Blade and Threshold

"She handed me the knife like it was the last thing holding her upright. And I suppose it was." — Detective Sarah Lahey

Sarah fell into step beside Karl, their boots crunching in unison on the gravel, and together they walked towards the front door of Jeffries Manor.

Sarah's hand drifted towards her holster — an instinct so deeply embedded it preceded thought, the body's own assessment of a situation that the conscious mind hadn't yet finished processing. The weight of the weapon against her hip was a familiar anchor, and right now she needed anchoring.

"No gun. Not yet."

Karl's voice was low, unhurried. He didn't look at her as he said it, his eyes still moving across the façade, reading the windows the way he read people — looking for what was absent rather than what was present. He raised one hand, palm out, a gesture she'd seen him use a hundred times before. Easy. Steady. Follow my lead.

She let her hand fall. Every instinct protested, but Karl's operational judgment had kept them both alive through situations that had gone sideways faster than this one. She trusted that judgment even now — or at least, she trusted the version of it that existed before two nights ago. Whether the man beside her was still operating from the same playbook was a question she couldn't afford to examine at this particular moment.

They were three metres from the portico steps when the cry split the air.

"He's in here!"

The voice came from their right — ragged, high, cracked through with something that had gone well past fear into territory Sarah didn't have a word for. Both of them pivoted simultaneously, shoulders squaring, weight shifting to the balls of their feet. Years of working in tandem had wired their bodies to respond as a single unit, and even now, with everything fractured between them, that training held.

Louise Jeffries stood beside a large timber shed set back from the main house, partially screened by a row of mature camellias. The structure was solidly built — heavy posts, corrugated iron roof, a proper concrete slab beneath it — the kind of outbuilding that stored ride-on mowers and garden equipment and the accumulated tools of maintaining a fifty-acre estate. Its door was closed. A padlock hung from the latch, but even from this distance Sarah could see it wasn't engaged — the shackle was open, hooked through the hasp but not snapped shut.

Louise herself was barely recognisable from the composed woman who had sat across from them in Interview Room Three five days ago. The tailored blouse had been replaced by a heavy knit jumper, its sleeves pushed past her elbows. Her hair, which Sarah remembered as carefully pinned, hung loose around a face that had aged a decade in less than a week. Mascara had tracked down both cheeks in dark tributaries that the cold air had dried into place.

And in her hands — white-knuckled, trembling, held out in front of her body with the locked-arm rigidity of someone who had never held a weapon before and was terrified of the one they were holding now — was a kitchen knife. A large one. The blade caught the weak afternoon light and threw it back as a cold, brief flash.

"Want to use those guns yet?" Sarah murmured. The words came out flat, the reflex of a gallows humour that couldn't quite find its footing.

Karl didn't respond. His features had already settled into the expression he wore for negotiations — open, authoritative, carefully emptied of anything that might escalate a volatile situation. It was a mask Sarah had watched him build and deploy dozens of times, and it was flawless. No trace of the exhaustion that had hollowed his eyes in the car. No sign of the hunger she'd seen flare when the dispatch came through. Just calm, professional competence.

It chilled her more than the knife did.

"Louise." Karl's voice carried across the gravel with an easy authority that gave no indication of the man beneath it. "It's Detective Jenkins. You called us. We're here now. I need you to put the knife down."

Louise's head snapped towards them, and Sarah saw the moment recognition landed — a fractional loosening in her shoulders, immediately swallowed by a fresh surge of agitation. "I've got the bastard trapped inside," she said, and there was something savage in the triumph that bled through her terror. Something feral that the old money and the carefully tended gardens and the heritage paintwork had no capacity to contain. "He came here. To my home. After everything he's done to my family, he came here."

Karl gave Sarah the look — the fractional tilt of his chin, the slight widening of his eyes that meant you take the civilian, I'll take the scene. A whole conversation compressed into a glance that lasted less than a second. They'd had that conversation a hundred times before, in car parks and living rooms and hospital corridors, and Sarah's body responded before her mind caught up.

She moved towards Louise with steady, unhurried steps, keeping her hands visible, her posture open. Non-threatening. Approachable. Everything they taught you at the academy about de-escalation, delivered by a woman who was barely holding herself together behind a mask of her own.

"Louise, my name's Sarah. I'm Karl's partner. We spoke last week at the station — do you remember?"

Louise's eyes flicked to her, then back to the shed door, then back again. The knife trembled in her grip. Up close, Sarah could see the details that distance had obscured — the bitten-down fingernails, the raw skin around her wedding ring where she'd been twisting it, the fine tremor in her jaw that spoke of teeth clenched so hard the muscles had begun to spasm. This was a woman operating on the last fumes of adrenaline, someone who had held herself together through sheer force of will and was now discovering that will had its limits.

"I need to take the knife, Louise," Sarah said quietly. "You've done brilliantly. You've kept him contained and you've called us and we're here now. But I need the knife so we can do our job. All right?"

For a long moment, Louise didn't move. Her gaze remained fixed on the shed door, and Sarah could feel the war playing out behind her eyes — the primal urge to stand guard, to maintain the one fragile barrier between her family and the man she blamed for destroying it, battling against the trained compliance of a woman who had spent her entire life deferring to authority when authority finally arrived.

Then her fingers opened.

The knife dropped handle-first into Sarah's waiting palm, and the moment it left her grasp, something structural gave way inside Louise Jeffries. Her shoulders caved. Her chin dropped to her chest. The rigid, trembling posture that had held her upright collapsed inward as though the blade had been the only thing keeping her standing.

"I can't find Brianne," she said.

The words came out small and broken, stripped of the savage energy that had animated her moments before. She wrapped her arms around her own torso, fingers digging into the wool of her jumper, and Sarah recognised the gesture — not for warmth, but for containment. The body's attempt to hold itself together when the mind had given up trying.

Karl had gone very still.

"Brianne?" His voice was sharp. Focused. Sarah saw his weight shift forward, saw the way his attention narrowed to a point the way it always did when a new piece of the puzzle presented itself.

"Kain's fiancée," Louise managed. Her voice was barely above a whisper now, the words escaping in shallow, shuddering breaths. "She's been staying here. With us. Since Kain —" She broke off, swallowed hard. "Luke came to the house. Said he needed to speak to her. And now she's gone. She's gone, and he's in that shed, and I don't know what he's done with her."

The air between the three of them seemed to contract.

Sarah watched Karl's face and saw the information land — saw it slot into the architecture of his conviction with the inevitability of a key turning in a lock. Another disappearance. Another person connected to Luke Smith who had simply ceased to be present. The pattern that Karl had spent a week building, circling, obsessing over — it wasn't just holding. It was growing.

"Take her inside," Karl said. His eyes were on the shed. His voice was level, but something beneath it had shifted, a tectonic adjustment that Sarah felt rather than heard. "Stay with her. I'll handle this."

Sarah opened her mouth to argue. To say we should wait for backup. To say you shouldn't go in alone. To say any one of a dozen things that protocol and common sense and the knot of dread tightening in her stomach all demanded she say.

She said none of them.

Because Karl was already moving towards the shed with the unhesitating certainty of a man who had passed beyond the reach of caution, and because Louise was shaking against her arm, and because someone had to make a choice about which crisis to attend to first.

"Come inside, Louise," she murmured, guiding the trembling woman towards the portico steps. "Come on. You're all right. We're going to sort this out."

Louise moved with the compliance of someone operating on autopilot, her feet finding the sandstone steps without conscious direction. Sarah kept a firm hand on her arm, steadying her, steering her towards the heavy front door that still sat slightly ajar.

At the top of the steps, Sarah paused. Turned.

Karl stood alone before the shed, fifteen metres away across the gravel. The afternoon light had thinned to something pale and unreliable, and it caught him in a way that flattened his features, reduced him to outline and posture and the set of his shoulders beneath his jacket. He looked, in that moment, both utterly familiar and profoundly strange — the man she'd worked beside for a year, the man she'd let into her bed, the man whose hands had done something unforgivable two nights ago, standing alone before a door that might hold answers or might hold nothing at all.

She wanted to call out to him. To say something — his name, a warning, anything that would make him turn around and look at her so she could read his face one more time.

She didn't.

She turned away, guided Louise through the front door, and stepped into the cool, dim interior of Jeffries Manor.

The door closed behind them with a sound like a breath being held.

Karl stood alone on the gravel and let the silence settle around him.

The shed sat five metres ahead, squat and solid against the dark backdrop of the tree line. Timber frame. Iron roof. A concrete apron extending half a metre beyond the door, stained with the usual tidemarks of oil and rust and years of use. The padlock hung from the hasp, unlatched, its shackle glinting dully in the failing light.

Behind him, the manor's façade rose like a wall at his back. He didn't look at it. Didn't look at the windows where Sarah might or might not be watching. The space between the house and the shed had contracted to something narrow and airless, and within it, Karl was aware of nothing but the structure ahead and the man who was supposedly inside it.

Luke Smith.

The name moved through his mind the way it had moved through every waking hour of the past week — constant, insistent, pulling him forward with a gravity he'd stopped trying to resist. Everything led here. Every disappearance, every dead end, every sleepless night spent staring at case notes until the words blurred and reformed into the same accusation. Luke Smith was behind all of it. Karl knew it the way he knew his own heartbeat — not because the evidence proved it, but because the absence of evidence proved something worse. Men like Luke didn't leave traces. They left voids.

He crossed the gravel slowly. Each footfall was deliberate, measured, the approach of a man who understood that the next few minutes would define something, even if he couldn't yet say what. The winter air pressed close — dense with the smell of damp earth and eucalyptus and the faint, mineral tang of the river somewhere below the tree line. A magpie that had been foraging near the camellia hedge lifted off with a clatter of wings, and then there was nothing. No birdsong. No wind. Just the crunch of his boots on loose stone and the steady, unhurried rhythm of his own breathing.

The shed door waited.

Karl reached for the latch. The metal was cold against his fingers, rough with surface rust that left a faint orange residue on his skin. He could hear nothing from inside — no movement, no breathing, no indication that the space beyond the door contained anything at all. The gap between the door and its frame was narrow, perhaps two centimetres, and the darkness on the other side was absolute.

He thought, briefly, of Sarah. Of the look on her face as she'd guided Louise up the portico steps. Of the way she'd paused at the top and turned back, as though there were something she needed to say but couldn't find the shape of. He wondered what it would have been.

Then he stopped wondering.

Karl Jenkins pulled the door open and stepped into the dark.