Read Chapter 13: The Second Turn

The fire had gutted the place, but the ashes still breathed heat into the night. Edward stood at the edge of the ruin, his face slick with sweat and soot, watching the last flames lick at what remained of the refinery’s skeleton. The smell was thick—burnt timber, scorched brick, and something else. Something he tried not to think about.

He stepped forward, boots crunching over charred debris. Abberline and his men had already combed the site and taken the body. The scarred man. Whoever he had been, whatever he had known, was now ash and bone on a coroner’s table. And the killer was long gone.

Edward’s foot caught on something—metal, twisted, meaningless. He kicked it aside and froze.

A scrap of paper, half-buried under a chunk of blackened beam. Its edges were singed, but the center was intact. White paper. His paper. The same stock he used for his drafts, the cheap foolscap he bought by the ream from the stationer on Fenchurch Street.

His heart hammered as he crouched and picked it up. The handwriting was his own. A smeared line, half a sentence, a draft of the fourth letter that he had rewritten three times before settling on the final copy. He knew the words by heart even before he finished reading them.

*the ruin on Commercial Street, where the sugar boiled, where the rats nest in the old ovens…*

He had left that draft in his private room. It had never left the desk drawer. He had locked the drawer. He had checked the lock.

Edward clutched the scrap until his knuckles went white, then he shoved it into his pocket and ran.

The streets blurred past him—Whitechapel, then Aldgate, then the narrow lane that led to his lodging house. He took the stairs two at a time, breath ragged, pushing through the door of his room with his shoulder before he even had the key out of his pocket.

The lamp was still lit. He had left it burning—he remembered that. But the room was wrong. Not in any obvious way. The chair was where he had left it. The desk was clean, papers neatly stacked. The bed was made.

But the air felt different. Someone had been here.

Edward walked to the desk, his eyes scanning for disturbance. The inkwell was full. His pens were in the same cracked ceramic jar. He pulled open the drawer where he kept his drafts. Empty. He had taken the final copy to the police, but the earlier versions, the false starts, the rough notes—

They were gone.

He slammed the drawer shut and turned, and that’s when he saw it.

On his pillow, centered as if placed with care, lay a handkerchief. White linen, delicate edging, with a small embroidered emblem in the corner—a single rose, stitched in faded crimson thread.

Mary’s.

He knew it. He had seen her press it to her face a dozen times when she laughed, when the coal smoke got thick, when she wiped her eyes after a long night. She had shown him the embroidery once, told him her mother had taught her the stitch before she died.

The handkerchief was stained.

Blood. Dark and tacky, spreading across the center in a bloom that had dried to rust.

Edward’s hands were shaking. He picked it up with two fingers, turning it over. There was something underneath—a pin. A simple brass pin, the kind used to hold a bonnet in place.

A message. The killer had been in his room. He had walked past his bed, opened his drawer, stolen his drafts. And he had left this. Mary’s handkerchief, stained with her blood.

But that meant she was alive. The killer wouldn’t leave a token if he had nothing left to threaten. He kept trophies. He was the kind of man who kept trophies.

Edward sank to the edge of the bed, the handkerchief still clutched in his hand. His mind raced through possibilities—she had left last night. She had gone to meet a gentleman. The scarred man was dead. But he had not been the killer, not the man who wrote his letters into flesh. He had only been watching. So who had Mary gone to meet?

And why had the killer left her handkerchief on Edward’s pillow, as if marking a conquest he had not yet made?

A sound from the street below. Edward’s head snapped toward the window. Shadows moved—just the lamplighter making his rounds, his long pole swinging. But Edward watched until the man passed, until the orange glow faded down the lane.

He looked down at the handkerchief again. The blood was dry. Hours old, maybe more. If the killer had wanted to kill Mary, he would have. He wasn’t careless. Edward had learned that much from the letters.

So Mary was alive. And she was bait.

The killer was not following Edward’s forgeries. He was not even hunting Edward. He was playing with him, toying, drawing him forward step by step, leaving clues and scraps and blood-stained linen as milestones on a path Edward had never chosen to walk.

Edward had thought he could use the letters to trap the killer. But the killer was using Edward the same way. And he had just shown him exactly how the game would end.