Page 88 of Hell’s Weapon

“That is the only two we can’t discount.”

“What if both are the correct answer? We know there are multiple cases tangled together now,” Wyatt asks.

“We can’t risk it,” I tell him, caressing his thigh over his joggers. We’re both sitting across his bed, backs to the wall. His arm is around my shoulders and I’m half leaning into the crook of his shoulder, hand resting on his outstretched leg.

Milo is in his usual spot when we’re working, standing on the opposite bed, pen in hand as he tinkers with the sprawling web of notes we’ve put up on the wall.

Another hour passes, and we still haven’t made any progress on either option.

“Fuck, I’m too hungry to carry on. Shall we go and get some food?” Rio asks.

“I feel like we can’t give up. There’s only a couple more days left for us to solve this thing,” Seffy says.

“I agree. We can’t miss the deadline,” I add.

“How about I go grab us some food and bring it back here?” Rio counters. “If I don’t eat I’m going to pass out.”

“To be fair, so am I,” Wyatt says.

In the end Wyatt and Rio leave to go stock up on food, leaving me, Seffy, and Milo to keep working.

They’d only been gone a few minutes, however, when Milo gasps from where he’d been trawling through one of the files.

“What is it?” I say and Seffy’s head snaps up as well from where she’d been reading another one of the profiles for the hundredth time.

Milo turns the page round and points at a specific bit. It's where one of the suspects is accusing another of the murder, but the analogy they use to describe the person is a very specific type of poisoning. The exact effect of the poison we’ve identified to be one of the weapons used.

I keep reading and they make another reference further down. Seffy joins me, reading over my shoulder.

Milo turns to pick up the other pages of the same file. He then shoves the character profile at us, pointing at the basic information section. They work at a pharmaceutical company.

“You think this is the proof we needed?” I ask. My gut is telling me it's the link we had been missing. Poison had become an option when some of the other characters had described how they found one of the bodies, the state it was in. What we’d been unable to do until now is link it to one of the suspects.

Seffy moves back to her own file. “Yes, that guy lives in the woods as well.”

“How’d you know that?”

“Here, this woman describes the cabin he lives in. She’s sleeping with him.” She passes over the pages and Milo and I read. “This is it, I can feel it.”

Milo nods in agreement, his eyes alight after looking as frustrated as the rest of us for the last few hours.

With some of our motivation renewed, we scroll over everything with a new purpose and find more links and more details that we hadn’t picked up on before. We get a more exact location for this cabin and are feeling confident in our deductions.

“Shall we go get it?” Seffy asks.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Wyatt and Rio? They should be back any second,” I say.

A knock at the door seems like impeccable timing, but Wyatt would just use his wristband. We all freeze, going quiet as we all reach the same deduction.

The knock comes again, although cuts short as it sounds like something else hitting the door.

“Let me get it, you two stay back,” I instruct them. Thankfully, neither of them argues as I don’t want to try and explain that I am much more indestructible than their frail human bodies.

Positioning myself so whoever is on the side won’t be able to get the jump on me I grab the handle and snatch the door open.

Deflating in relief, I find a loaded-up Rio standing in the hallway, the scent of hot food wafting from the many paper bags he’s carrying.

“Sorry, did I scare you?” he says as he crosses the threshold.