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The door flew open, and Ayatsuji paused.
It was a split second of hesitation, too quick for most people to catch onto, and certainly unnoticed by the boy dangling from his ceiling and the woman who had charged into his office. But for him, it was a millisecond that could’ve stretched across an entire afternoon. He swallowed against his drying throat.
It shouldn’t be possible. The chances were so microscopically small they may as well have been zero. And yet somehow, against the odds, standing there by the entrance…
“W-What do you think you’re doing?”
Her voice trembled as she spoke. Taken aback by the scene in front of her, she’d pushed aside whatever it was she’d been psyching herself up to say to him—probably nonsense he was better off without. Her hand rubbed at her head where it had smacked against the doorframe.
What, indeed. Because for the first time in his life, Ayatsuji could see the other end of his soulmate string, rather than having it disappear through the office wall in some random direction. It was knotted around a pinky finger that was attached to the body of a person who was looking at him like he was certifiably insane.
“I’m in the middle of something,” he said, as coolly as he could, before tuning her out. It was true, he was preoccupied with this intruder situation of his. Too busy to process a new onslaught of information. And if he tossed an extra log into the fire beneath the Tanizaki boy’s head just to give his hands something to do other than cut crescents into his palms, that was nobody’s business.
From the added pine wood bloomed fresh florets of smoke, and he stood back to watch them gather. He didn’t even flinch as the oxygen was driven out of his lungs, but the woman standing in his doorway broke into a fit of coughs. Not much of a smoker, then. Setting his jaw, he grabbed another lump of charcoal and rolled it between his fingers.
If this was orchestrated, the Special Division had outdone themselves. Bringing soulmates into this mess was a particularly sinister attempt at manipulation, even for them. But they’d have to try harder than that. Did they think they could just toss the other end of Ayatsuji’s string at him, and he’d begin to eat straight out of their hand? They already kept him locked away in their princess tower. This level of micromanagement seemed excessive.
Besides, he’d never agreed to sign any contract binding him to another human being, just as he’d never agreed to have his troublesome ability. He’d never even agreed to be born. Why was it, that the rules of his life were always being written for him? That he’d been given a brain clever enough to deduce anything, but was still powerless to change his fate?
He could sense a worried gaze on him, darting between the charcoal he’d picked up and the boy he was interrogating. He sighed heavily.
There had to be a sound and logical way to address this turn of events, and he, of all people, should be the fastest to figure it out. But every mental corner he turned led him to a brick wall. Where thousands of solutions should be forming in his mind, each train of thought whittled away to nothing, dissipating before he could latch onto any of them.
Helpless, was how he felt. It was an unnerving feeling that wasn’t as foreign as he’d like it to be. He found his only comfort in the confirmation that his suspicions from the start had been right—the matching system was flawed to its core. Someone well suited to him would never be a part of an organization like the Special Division, his captors who kept him in limbo.
Not that she was even reacting as she should. He’d anticipated more… repulsion, from a person discovering they were betrothed to a prisoner. In fact, the agent—Tsujimura Mizuki, as he’d been informed, and that woman’s daughter—didn’t appear to be aware of the string at all. He weighed up the chances of her being a good actress, but her confused babbling from across the room led him to quickly toss that idea out.
He dropped the lump of charcoal he was holding into the flames. Tanizaki made a muffled noise of protest.
So, on top of his soulmate being a Division agent, she was an utter fool. Ayatsuji closed his eyes, trying to trick himself into believing that when he opened them again, both the unwanted guests in his office would have vanished.
"You better start taking me seriously!"
Good grief. Instead of being teleported out of the room, Tsujimura was mustering up some courage to argue with him—or perhaps, it was more like a child’s petulance. But he relented, letting her lay into his captive for a few minutes, even if it was merely to give himself space to think. He was itching to retreat downstairs into the basement, but the thought of either of them following him to where he kept his dolls wasn’t one he could stomach.
Tsujimura didn’t reach any new conclusions through her questioning that Ayatsuji hadn’t reached three days ago. He wasn't surprised.
There was no two ways about it. He had to rid himself of his newly-assigned pest, ideally before the day was over. It was the only escape route, the only solution that the hazy arrows in his mind pointed towards. The Division would lose their trump card, and he could maintain the shaky foundations he’d built for himself in the hell that he lived in. Tsujimura would be gone, and he could stop glancing at her out of the corner of his eye.
By the end of that day, he’d learned that he was very, very weak. Pathetic, embarrassing and unable to keep to his own word. He listened to Tsujimura swear to protect him, and couldn’t determine if the shame gnawing at his gut lessened or grew stronger.
The transition from hell to purgatory was slow.
Like most of the immutable, infallible concepts he encountered, Ayatsuji continued to despise the red string. It was another variable among the heap of circumstances he couldn’t control, that resulted in him being forcibly steered in some direction or another. If he could cut it with scissors, it would’ve been gone from his finger years ago. If it could be burned away, he would have thrust his hand into the fire as soon as Tsujimura stepped foot in his office.
But whether it was a true curse bestowed upon him or simply an unfortunate coincidence, his resolve was weakening. He wasn’t immature enough to hold a grudge against the entire universe. It may be cold and unfeeling, but it couldn’t be malicious. Not like the people that lived in it.
The rumbling of the Aston Martin vibrated through his arm where he had it rested against the window. They were on their way to a crime scene, but he didn’t bother himself with the specifics. Or, it would be more accurate to say he’d solved the mystery before seeing it in person. He hadn’t told anyone, deciding to let Tsujimura drag him to the house where the murder had taken place anyway. It was fun to make her and the Division panic, and he took any chance he was given to leave the office through the front door.
One look at the rearview mirror showed Tsujimura’s face at its most intense, her lips pursing as they did whenever she was behind the wheel. She loved to drive, but she always took it too seriously, frowning like they were in a high-speed chase rather than cruising through a suburban neighborhood.
Her hand was white-knuckled around the gear stick. The string was there—not that it ever wasn’t, but every time he spotted it felt like the first. It had never stopped being strange to see it slack with their close proximity rather than pulled taut as it had been for years, connecting him to another soul miles away.
Was he grateful for that change?
There were worse people to be tied to, he supposed. Thanks to the months they’d spent in each other’s company, he’d learned that Tsujimura wasn’t hard to handle, and he didn’t have to waste a lot of energy trying to figure her out. She was a light sentence, from an objective standpoint.
If he had to rank his options, she’d be…
On the stereo, some corny pop song was playing, and she was mumbling the lyrics to herself as she drove. Months ago, he would’ve told her to cut it out before his ears bled all over her precious leather car seats. Now, he couldn't bring himself to form the words. Did that mean she was high on the list?
Well, whatever. There was no point in reflecting on what he could do nothing about.
Before long, the car pulled up to the house. He huffed at all the police tape and the agents standing around in tacky shades and earpieces. Studying the building, the broken guttering and the scratches on the door’s lock made it abundantly clear that this was the work of an amateur as he’d predicted, and nothing to do with anyone more sinister.
“Done,” he said. “We can go.”
Tsujimura spluttered. “We just got here! We haven’t even gotten out of the car!”
“I don’t understand how you aren’t used to this by now. You’ve been working with me for long enough, haven’t you? I’ve solved the case.”
“At least tell that to the inspector on the scene!” she exclaimed, narrowing her eyes at him when he went to refuse. “Or you can walk home.”
She stared him down with false confidence, daring him to call her out on her bluff, as if the uncertainty wasn’t leaking from every contour of her face. Ayatsuji knew she had no real power to make him walk—not without ordering the movement of a large surveillance team, anyway. But there was a thin line between an entertainingly frustrated Tsujimura and a genuinely unhappy one, and he was teetering on the edge of it.
Maybe it was that deplorable red thread that made him uncomfortable with truly upsetting her. He held back a shiver of disgust.
“Fine,” he grumbled, and threw open the car door.
He checked over his shoulder, and Tsujimura was folding her arms, inclining her head in the direction of the police officers. He gave her a dirty look, and then directed his irritation towards the line of thread drawn between the two of them, connecting him to her balled fist like she had him on a leash.
The phrase ‘Special Division’s dog’ echoed through his mind. How distasteful.
It was due to this reminder of his limited freedoms that the explanation he gave the investigators was so curt and unfriendly, and they struggled to follow it, bumbling idiots as they were. He didn’t let them get a single question in before turning on his heel and walking away. While Tsujimura wasn’t impressed by his bad attitude, she was kind enough to spare him the lecture when he got back into the car.
“I’m not expected to report back for five more hours,” she groaned as she checked her watch. “I thought you’d be difficult, but in the time-consuming way.”
He shrugged, not really caring about her schedule. “Then go somewhere else.”
A perplexed crease formed in her brow. “What? I can’t just let you roam free, the Division will have my head.”
“Aren’t you a responsible handler,” he said dryly. “It would hardly be roaming free, since you’ll be there. My ball and chain, with legal permission to shoot me dead should I act against you. Unless you’d rather sit in my office with nothing to do for five long, excruciating hours?”
“We could do your reports,” she opposed.
He let his head fall back against the car seat headrest with a muffled thump. “Dull.”
Tsujimura took a moment to chew at her lip in contemplation, and he knew he’d won. Because if there was anything she was terrible at, it was sitting still without an output for the endless supply of energy that boiled under her skin.
He counted down the seconds until her inevitable backpedal. Three... two... one...
“Alright,” she caved with a grimace. “But only for a little while, and then we’re going back. Promise me you won't go on a rampage?”
"Are you an idiot? Drive already."
She pouted, but stuck the key into the ignition. Ayatsuji smirked into the palm of his hand. She must have picked up on it, because she reached into the backseat and swatted his arm.
Desperate to maintain some amount of control over the situation, Tsujimura made it clear that she would be the one to decide where they headed. Ayatsuji scoffed, already piecing together the kind of ridiculous ideas that were buzzing around her skull.
It was an arcade she settled on. He didn’t believe she could’ve picked a worse option, and made sure she was very aware of it. But he followed her inside regardless, feeling a trickle of amusement at the irony of it all.
Him, in an establishment kept alive by the bad luck of its customers. He’d make them a fortune if he had a little less self-respect.
Which he did have, though the belief was wobbly at its edges. At least enough to not lay a hand on a single one of the machines.
Tsujimura, to nobody’s surprise, was incredibly proficient at the first-person shooter games, and acquired the vast majority of her tickets through shooting pixelated zombies. He failed to understand the appeal of it, nor how everyone else who’d played before was unskilled enough to let someone like Tsujimura top the leaderboard. But apparently success bored her, because it didn't take long for her to abandon what she was good at and float away to the center of the room, developing a fixation on the rigged coin pushers.
He enjoyed a delightful thirty minutes of making fun of her failure before her chronic losing streak began to grate on him, and he pointed her towards a machine she actually had any chance at beating.
There was a keychain set she'd been eyeing since they'd arrived, and she couldn’t be pulled away until one lying on the bottom shelf was pushed off of the edge. She knelt down to grab it with an excited gasp. Her hand dug around in the compartment for so long that Ayatsuji began to wonder whether she was dumb enough to get herself stuck.
“There’s something else in here,” she explained as she pulled out her prize. The miniature golden gun she’d been fawning over had its barrel caught in the clasp of a second keychain, a figurine of an obscure anime character.
She smiled at it for a second, before tugging them apart and shoving the spare straight into Ayatsuji’s hands. He raised an eyebrow.
“That’s your sort of thing, right? I mean, it’s… it’s got a pretty dress.” She laughed awkwardly. “I think you can take the limbs off.”
It was almost entertaining, how clueless she was. “You really don’t know anything about dolls, do you?”
She puffed out her cheeks, opening her mouth to protest, when a call of her name made her jump almost a foot into the air.
“Oi, Tsujimura, is that you?”
They both turned. There was a woman staring at the two of them in surprise. She had reddish-brown hair parted into two low ponytails, and Ayatsuji placed her as one of Sakaguchi’s goons.
Tsujimura went as white as a sheet. Ayatsuji expected her to devolve into one of her usual indecipherable rambles to justify them being here, but she didn’t. She directed her most pleading eyes at him, as if hoping he would own up to his manipulation scheme that had brought them to an arcade full of innocent civilian lives.
He didn't, obviously. Tsujimura didn't look rattled by the betrayal, as she wasn’t slow enough to not notice how implicated she was, especially with the tiny keychain dangling from her thumb. She shifted on her feet, her expression hardening with determination, before she grabbed Ayatsuji by the arm and bolted.
Even through his jacket, the contact sent sparks searing through the crook of his elbow. How careless he’d been, forgetting about his little problem. He ground his teeth so roughly that it hurt.
She pulled him towards the door, and in the rush he dropped the strip of tickets he’d been unfolding and refolding to amuse himself. His other hand kept an unyielding grip on the keychain he’d been given. He wanted to relax his fingers, to discard it like the junk that it was, but against his wishes, his body refused to make the same mistake twice.
The parking lot was attached to the back of the building, so the distance between them and the Aston Martin couldn’t be far, but with Tsujimura clutching his bicep it felt like they ran for miles. There was sure to be some unavoidable consequence of their escapade today—Ayatsuji could already hear Sakaguchi spelling out every new restriction that would be imposed upon his house arrest. This was Tsujimura’s first major slipup, so there was a chance it would be forgiven on her end. It had been the result of his instigation, anyway, so as long as he made Sakaguchi aware of that fact beforehand—
Wait, what the hell was he doing, sticking his neck out for her? He wasn’t in a position to accept punishment on somebody else’s behalf.
But his unease was washed over by waves of resignation. It didn’t sit right with him for to be fired over something so minor. She still hadn’t learned the truth about her mother, or whatever reason it was that she had yet to request a transfer away from him. More time was the least he could grant her. He knew the value of it—his own time could run out any day now, after all.
Yes, that was what it came down to—the respective values of their lives. It was a simple trolley problem scenario, prioritizing the future of a skilled agent rather than a dangerous killer. There was nothing sentimental about it. If either of them deserved the extra lashings, it was him.
And through the drumming of their footsteps against the pavement he could make out Tsujimura’s laughter, breathy and laden with adrenaline, so he couldn’t find it in himself to be too disheartened about a few extra snipers on his rooftop.
“You’re always staring at my hands,” Tsujimura said one morning, as she straightened out a stack of papers against the desk. There was an airy tone to her words, but she couldn’t hide the gelatinous insecurity that stuck to them. “Is there something wrong?”
He’d been looking at the thread again, he realized, and ripped his eyes away, stupidly hoping that could undo him being caught in the act.
“No,” he blurted, before it dawned on him that he’d have to come up with a far more convincing response. “You have a scar.”
It wasn’t a lie. At the base of her wrist, there was a silvery-pink smudge.
“Ah.” She poked at it sheepishly. “I caught it on the stove. Does it look that bad?”
It didn’t. He hadn’t even been looking at it in the first place. “Someone in your line of work shouldn’t care so much about appearances. Do you think those movie spies you’re obsessed with would be bothered by a tiny scar?”
He flipped a page of his book as he spoke, but he hadn’t been taking in any of the contents. Not that it mattered, since he’d already read this particular work several times.
When he dared to glance up from it, Tsujimura’s face was in that frustrated arrangement he was ever so fond of. Her anger was far enough removed from being intimidating that it was almost cute, though he would rather the Division operatives open fire on him than admit that out loud.
She marched over, slamming her palms on the desk in front of him. He nonchalantly moved a hand to steady his coffee, risking one final peek at the red thread being crushed against the wood.
“There!” she shouted, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “You looked at my hand again, and it wasn’t the one with the scar!”
There was no doubt radiating from her this time—no space to fill with another lie. He wanted to fiddle with his kiseru pipe, but it was in his jacket pocket on the other side of the office. His forefinger and thumb closed around thin air.
Perhaps it was being backed into a corner that made him so bold. Maybe it was a dormant need to indulge himself. Maybe it was neither, and he was fuelled by the simple desire to see her at a loss.
He leaned into her space, schooling his expression into dead seriousness. “What do you want me to say? That I was estimating your ring size?”
Tsujimura’s mouth shut with an audible clack. Ayatsuji leaned back again, taking a sip of his coffee. He watched intently as her face filled with color, her long eyelashes fluttering.
“Are you— was that a—” she stammered. “W-Were you?”
He snorted. “Of course not.”
Immediately, she clenched her fists in outrage, shaking her head as if to physically fling off the embarrassment. Her mouth opened again like she wanted to counter with an insult, but she came up empty, and instead stormed back over to her chair, falling into it with an affronted sound.
His hand had a slight tremor where it hovered above the handle of his mug. Odd, since he’d barely touched his coffee.
The criminal lunged at Ayatsuji, and his eyes widened.
It wasn’t unusual for this sort of thing to happen, but today he’d been betting on flight rather than fight when taunting the suspect. Miscalculation or not, he was caged between two walls with nowhere to dodge. It seemed he’d just have to nurse a fractured jaw for a while.
He inhaled sharply, bracing himself for the incoming hit, and there was a loud crunch. No explosion of pain accompanied it, meaning it hadn’t been his bones that had cracked. He blinked.
Tsujimura was there, one leg raised in a kick where the criminal’s head had been, her hair falling loose and wild around her shoulders.
When he met her gaze, she beamed. “Aren’t you glad you have me around? I don’t know if I could stand listening to you complain about a black eye for the next two weeks.”
She must have been possessed with superhuman speed, to make it over to him in such a short length of time. Her intervention hadn’t been a possibility he’d considered. He must be losing his edge.
There was something else. He stared at her and somewhere, deep in the pit of his stomach, curling and writhing was the urge to break the promise he’d made to himself. An urge to cut himself open and show his insides, a slice of vulnerability, to tell her about the connection they shared that she couldn’t see.
Concerned, she waved a hand in front of his face. The thread danced with the motion. “That guy didn’t actually hit you, did he?”
He cleared his throat. “…No. Good work.”
Always a sucker for praise, she went pink to the tips of her ears. He grabbed the pleased twinge in his chest and strangled it until it stopped moving.
Tsujimura squatted down, taking hold of the criminal by the ankles to drag his unconscious, soon to be dead body out to the rest of the team. She made it three steps before her name rose out of Ayatsuji like bile.
“Tsujimura—”
He cut himself off. She halted in her tracks. Her hair was still untied, flowing in rivulets over her left shoulder. All he could think was that he’d never seen her with her hair down before.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t respond until it felt safe to, until he was certain his brain had caught up with his tongue. “Nothing, forget it. Let’s get out of here.”
He spent most of the following day brooding in the basement. He had a decent excuse, being that the criminal they’d caught—and he’d disposed of—had an accomplice they’d yet to track down. That didn’t stop Tsujimura from throwing him worried glances whenever she came to check on him and saw him sitting in the same position that he had been thirty minutes prior.
The dolls were calming. There was no malice behind their watchful eyes, no hushed discussions on how he should be dealt with. A different kind of surveillance, one that didn’t see him as an atomic bomb, one that forgot his mistakes as soon as they happened.
There was nothing affectionate, either, nothing that held him to any standard, and that lack of warmth was what he desperately needed right now in order to tamper down whatever maelstrom was wreaking havoc in his head.
If Tsujimura were to find out about the string, how would she react? Would she feel pressured to stay by his side out of obligation? The thought left a sour taste in his mouth. She’d probably dig herself into a hole out of embarrassment. She might even request a transfer.
Funny, how what he’d so desperately wanted her to do when they’d first met made him twitch with discomfort now.
It couldn’t be helped. There was no universe, no context in which he could tell her. It would be inconvenient, was his justification. If he scared away Tsujimura, the Division would assign him another supervisor, and he’d have to learn how to deal with someone new all over again.
He was scanning the basement for something to distract himself—maybe one of the dolls could tell him what to do, he thought with a scoff—when he came across the keychain.
Why had he brought it down here? It looked terrible. It didn’t fit with his collection at all, and there was something sacrilegious about it being displayed next to pieces that had cost him hundreds of thousands of yen.
Even so, he made no effort to remove it from the shelf. When he went through with his routine of cleaning the dust off of each of his dolls, he brushed it over with the duster. He was stilted with it, the motion having none of the smooth precision that came from the care he had for the rest of his collection, but when he was finished, the keychain stood just as shiny and clean as the others.
His eyes lingered on it for a moment too long. That moment was his tipping point.
He sagged where he stood, mountains of pressure and tension leaving his body. He dragged a hand through his hair. He made phone calls. The signal was awful in the basement, forcing him to type each number several times. The back of his neck was cold and clammy. So were his palms, and the phone nearly slipped out of his hand once or twice while talking. He hung up. He pulled his jacket from where it had been thrown over the back of his chair, and tugged it around his shoulders.
He left the basement with heavy steps. He didn’t say anything to greet Tsujimura. He didn’t have to, as she jumped up and walked towards him with a single gesture. They went out to the car, and he relayed an address to her, one of a university.
His lack of an explanation was uncharacteristic, he knew, and Tsujimura failed to hide her confusion when he didn’t go on a spiel about how much of an imbecile she was for not guessing their next stop. As curious as she may have been, she didn’t pull over or ask about it, and he was glad. He wasn’t in the mood to come up with another excuse.
The drive was mundane, if quiet. He’d ridden shotgun, for a change, which had been a terrible idea as it put them far too close. Being in the same room was too close, these days. When had he become so insane?
Tsujimura reaching the gates of the university came as a breath of relief. The school building gave off a surreal air with the late hour, vacant of the students that had filled the halls a few hours ago. Located in the center of town, it was the most suitable spot to call the witnesses to. That, and the fact that the sports hall was built to handle a commotion.
Everything about this case was normal, as normal as a case pawned off to him could be, and it ached. Familiarity morphed into routine, which in turn morphed into domesticity. He wished he could stop thinking. Why hadn’t Tsujimura resigned yet? Why hadn’t one of his countless execution orders been approved yet? Would he even be able to tell the difference, if it had? When he’d been sentenced to death the day this woman had entered his office?
She speed-walked ahead of him, making it her mission to scope out the area. He would have pointed out that bad guys didn’t tend to lurk around populated public buildings, but he supposed she had her rituals, just as he had his.
After she scurried off, he didn’t see her again until he reached the sports hall. He strolled at a leisurely pace, like he was on his way to the guillotine. The artificial lighting hurt his eyes, but reflected quite pleasantly on Tsujimura’s hair. She was crouched by the double doors in the corridor, back to the wall like a police officer about to conduct a raid.
He found himself crouching next to her, for some godforsaken reason. Tsujimura always got a little too into her secret agent job—him indulging it was a lot less common.
She fidgeted, and there was a puzzlement etched into her features, heightened by his weird behavior today. She knew there was something up with him, a melancholy scratching beneath the surface, but she wasn’t good at putting her vulnerable thoughts into words—it was one of the few traits they shared. So Ayatsuji wasn’t showered in reassurances or sweet nothings. Instead, after mulling it over, she reached out, grabbed his wrist, and gave his hand a timid squeeze.
The ends of their string were side by side, a red tangled mess. Ayatsuji couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. Not that he ever could.
“I think we did pretty well,” she whispered, making the wrongful assumption that he’d been feeling down about the case. Her cheeks were gaining the satisfied flush that rose to them whenever she was getting too proud of herself. Were it any other occasion, Ayatsuji would have taken the opportunity to knock her ego down a peg, but for once he let it slide.
“I can’t deny that you’ve been a decent assistant.” The soft pads of her fingers were tapping the back of his hand now, in order from left to right, and every touch burned. Pinky, ring, middle, index, thumb, repeat. “Let’s hope you can keep it up. It’s a lifelong commitment, you know.”
She pulled a face. “How many times are we going to have this conversation? I’ve made my choice. Don’t act like you haven’t worked it out already.”
He hummed. There was a beauty to it. The freedom of choice had been missing from his life from the very beginning, but Tsujimura had ended up at the agency, as his partner, not through happenstance but her unshakeable will. She had no knowledge of the thread of fate tying them together, so her decisions were solely her own, and yet she was here, taking his hand and choosing him anyway.
He squeezed her fingers back only once—he couldn’t let her believe he was going soft on her, after all—before pulling away.
Her lips parted in a small ‘o’, as if she’d seen right through him, and he couldn’t suppress his jolt of panic. He needed to retreat, to slip out of sight and mind before he dug himself into a well too deep to climb out of.
“I’ll get started, then. Stay here and stay alert. This guy is definitely a runner.”
“Wait—”
Standing to full height, he pushed open the doors and proceeded through them, approaching the waiting crowd of suspects and witnesses. He heard Tsujimura mutter under her breath about how annoying he was, and the corner of his mouth quirked up.
There was nothing precariously balanced or poorly fitted in the building, which meant this one would be straightforward. A heart attack, or perhaps an aneurysm, a contained death that the Division’s cleanup team would happy about. An easy kill for an easy case.
Countless eyes were on him, but the scrutiny didn’t make his skin crawl like it used to. He felt uplifted, as sickeningly cheesy as it was. Like if this all went wrong, he’d have someone to fall back on.
The witnesses were silent, rigid with anticipation. He examined each and every face, making a show out of it, before focusing his attention on the star of the evening.
He made sure his voice was loud enough to be heard through the double doors. “You there. Yes, yes, the athlete, who else would I be talking to? Tell me, did you really think wearing the victim’s shoes would be enough to get away with murder?”