Page 156 of Somno Slave

The key slides free into my palm with a soft scrape.

My mouth goes dry. I’m already turning toward the black steel filing cabinets lining the back wall. The key shakes once between my fingers before I force my hand steady enough to push it into the lock.

The mechanism gives with a deep metallic clunk that echoes too loudly through the room.

My breath catches.

I wait for a moment, listening out for movement, but nothing comes. Just the faint humming of the monitors.

I pull the drawer open and see dozens of black folders with red tabs. Some are thick enough that they barely fit inside the rails and others are so thin they look unfinished.

My eyes move automatically across names and case numbers until one catches immediately.

ATTOR.

The folder is enormous.

My stomach twists before I even touch it.

The sheer weight of it nearly drags it from my hands as I pull it free. The overhead monitor light washes the pages pale blue as I open it.

The first pages are procedural: transfer summaries, interrogation reports, psychological assessments. Most of them heavily redacted. Things I know or things I could guess.

I turn a page and a photograph slips loose. It lands face-up against the desk.

For a second my brain refuses to process what I’m seeing. White tiles. Medical equipment. A stainless-steel operating table. And blood, so much blood, but not sprayed wildly. Positioned.

My throat tightens.

The body sits upright in a chair at the centre of the room. Male. Late fifties maybe. The skin around his chest cavity has been opened with surgical precision, peeled back neatly enough to expose the ribcage beneath.

I catch the ID badge clipped beside him.

DR ELLIOT VALE.

Something hot rises sharply into my throat.

My fingers shake when I take it.

Library shelves, tall oak bookcases disappearing into darkness. The victim lies across a reading desk beneath a pool of warm yellow lamplight; lips tightly sealed with horrible blue thread mangling the skin. Surrounding him, there are thousands of pages. Hundreds of manuscripts torn across the floor and painted with blood.

My stomach lurches violently when I realise what I’m looking at. There’s a hole where the heart should be. And around it—God—dark bruising between the ribs. The skin torn wider. Used.

My hand flies to my mouth too late.

The photograph trembles violently between my fingers. I catch black writing scribbled across the back.

Professor Adrian Wells.

Historian. A specialist in medieval religious history.

The words blur together beneath the sudden roaring in my ears.

My fingers drag out the next image automatically now.

Sharp orange burns through the picture. It’s bright beneath the camera flash next to a body. The victim hangs against a stone wall, wrists nailed high above his head. Everything else in the room is destruction. Flesh. Blood. Torn skin dragged across ancient stone. Symbols have been carved into the walls around him.

MERCY.