laptop was open, a data sheet frozen on the screen, as if she'd only stepped away for a moment.
But there was no sign of Lucie.
No notes. No phone. No keys.
And no Lucie.
Isabelle walked through the small apartment, every nerve in her body on edge. The bathroom light was still on, the mirror fogged over as if someone had recently stepped from the shower — but no towels disturbed, no water on the floor.
In the bedroom, the sheets were missing. The mattress bare, a single, ominous dark stain seeping into the fabric at its center.
Taped to the headboard, a single note, handwritten in the same looping script as the story entries online:
"The mask fits only the willing."
Isabelle stepped back, her hands curling into fists. The same script. The same psychological game. The killer was escalating.
When she returned to the precinct, night was beginning to creep in. Rain lashed against the windows, the cold bleeding through her clothes. She sat at her desk, staring at the mask in the evidence bag.
Everything in her told her it wasn't over.
And the next move came just minutes later.
Her phone vibrated. An unknown number. One attachment.
A photograph.
Lucie, seated inside the confessional booth at Église Saint-Roch. Her hands folded neatly in her lap. A porcelain mask covering her face. Her posture was calm, as if awaiting the start of Mass.
But in the reflection of the confessional's dark wood paneling, just faint enough to notice — a figure stood behind her.
Watching.
And written at the bottom of the photograph, another message:
"Your witness has joined the congregation."
Isabelle's breath caught. The blood ran cold in her veins.
The game had shifted.
Lucie was gone.
And the clock was ticking.
To be continued...