4338.212 · July 31, 2018 AD
Breaking Protocol
Protocol be damned—Karl stakes out Luke Smith's house alone, driven by obsession and nightmares of Gladys dying. Jamie's phone rings from inside the suspiciously empty house. Against every instinct, Karl breaks in. The rooms are sanitised, stripped bare, wrong. Then Sarah's voice cuts through the phone: "Get out, right now!" But the warning comes too late. Someone's already inside. And when the violence ends, nothing is what Karl expected.
"You need to get out, right now!"
Sarah's warning crackles through Jamie's phone—the phone Karl found ringing inside Luke Smith's suspiciously empty house. But the warning comes seconds too late.
A figure emerges from the darkness, dressed in black, moving with deadly purpose. Karl is unarmed, trapped, outmatched. What begins as surveillance becomes trespass. Trespass becomes confrontation.
And confrontation becomes catastrophe on a darkened staircase where two men tumble down in a violent tangle of limbs and desperation.
The sound that follows—bone meeting floor, vertebrae snapping—will haunt Karl for the rest of his life.
In the terrible stillness, Karl faces an impossible choice: call it in and destroy his career, or hide what just happened and become the very thing he's been hunting.
The cupboard under the stairs offers a solution. But solutions have consequences.
And when Karl finally examines what he took from the body—a blank plastic card that reveals its secret only under light—he realises this was never about Luke Smith at all.
He's stumbled into something far darker. Something with a name.
And there's no going back.
