Previous Chapter (4) - Gordon | First Chapter - Camila
The rain hadn't stopped in three days. It was that miserable, relentless city rain that turned the streets into slick gray ribbons and made the air inside Jack Derringer’s second-floor office smell like damp wool and stale cigarette smoke.
He was slumped in his creaking swivel chair, nursing three fingers of cheap bourbon in a glass that hadn't been washed since Tuesday. The shades were drawn against the neon glare of the pawn shop sign below, casting the small room in perpetual twilight.
Jack stared across the cluttered desk, past the overflowing ashtray and the unpaid utility bills, to the corkboard that dominated the far wall. It used to be organized. Maps, timelines, neat little index cards. Now, it was a chaotic, sprawling mess of red string connecting dead ends to even deader ends.
But in the center, there was one clear point of focus. A high-quality studio portrait of a young woman. Elena Kowalski. Twenty-one. Eyes full of life, smile bright enough to light up a room.
The photo wasn't from a police file. It had been FedExed by a panicked father in Krakow, along with a cashier's check that had kept Jack in bourbon and rent for nearly six months.
"Here's to you, kid," Jack muttered, raising the glass in a mock toast before downing half of it. The liquor burned a familiar path down his throat, numbing the edges of the guilt that was his constant companion.
He knew everything. And he could do nothing.
That was the beauty of it. The perfect, horrible joke of his profession. He was an investigator who had solved the case, only to find out the answers were useless.
He looked at one of the index cards pinned with a red thumb tack. OLD PRINT WORKS - WEST DISTRICT. He knew the building, a rotting hulk of Victorian industry that had been condemned since the nineties.
He looked at another card, this one connected by a thick red line to a blurry telephoto shot of a fat man in a suit exiting a black sedan. ROMANO.
Jack rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He knew who took her. He knew where she was. He even knew why, though the whispers he’d heard in the darkest corners of the city’s watering holes made his stomach churn.
But knowing wasn't action.
If this were a movie, he'd load up his snub-nose .38, kick down the door of the factory, shoot the bad guys, and carry Elena out into the rain. Cue the swelling orchestral music.
In reality, the Old Print Works was a fortress. Romano’s crew weren’t corner boys strapping Glocks; they were pros. Knuckles Grimaldi could break a man in half just for exercise. And the rumors about the others—Slick, the interrogator Nails—were enough to keep Jack awake at night.
Going in alone was suicide. It would get him killed, and worse, it would put Elena in the crosshairs. An asset that caused too much trouble was an asset that got liquidated.
And the cops? Jack poured the rest of the bourbon into his glass. He'd tried. four months ago, when he first connected the pieces. He'd sat down with a detective he knew, an old buddy from his short-lived days on the force. The man had looked at Jack’s notes, gone pale as a sheet, and pushed them back across the sticky bar table.
"Don't say that name, Jack," Harrington had hissed, eyes darting around the bar. "You bury this. Deep. Or I swear to Christ, they'll bury you in the foundation of that place."
The police weren't incompetent. They were the perimeter guard.
So Jack sat in his dim office, listening to the rain, staring at the face of a girl he was paid to save, knowing she was enduring god-knows-what just a few miles away, while he drank cheap booze and played pretend detective. He was a man holding the keys to a locked room, petrified of what would happen if he actually opened the door.
The bourbon was gone. Jack stared at the empty glass, the rain still drumming its endless rhythm against the window. It had been a week since the night he finally cracked, the night the passive guilt turned into reckless action.
His mind drifted back seven days.
He’d been at a greasy spoon diner at 3 AM, the kind of place where the coffee tasted like burnt pennies and the only other patrons were long-haul truckers and insomniacs. He was chain-smoking over a plate of cold eggs, flipping through a discarded copy of the Metro Tribune some previous customer had left behind.
He’d almost missed it. It was a small byline on page seven, buried under a fluff piece about a new artisanal bakery opening downtown.
West District Disappearances: A Pattern Emerges?
By Camila Reyes
The article itself was short, maybe three hundred words. It mentioned three names: Elena, Sarah, and Chloe. The police were quoted delivering the usual platitudes about runaways and drug debts.
But it was the tone of the writing. There was an urgency to it, a sharp, cynical edge that didn't buy the official line. Camila Reyes was asking potential witnesses for information. She was digging where nobody else was willing to put a shovel.
Jack had looked up the name. Camila was young, hungry, trying to make a name for herself in a dying industry. She wasn't a grizzled old cynic like him, beaten down by years of compromise. She still had fire.
And that made her dangerous. Both to Romano, and to herself.
An idea had formed in the smoky haze of his mind. It was a desperate, stupid, potentially catastrophic idea. But after nearly six months of staring at Elena’s picture, desperate and stupid was all he had left.
If he couldn't take it to the cops, and he couldn't kick down the door himself… maybe he could light a fuse.
Camila Reyes was already sniffing around the edges of the truth. What if he gave her the map?
She was a reporter. If she could blow this wide open—get Romano's name in print, get the location out there in the public eye—the police couldn't ignore it. Romano might have half the precinct on his payroll, but he couldn't pay off the entire city when it was headline news. The pressure would be too great. They'd have to raid the place.
It was a gamble. He knew that. He was putting a civilian in the line of fire. But the guilt of doing nothing had finally outweighed the fear of what might happen if he did something.
He’d grabbed a grease pencil from the waitress's apron while she was refilling his coffee. He ripped a coarse cocktail napkin from the metal dispenser on the table.
He hesitated for only a second, the tip of the pencil hovering over the textured paper. Then, he wrote.
THE OLD PRINT WORKS. WEST DISTRICT.
ROMANO.
Just two lines. The where and the who. The what… she would have to figure that out herself. If he told her the truth about The Giggle Room, she’d probably think he was a crank and throw it away. But a location and a name like Romano? That was bait no hungry reporter could resist.
He didn’t sign it. He couldn’t.
An hour later, the city was dark and slick with rain. He parked his rusted-out Ford sedan two blocks from a modest apartment building in Queens. He didn't know her unit number, but he knew she lived there. It hadn't been hard to find.
He stood in the vestibule, dripping on the cheap tiles, feeling more like a perp than a P.I. He watched the mail slots, reading the names and found what he was looking for "C. Reyes - 3B". When a tenant came out for a late-night smoke, Jack slipped in before the door closed.
He found her door on the third floor.
He stood there for a long moment, the napkin heavy in his damp palm. This was it. The point of no return. If he did this, he was setting a chain of events in motion he couldn't control.
He pictured Elena’s face. Then he pictured Romano’s laugh, the one that sounded like gravel shifting in a mixer.
His jaw tight, Jack stepped forward and slid the grease-stained napkin under the gap of the door.
It was done. The bomb was set. All he had to do was wait for the boom.
Now, a week later, sitting in his dark office, Jack finally allowed himself to wonder if he’d just lit the fuse on the bomb, or if he’d lit the fuse on Camila Reyes instead.
The silence in the office was heavy, broken only by the ceaseless drumming of rain against the window and the rhythmic clicking of Jack’s mouse.
Seven days. He’d counted every one.
He was hunched over his laptop, an ancient cinderblock of a machine that wheezed with the effort of running a modern web browser. He had the homepage of the Metro Tribune open, his finger hovering over the F5 key.
Refresh.
Nothing. The headline story was a piece on the mayor's new green space initiative. Below that, an article on the local sports team's losing streak.
Refresh.
He scrolled down, his eyes scanning the bylines, looking for the name. Camila Reyes. There was nothing. Not a follow-up on the missing girls, not a city council report, not even a review of a new diner.
The hope that had fueled his desperate gamble a week ago was curdling into a sour, sickening dread in the pit of his stomach.
"Come on, kid," Jack muttered, rubbing the stubble on his jaw with a shaking hand. "Where's the scoop? Where's the headline that blows the lid off this whole thing?"
He looked up at the corkboard. Elena's portrait seemed to be staring right at him, her smile now mocking his optimism. He pictured the napkin under the door. Had she thought it was a prank? Had she ignored it?
Or had she done exactly what he hoped she would? Had she taken the bait, grabbed her notebook, and headed straight for the West District?
A chill snakes its way up Jack's spine that had nothing to do with the draft in the office. If she had gone to the Print Works… and if she had found something… why was there no story?
Romano wasn't the type to sue for libel. He handled problems in a much more direct, permanent way.
Jack slammed the laptop lid shut, the sudden noise echoing in the quiet room. He couldn't just sit here and click refresh anymore. The not knowing was eating him alive. He needed a drink, but the bottle was empty. He needed answers, but the screen was blank.
He stood up, pacing the small, cramped space between the desk and the window. His mind was a hamster wheel of worst-case scenarios. The police were useless. His own investigation was a dead end. And now, his last-ditch effort, his Hail Mary pass… it seemed to have vanished into the same void that swallowed Elena.
He had to know.
With a surge of terrifying adrenaline, Jack turned and grabbed the heavy, old-fashioned telephone on his desk. He knew it was a risk. Calling brought attention. But he was past caring about risks now. He dialed the main number for the Metro Tribune, his fingers fumbling slightly with the buttons.
It rang three times before a bored voice answered. "Metro Tribune, how may I direct your call?"
Jack gripped the receiver until his knuckles turned white. He took a breath, forcing his voice into a calm, professional timbre that he didn’t feel.
"Yeah, hi. I'm looking to get in touch with one of your reporters. Camila Reyes?" He paused for a beat, adding, "It’s about a story she’s working on."
The line went quiet for a moment. He heard the faint clicking of a keyboard on the other end.
"Hold please." The hold music was a tinny, distorted jazz tune. Every second felt like an hour. Jack wiped a line of sweat from his forehead, despite the chill in the room.
After what felt like an eternity, the line clicked back. It wasn't the same bored receptionist. The voice that spoke this time was sharper, more official. A man’s voice.
"Who am I speaking with?" he asked, no pleasantries.
Jack’s heart hammered against his ribs. This was bad. A simple transfer didn't warrant a handoff like this.
"Just a… a concerned citizen," he lied smoothly. "I have some information about the West District disappearances Ms. Reyes wrote about last week."
There was another pause. Jack imagined this new man signaling to someone across the room.
"Ms. Reyes is no longer with our publication," the man said coldly. "She submitted her resignation last week. Effective immediately."
The words hit Jack like a physical blow to the stomach. His breath caught in his throat.
Resignation. Effective immediately.
In the world of journalism, that was code. It could mean she got a spectacular offer from the NYT. It could mean she had a breakdown. But given what she was looking into… it could mean something far more sinister. It could mean she had been silenced.
"Resigned?" Jack managed to choke out, his voice rougher than he intended. "That’s… sudden. Do you have a contact number for her? This information is—"
"We have no contact information for Ms. Reyes," the man cut him off, his tone brooking no argument. "As for the West District story…"
His voice shifted again, dropping into a tone that was no longer official, but outright suspicious.
"What is your name, sir? And what is the nature of this information you have?"
It wasn't a question from an editor looking for a lead. It was a question from someone who was vetting calls. Someone who had been instructed to flag anyone asking about Camila Reyes and the West District.
Jack’s mind flashed to Detective Harrington’s pale face in the bar. “They’ll bury you.”
Romano’s reach didn’t just extend to the cops. It reached here, too. To the newspapers. The whole system was infected.
"Never mind," Jack whispered, his throat tight with terror. "Forget I called."
He slammed the receiver down into the cradle, his hand shaking uncontrollably. He stared at the phone as if it were a live snake.
He’d done it. God help him, he’d done it. He hadn't given her a story. He had given her a death sentence.
He wasn't just the man watching the empty room. He was the one who had locked the door.
Jack stared at the phone, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The rain pounded harder against the glass, a deafening static that matched the noise in his head.
Resigned. Gone. No forwarding address.
His stomach twisted with a sickening certainty. He knew what that meant. Romano didn't send cease-and-desist letters. He didn't file lawsuits. He erased problems.
And Jack had just handed him one on a platter.
He stumbled back from the desk, his legs weak. He needed a drink, but the bottle was empty. He needed to run, but there was nowhere to go. The walls of his office felt like they were closing in, the faces on the corkboard staring down at him in silent accusation.
He was drowning in guilt. It was a physical weight, heavy and cold, pulling him down.
He couldn’t just sit here. Not now. The not knowing was worse than any truth could be. He had to find out. He owed her that much.
With a jerky, desperate motion, Jack threw himself back into his chair. He opened the ancient laptop, its fan whining in protest. The screen flared back to life.
He didn't open the browser he used for news and sports. He reached into the drawer and pulled out a small, black USB drive. He plugged it into the side of the laptop.
He didn’t want to do this. He had sworn he wouldn't go back into that world. The things he’d seen during his initial hunt for Elena—the depravity, the cruelty—it had stained him. It’s what had driven him to the bottle in the first place.
But now, it was the only door left open.
He clicked the icon for the Tor browser. The screen turned a dark, muted grey as it connected, bouncing his signal through a dozen servers around the world, hiding his digital footprint in the labyrinth of the dark web.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He didn’t need to check his notes for the address. It was burned into his memory. A string of random alphanumeric characters that led to the heart of the nightmare.
He typed it in, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
Enter.
The screen went black. A loading icon spun—a small, stylized laughing mouth with a feather over it. The logo of The Giggle Room.
He prayed, a desperate, silent plea to a God he’d long since given up on.
Please let the site be down. Please let it be a 404 error. Please let it be anything other than what I know it is.
He prayed he would see Elena. If he saw her, it meant she was alive. That was all he had wanted for nearly six months.
But a new prayer was fighting its way to the surface, dark and terrible.
Please don't let me see her. Please don’t let me see Camila.
If she wasn't there, there was still hope. Maybe she had run. Maybe she was safe.
The loading icon stopped spinning. The homepage appeared. Sleek and professional, like a high-end Netflix for human misery.
And in the center, under the banner that read RECENT HIGHLIGHTS, was a video thumbnail. It wasn't Elena.
Jack's blood turned to ice. He stopped breathing.
He stared at the small, pixelated image, his world narrowing down to that terrifying rectangle of light.
It was her. Camila.
Jack’s hand trembled so fiercely he could barely control the mouse, but he forced himself to click on the thumbnail. The video player expanded, filling the laptop’s cracked screen with high definition horror.
It was a professional production. Multiple camera angles, crisp audio—it looked like a prime-time news report, but the subject was torture.
There she was. Camila Reyes. The fiery journalist he had sent to her doom.
She was strapped to a heavy medical table in the center of a well-lit studio. Jack recognized the layout, the dark background he had seen in other videos. But this… this was different.
She looked deranged. Her dark hair was a wild, sweaty tangle plastered to her forehead and cheeks. Her face was a twisted mask of pure, frantic desperation. Her body thrashed violently against the leather restraints, but it wasn't the predictable thrashing of someone trying to escape pain. It was something much more chaotic, more panicked.
She was squirming. Her feet were kicking and twisting, her torso straining against the thick leather strap, her head whipping from side to side on the padded headrest. She looked like someone strapped to a bed of fire ants.
The audio crackled to life, and Jack winced. It wasn't screams. It was worse. It was a broken, breathless, hysterical litany of pleas and choked, jagged sobbing.
"God, please! Make it stop! It burns! It burns!" She wasn't screaming at a captor; she was screaming at the sensation itself. "Get it off me! My feet! Oh god, my feet! Please!"
The video cut to a wider angle. Jack saw him. Grimaldi. A mountain of a man in a dark t-shirt, standing at the foot of the table. He wasn't holding a club or a knife.
He was holding a simple, white-bristled hairbrush.
He wasn't touching her. He was just holding the brush a few inches from the soles of her bare feet, waving it slowly, tantalisingly.
Jack’s stomach lurched. He recognized the tactic. He’d seen it in the chatrooms, heard the whispers. Atkins. The doctor. The "gardener." He’d used itching powder on her sensitized skin. The most potent, maddening blend of hellfire they had.
Camila's eyes were on the brush, the relief was so close, but she knew what that relief was going to cost her. Her hands clenched and unclenched, clawing the air desperately.
"Please!" Camila shrieked, her voice cracking. "Just… just make it stop…"
Knuckles lowered the brush slightly, his voice a deep, rumbling growl that the microphone barely picked up.
"Say the words, lady."
Camila stopped thrashing for a millisecond. She looked at him, her eyes wide and haunted, tears cutting tracks through the sweat on her face. She was breaking. Jack could see it happening in real-time. The fight was gone, replaced by a primal, overpowering need for relief.
She let out a choked, broken sob, a horrible sound that was half-gasp, half-whimper.
"Please…" she rasped, her voice thick with despair. "Please… scratch my feet."
The words hung in the air, a total surrender. A journalist, reduced to begging a monster for a moment of scratching.
Knuckles' smile widened. He chuckled—a low, wet sound.
"You heard the lady," he murmured, as if to an unseen audience. He didn't move to scratch her instead he lowered the brush to his side.
Knuckles turned his head, looking off-camera. "Luis, are the votes in?"
A new voice, greasy and smooth, came from the speakers. "Yes indeed, Tony. The people have spoken!"
Jack clutched the edge of his desk, his knuckles white. A vote. An audience. God…
The video cut to a shot of the side of the set. A wiry figure stepped out of the shadows.
He wore a sleek black suit that seemed too big for his thin frame. His dark hair was greased back flat to his skull. His face was pale, his smile a thin, cruel line that didn't reach his cold, dead shark’s eyes.
It was Nails. Carlo Bellini. The sadist.
He walked towards the table with a fluid, almost reptilian grace. He didn't look at Camila's face. He was looking at her twitching, desperate feet.
As he approached the foot of the table, he held his hands up into the light. They were long, spindly, the fingers like brittle twigs. And at the end of each finger was a horror show. His fingernails were lacquered to a glassy shine, filed into long, curving, deadly points that glinted like shards of obsidian under the studio lights.
Nails stopped at the foot of the table.He leaned in slightly, his smile widening.
"Happy to oblige," he purred, his voice a soft, terrifying hiss.
On the laptop screen, the scene dissolved into chaos.
As Nails’ hands, with their glinting, lacquered talons, came into the light at the foot of the table, Camila’s eyes went wide. The realization of what was about to happen hit her with the force of a physical blow. The desperate pleading vanished instantly, replaced by frantic begging.
"NO! NOT THAT!!! ANYTHING BUT THAT! I'LL DIE!!!"
Her screams shredded his laptop speakers, audio peaking into distorted static with every word. It was a primal screech of pure terror, her body bucking against the straps with renewed, frantic energy. She was desperately trying to pull her feet away after she had just begged for relief.
Nails, for his part, didn't even flinch. He moved with the cold, deliberate precision of a surgeon. He didn’t need to hold her feet; the straps and Knuckles' earlier "prep work" kept them presented and vulnerable.
He went to work.
His right hand, fingers curved into a claw, latched onto her right sole. He didn't just scratch; he raked. He sank the tips of all four talons deep into the pad of her foot and dragged them down the entire length of her arch, from the base of her toes to her heel. It was a slow, agonizingly deliberate movement, his nails drawing thin, white lines that instantly flamed red against her hypersensitive skin.
"NO NO NAAAAA-HA-HA-HA-HA FUUUUUU! STAAAAAAAAAAHHHP"
Simultaneously, his left hand attacked her left foot. He splayed his spidery fingers wide and jammed the sharpened points of all five nails deep into the delicate, powder-coated webbing between her toes. He twisted them back and forth, digging and scraping in the most intimate, maddening crevices.
The sound that came from Camila wasn't a scream anymore. It wasn’t sobbing. It wasn’t human. It was a horrible, high-pitched, sustained shriek that fractured and broke under its own intensity.
"NAAAA-HA-HA-HAT THE TOOO-HO-HOOOOES! IT'S WOOOOOORSE!!!"
It was a sound of complete neurological overload. A jagged, shattering cry that held both the peak of her unbearable torture and the horrific, twisted echo of laughter that broke through her screams. Her body was a convulsive blur on the screen, her head whipping repeatedly against the headrest, tears and saliva flying as her entire being surrendered to the sadistic assault.
"PLEEEEEASE! I'LL DO ANYTHING!! AAAA-HA-HA-HA-HA JUUU-HU-HU-HUST STAAAAAAHHHP!"
Jack watched in open-mouthed horror as Nails’ face, framed in a tight close-up, curved into a grotesque smile of pure, unadulterated ecstasy. He was feeding on her agony, lost in the rhythm of his own torment.
Nails lifted his hand that was raking her left foot and extended his index finger "now where was that spot..." Nails mused, drawing a tightening spiral just under the ball of Camila's left foot.
"NOT THERE!!! PLEASE FUCK NO!!!! I'LL SUCK YOUR DICK! ANYTHING! JUST..."
The wicked fingernail reached the centre of the spiral and an explosion like no other was released from Camila, it was clear that every fibre of her being was straining against the leather straps, giving them the endurance test of their lives. Then her body relaxed but the laughter and screams were deafening.
The video cut to a wide shot of the entire studio. The lights pulsed. The audience chat was a blur of neon text and cheering emojis on the side of the screen.
It wasn't just torture. It was a show. A show that Jack had helped write.
Jack's hand moved on pure instinct, and with a violent spasm, he slammed the lid of the laptop shut.
CRACK.
The screen went black, cutting off the sound of Camila’s inhuman shrieking.
The silence that rushed back into the office was suffocating. It was thick, heavy, and absolute. The rain outside seemed muffled, distant. The only sound in the room was Jack’s own ragged, shallow breathing, tearing at his throat.
He sat there, staring at the black plastic lid of the laptop, his brain short-circuiting. The image of Nails’ grinning face, of Camila’s trashing body, burned behind his eyes.
He had done this.
It wasn't Romano. It wasn't Knuckles or Slick or that sadistic freak with the claws. They were just the machinery. Jack was the operator who had fed an innocent woman into the gears.
A wave of pure, unadulterated self-loathing washed over him. It was a physical sickness, a roiling mass of bile and despair rising in his gut.
"FUCK!"
He screamed, the sound tearing from his chest, echoing in the small office. He stood up, the chair screeching against the floor, his body shaking with impotent rage.
"FUCK! FUCKING HELL! GOD DAMN IT!"
He turned, searching for something, anything to vent the torrent of guilt that was drowning him. His eyes landed on the desk. The half-read newspaper, the unpaid bills, the empty bourbon glass.
With a roar of frustration, he slammed his fist onto the wooden surface.
CRASH.
The empty glass shattered into a hundred shards. Papers flew everywhere. The old rotary phone jumped in its cradle.
He stood there, breathing heavily, his hand stinging, blood welling from a small cut on his knuckle where a shard of glass had nicked him. He didn’t feel it.
He looked up. Past the mess, past the window where the city was drowning in the rain. He looked at the corkboard.
Elena’s portrait stared back at him. Her smile was still bright, still hopeful. But now, it looked different. It looked like an accusation.
Six months. He had spent almost six months staring at that face, promising her father, promising himself, that he would save her. And what had he done?
He had taken another name, another face, and added it to the wall.
Jack leaned against the wall next to the board, his forehead resting against the cool cork. He closed his eyes, but he couldn't block it out. He could still hear the sound.
"NAAAA-HA-HA-HAT THE TOOO-HO-HOOOOES!"
He was a detective. His job was to find the truth. Well, he’d found it. The truth was that he was a failure, a coward, and a monster by proxy.
Jack Derringer stood alone in the dark office, the pieces of his broken world shattered around him. He had tried to light a fuse to blow open a prison. Instead, he’d just locked another innocent soul inside. And this time, he knew, there would be no key.
Next Chapter (6) - Vince
The rain hadn't stopped in three days. It was that miserable, relentless city rain that turned the streets into slick gray ribbons and made the air inside Jack Derringer’s second-floor office smell like damp wool and stale cigarette smoke.
He was slumped in his creaking swivel chair, nursing three fingers of cheap bourbon in a glass that hadn't been washed since Tuesday. The shades were drawn against the neon glare of the pawn shop sign below, casting the small room in perpetual twilight.
Jack stared across the cluttered desk, past the overflowing ashtray and the unpaid utility bills, to the corkboard that dominated the far wall. It used to be organized. Maps, timelines, neat little index cards. Now, it was a chaotic, sprawling mess of red string connecting dead ends to even deader ends.
But in the center, there was one clear point of focus. A high-quality studio portrait of a young woman. Elena Kowalski. Twenty-one. Eyes full of life, smile bright enough to light up a room.
The photo wasn't from a police file. It had been FedExed by a panicked father in Krakow, along with a cashier's check that had kept Jack in bourbon and rent for nearly six months.
"Here's to you, kid," Jack muttered, raising the glass in a mock toast before downing half of it. The liquor burned a familiar path down his throat, numbing the edges of the guilt that was his constant companion.
He knew everything. And he could do nothing.
That was the beauty of it. The perfect, horrible joke of his profession. He was an investigator who had solved the case, only to find out the answers were useless.
He looked at one of the index cards pinned with a red thumb tack. OLD PRINT WORKS - WEST DISTRICT. He knew the building, a rotting hulk of Victorian industry that had been condemned since the nineties.
He looked at another card, this one connected by a thick red line to a blurry telephoto shot of a fat man in a suit exiting a black sedan. ROMANO.
Jack rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. He knew who took her. He knew where she was. He even knew why, though the whispers he’d heard in the darkest corners of the city’s watering holes made his stomach churn.
But knowing wasn't action.
If this were a movie, he'd load up his snub-nose .38, kick down the door of the factory, shoot the bad guys, and carry Elena out into the rain. Cue the swelling orchestral music.
In reality, the Old Print Works was a fortress. Romano’s crew weren’t corner boys strapping Glocks; they were pros. Knuckles Grimaldi could break a man in half just for exercise. And the rumors about the others—Slick, the interrogator Nails—were enough to keep Jack awake at night.
Going in alone was suicide. It would get him killed, and worse, it would put Elena in the crosshairs. An asset that caused too much trouble was an asset that got liquidated.
And the cops? Jack poured the rest of the bourbon into his glass. He'd tried. four months ago, when he first connected the pieces. He'd sat down with a detective he knew, an old buddy from his short-lived days on the force. The man had looked at Jack’s notes, gone pale as a sheet, and pushed them back across the sticky bar table.
"Don't say that name, Jack," Harrington had hissed, eyes darting around the bar. "You bury this. Deep. Or I swear to Christ, they'll bury you in the foundation of that place."
The police weren't incompetent. They were the perimeter guard.
So Jack sat in his dim office, listening to the rain, staring at the face of a girl he was paid to save, knowing she was enduring god-knows-what just a few miles away, while he drank cheap booze and played pretend detective. He was a man holding the keys to a locked room, petrified of what would happen if he actually opened the door.
The bourbon was gone. Jack stared at the empty glass, the rain still drumming its endless rhythm against the window. It had been a week since the night he finally cracked, the night the passive guilt turned into reckless action.
His mind drifted back seven days.
He’d been at a greasy spoon diner at 3 AM, the kind of place where the coffee tasted like burnt pennies and the only other patrons were long-haul truckers and insomniacs. He was chain-smoking over a plate of cold eggs, flipping through a discarded copy of the Metro Tribune some previous customer had left behind.
He’d almost missed it. It was a small byline on page seven, buried under a fluff piece about a new artisanal bakery opening downtown.
West District Disappearances: A Pattern Emerges?
By Camila Reyes
The article itself was short, maybe three hundred words. It mentioned three names: Elena, Sarah, and Chloe. The police were quoted delivering the usual platitudes about runaways and drug debts.
But it was the tone of the writing. There was an urgency to it, a sharp, cynical edge that didn't buy the official line. Camila Reyes was asking potential witnesses for information. She was digging where nobody else was willing to put a shovel.
Jack had looked up the name. Camila was young, hungry, trying to make a name for herself in a dying industry. She wasn't a grizzled old cynic like him, beaten down by years of compromise. She still had fire.
And that made her dangerous. Both to Romano, and to herself.
An idea had formed in the smoky haze of his mind. It was a desperate, stupid, potentially catastrophic idea. But after nearly six months of staring at Elena’s picture, desperate and stupid was all he had left.
If he couldn't take it to the cops, and he couldn't kick down the door himself… maybe he could light a fuse.
Camila Reyes was already sniffing around the edges of the truth. What if he gave her the map?
She was a reporter. If she could blow this wide open—get Romano's name in print, get the location out there in the public eye—the police couldn't ignore it. Romano might have half the precinct on his payroll, but he couldn't pay off the entire city when it was headline news. The pressure would be too great. They'd have to raid the place.
It was a gamble. He knew that. He was putting a civilian in the line of fire. But the guilt of doing nothing had finally outweighed the fear of what might happen if he did something.
He’d grabbed a grease pencil from the waitress's apron while she was refilling his coffee. He ripped a coarse cocktail napkin from the metal dispenser on the table.
He hesitated for only a second, the tip of the pencil hovering over the textured paper. Then, he wrote.
THE OLD PRINT WORKS. WEST DISTRICT.
ROMANO.
Just two lines. The where and the who. The what… she would have to figure that out herself. If he told her the truth about The Giggle Room, she’d probably think he was a crank and throw it away. But a location and a name like Romano? That was bait no hungry reporter could resist.
He didn’t sign it. He couldn’t.
An hour later, the city was dark and slick with rain. He parked his rusted-out Ford sedan two blocks from a modest apartment building in Queens. He didn't know her unit number, but he knew she lived there. It hadn't been hard to find.
He stood in the vestibule, dripping on the cheap tiles, feeling more like a perp than a P.I. He watched the mail slots, reading the names and found what he was looking for "C. Reyes - 3B". When a tenant came out for a late-night smoke, Jack slipped in before the door closed.
He found her door on the third floor.
He stood there for a long moment, the napkin heavy in his damp palm. This was it. The point of no return. If he did this, he was setting a chain of events in motion he couldn't control.
He pictured Elena’s face. Then he pictured Romano’s laugh, the one that sounded like gravel shifting in a mixer.
His jaw tight, Jack stepped forward and slid the grease-stained napkin under the gap of the door.
It was done. The bomb was set. All he had to do was wait for the boom.
Now, a week later, sitting in his dark office, Jack finally allowed himself to wonder if he’d just lit the fuse on the bomb, or if he’d lit the fuse on Camila Reyes instead.
The silence in the office was heavy, broken only by the ceaseless drumming of rain against the window and the rhythmic clicking of Jack’s mouse.
Seven days. He’d counted every one.
He was hunched over his laptop, an ancient cinderblock of a machine that wheezed with the effort of running a modern web browser. He had the homepage of the Metro Tribune open, his finger hovering over the F5 key.
Refresh.
Nothing. The headline story was a piece on the mayor's new green space initiative. Below that, an article on the local sports team's losing streak.
Refresh.
He scrolled down, his eyes scanning the bylines, looking for the name. Camila Reyes. There was nothing. Not a follow-up on the missing girls, not a city council report, not even a review of a new diner.
The hope that had fueled his desperate gamble a week ago was curdling into a sour, sickening dread in the pit of his stomach.
"Come on, kid," Jack muttered, rubbing the stubble on his jaw with a shaking hand. "Where's the scoop? Where's the headline that blows the lid off this whole thing?"
He looked up at the corkboard. Elena's portrait seemed to be staring right at him, her smile now mocking his optimism. He pictured the napkin under the door. Had she thought it was a prank? Had she ignored it?
Or had she done exactly what he hoped she would? Had she taken the bait, grabbed her notebook, and headed straight for the West District?
A chill snakes its way up Jack's spine that had nothing to do with the draft in the office. If she had gone to the Print Works… and if she had found something… why was there no story?
Romano wasn't the type to sue for libel. He handled problems in a much more direct, permanent way.
Jack slammed the laptop lid shut, the sudden noise echoing in the quiet room. He couldn't just sit here and click refresh anymore. The not knowing was eating him alive. He needed a drink, but the bottle was empty. He needed answers, but the screen was blank.
He stood up, pacing the small, cramped space between the desk and the window. His mind was a hamster wheel of worst-case scenarios. The police were useless. His own investigation was a dead end. And now, his last-ditch effort, his Hail Mary pass… it seemed to have vanished into the same void that swallowed Elena.
He had to know.
With a surge of terrifying adrenaline, Jack turned and grabbed the heavy, old-fashioned telephone on his desk. He knew it was a risk. Calling brought attention. But he was past caring about risks now. He dialed the main number for the Metro Tribune, his fingers fumbling slightly with the buttons.
It rang three times before a bored voice answered. "Metro Tribune, how may I direct your call?"
Jack gripped the receiver until his knuckles turned white. He took a breath, forcing his voice into a calm, professional timbre that he didn’t feel.
"Yeah, hi. I'm looking to get in touch with one of your reporters. Camila Reyes?" He paused for a beat, adding, "It’s about a story she’s working on."
The line went quiet for a moment. He heard the faint clicking of a keyboard on the other end.
"Hold please." The hold music was a tinny, distorted jazz tune. Every second felt like an hour. Jack wiped a line of sweat from his forehead, despite the chill in the room.
After what felt like an eternity, the line clicked back. It wasn't the same bored receptionist. The voice that spoke this time was sharper, more official. A man’s voice.
"Who am I speaking with?" he asked, no pleasantries.
Jack’s heart hammered against his ribs. This was bad. A simple transfer didn't warrant a handoff like this.
"Just a… a concerned citizen," he lied smoothly. "I have some information about the West District disappearances Ms. Reyes wrote about last week."
There was another pause. Jack imagined this new man signaling to someone across the room.
"Ms. Reyes is no longer with our publication," the man said coldly. "She submitted her resignation last week. Effective immediately."
The words hit Jack like a physical blow to the stomach. His breath caught in his throat.
Resignation. Effective immediately.
In the world of journalism, that was code. It could mean she got a spectacular offer from the NYT. It could mean she had a breakdown. But given what she was looking into… it could mean something far more sinister. It could mean she had been silenced.
"Resigned?" Jack managed to choke out, his voice rougher than he intended. "That’s… sudden. Do you have a contact number for her? This information is—"
"We have no contact information for Ms. Reyes," the man cut him off, his tone brooking no argument. "As for the West District story…"
His voice shifted again, dropping into a tone that was no longer official, but outright suspicious.
"What is your name, sir? And what is the nature of this information you have?"
It wasn't a question from an editor looking for a lead. It was a question from someone who was vetting calls. Someone who had been instructed to flag anyone asking about Camila Reyes and the West District.
Jack’s mind flashed to Detective Harrington’s pale face in the bar. “They’ll bury you.”
Romano’s reach didn’t just extend to the cops. It reached here, too. To the newspapers. The whole system was infected.
"Never mind," Jack whispered, his throat tight with terror. "Forget I called."
He slammed the receiver down into the cradle, his hand shaking uncontrollably. He stared at the phone as if it were a live snake.
He’d done it. God help him, he’d done it. He hadn't given her a story. He had given her a death sentence.
He wasn't just the man watching the empty room. He was the one who had locked the door.
Jack stared at the phone, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The rain pounded harder against the glass, a deafening static that matched the noise in his head.
Resigned. Gone. No forwarding address.
His stomach twisted with a sickening certainty. He knew what that meant. Romano didn't send cease-and-desist letters. He didn't file lawsuits. He erased problems.
And Jack had just handed him one on a platter.
He stumbled back from the desk, his legs weak. He needed a drink, but the bottle was empty. He needed to run, but there was nowhere to go. The walls of his office felt like they were closing in, the faces on the corkboard staring down at him in silent accusation.
He was drowning in guilt. It was a physical weight, heavy and cold, pulling him down.
He couldn’t just sit here. Not now. The not knowing was worse than any truth could be. He had to find out. He owed her that much.
With a jerky, desperate motion, Jack threw himself back into his chair. He opened the ancient laptop, its fan whining in protest. The screen flared back to life.
He didn't open the browser he used for news and sports. He reached into the drawer and pulled out a small, black USB drive. He plugged it into the side of the laptop.
He didn’t want to do this. He had sworn he wouldn't go back into that world. The things he’d seen during his initial hunt for Elena—the depravity, the cruelty—it had stained him. It’s what had driven him to the bottle in the first place.
But now, it was the only door left open.
He clicked the icon for the Tor browser. The screen turned a dark, muted grey as it connected, bouncing his signal through a dozen servers around the world, hiding his digital footprint in the labyrinth of the dark web.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He didn’t need to check his notes for the address. It was burned into his memory. A string of random alphanumeric characters that led to the heart of the nightmare.
He typed it in, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
Enter.
The screen went black. A loading icon spun—a small, stylized laughing mouth with a feather over it. The logo of The Giggle Room.
He prayed, a desperate, silent plea to a God he’d long since given up on.
Please let the site be down. Please let it be a 404 error. Please let it be anything other than what I know it is.
He prayed he would see Elena. If he saw her, it meant she was alive. That was all he had wanted for nearly six months.
But a new prayer was fighting its way to the surface, dark and terrible.
Please don't let me see her. Please don’t let me see Camila.
If she wasn't there, there was still hope. Maybe she had run. Maybe she was safe.
The loading icon stopped spinning. The homepage appeared. Sleek and professional, like a high-end Netflix for human misery.
And in the center, under the banner that read RECENT HIGHLIGHTS, was a video thumbnail. It wasn't Elena.
Jack's blood turned to ice. He stopped breathing.
He stared at the small, pixelated image, his world narrowing down to that terrifying rectangle of light.
It was her. Camila.
Jack’s hand trembled so fiercely he could barely control the mouse, but he forced himself to click on the thumbnail. The video player expanded, filling the laptop’s cracked screen with high definition horror.
It was a professional production. Multiple camera angles, crisp audio—it looked like a prime-time news report, but the subject was torture.
There she was. Camila Reyes. The fiery journalist he had sent to her doom.
She was strapped to a heavy medical table in the center of a well-lit studio. Jack recognized the layout, the dark background he had seen in other videos. But this… this was different.
She looked deranged. Her dark hair was a wild, sweaty tangle plastered to her forehead and cheeks. Her face was a twisted mask of pure, frantic desperation. Her body thrashed violently against the leather restraints, but it wasn't the predictable thrashing of someone trying to escape pain. It was something much more chaotic, more panicked.
She was squirming. Her feet were kicking and twisting, her torso straining against the thick leather strap, her head whipping from side to side on the padded headrest. She looked like someone strapped to a bed of fire ants.
The audio crackled to life, and Jack winced. It wasn't screams. It was worse. It was a broken, breathless, hysterical litany of pleas and choked, jagged sobbing.
"God, please! Make it stop! It burns! It burns!" She wasn't screaming at a captor; she was screaming at the sensation itself. "Get it off me! My feet! Oh god, my feet! Please!"
The video cut to a wider angle. Jack saw him. Grimaldi. A mountain of a man in a dark t-shirt, standing at the foot of the table. He wasn't holding a club or a knife.
He was holding a simple, white-bristled hairbrush.
He wasn't touching her. He was just holding the brush a few inches from the soles of her bare feet, waving it slowly, tantalisingly.
Jack’s stomach lurched. He recognized the tactic. He’d seen it in the chatrooms, heard the whispers. Atkins. The doctor. The "gardener." He’d used itching powder on her sensitized skin. The most potent, maddening blend of hellfire they had.
Camila's eyes were on the brush, the relief was so close, but she knew what that relief was going to cost her. Her hands clenched and unclenched, clawing the air desperately.
"Please!" Camila shrieked, her voice cracking. "Just… just make it stop…"
Knuckles lowered the brush slightly, his voice a deep, rumbling growl that the microphone barely picked up.
"Say the words, lady."
Camila stopped thrashing for a millisecond. She looked at him, her eyes wide and haunted, tears cutting tracks through the sweat on her face. She was breaking. Jack could see it happening in real-time. The fight was gone, replaced by a primal, overpowering need for relief.
She let out a choked, broken sob, a horrible sound that was half-gasp, half-whimper.
"Please…" she rasped, her voice thick with despair. "Please… scratch my feet."
The words hung in the air, a total surrender. A journalist, reduced to begging a monster for a moment of scratching.
Knuckles' smile widened. He chuckled—a low, wet sound.
"You heard the lady," he murmured, as if to an unseen audience. He didn't move to scratch her instead he lowered the brush to his side.
Knuckles turned his head, looking off-camera. "Luis, are the votes in?"
A new voice, greasy and smooth, came from the speakers. "Yes indeed, Tony. The people have spoken!"
Jack clutched the edge of his desk, his knuckles white. A vote. An audience. God…
The video cut to a shot of the side of the set. A wiry figure stepped out of the shadows.
He wore a sleek black suit that seemed too big for his thin frame. His dark hair was greased back flat to his skull. His face was pale, his smile a thin, cruel line that didn't reach his cold, dead shark’s eyes.
It was Nails. Carlo Bellini. The sadist.
He walked towards the table with a fluid, almost reptilian grace. He didn't look at Camila's face. He was looking at her twitching, desperate feet.
As he approached the foot of the table, he held his hands up into the light. They were long, spindly, the fingers like brittle twigs. And at the end of each finger was a horror show. His fingernails were lacquered to a glassy shine, filed into long, curving, deadly points that glinted like shards of obsidian under the studio lights.
Nails stopped at the foot of the table.He leaned in slightly, his smile widening.
"Happy to oblige," he purred, his voice a soft, terrifying hiss.
On the laptop screen, the scene dissolved into chaos.
As Nails’ hands, with their glinting, lacquered talons, came into the light at the foot of the table, Camila’s eyes went wide. The realization of what was about to happen hit her with the force of a physical blow. The desperate pleading vanished instantly, replaced by frantic begging.
"NO! NOT THAT!!! ANYTHING BUT THAT! I'LL DIE!!!"
Her screams shredded his laptop speakers, audio peaking into distorted static with every word. It was a primal screech of pure terror, her body bucking against the straps with renewed, frantic energy. She was desperately trying to pull her feet away after she had just begged for relief.
Nails, for his part, didn't even flinch. He moved with the cold, deliberate precision of a surgeon. He didn’t need to hold her feet; the straps and Knuckles' earlier "prep work" kept them presented and vulnerable.
He went to work.
His right hand, fingers curved into a claw, latched onto her right sole. He didn't just scratch; he raked. He sank the tips of all four talons deep into the pad of her foot and dragged them down the entire length of her arch, from the base of her toes to her heel. It was a slow, agonizingly deliberate movement, his nails drawing thin, white lines that instantly flamed red against her hypersensitive skin.
"NO NO NAAAAA-HA-HA-HA-HA FUUUUUU! STAAAAAAAAAAHHHP"
Simultaneously, his left hand attacked her left foot. He splayed his spidery fingers wide and jammed the sharpened points of all five nails deep into the delicate, powder-coated webbing between her toes. He twisted them back and forth, digging and scraping in the most intimate, maddening crevices.
The sound that came from Camila wasn't a scream anymore. It wasn’t sobbing. It wasn’t human. It was a horrible, high-pitched, sustained shriek that fractured and broke under its own intensity.
"NAAAA-HA-HA-HAT THE TOOO-HO-HOOOOES! IT'S WOOOOOORSE!!!"
It was a sound of complete neurological overload. A jagged, shattering cry that held both the peak of her unbearable torture and the horrific, twisted echo of laughter that broke through her screams. Her body was a convulsive blur on the screen, her head whipping repeatedly against the headrest, tears and saliva flying as her entire being surrendered to the sadistic assault.
"PLEEEEEASE! I'LL DO ANYTHING!! AAAA-HA-HA-HA-HA JUUU-HU-HU-HUST STAAAAAAHHHP!"
Jack watched in open-mouthed horror as Nails’ face, framed in a tight close-up, curved into a grotesque smile of pure, unadulterated ecstasy. He was feeding on her agony, lost in the rhythm of his own torment.
Nails lifted his hand that was raking her left foot and extended his index finger "now where was that spot..." Nails mused, drawing a tightening spiral just under the ball of Camila's left foot.
"NOT THERE!!! PLEASE FUCK NO!!!! I'LL SUCK YOUR DICK! ANYTHING! JUST..."
The wicked fingernail reached the centre of the spiral and an explosion like no other was released from Camila, it was clear that every fibre of her being was straining against the leather straps, giving them the endurance test of their lives. Then her body relaxed but the laughter and screams were deafening.
The video cut to a wide shot of the entire studio. The lights pulsed. The audience chat was a blur of neon text and cheering emojis on the side of the screen.
It wasn't just torture. It was a show. A show that Jack had helped write.
Jack's hand moved on pure instinct, and with a violent spasm, he slammed the lid of the laptop shut.
CRACK.
The screen went black, cutting off the sound of Camila’s inhuman shrieking.
The silence that rushed back into the office was suffocating. It was thick, heavy, and absolute. The rain outside seemed muffled, distant. The only sound in the room was Jack’s own ragged, shallow breathing, tearing at his throat.
He sat there, staring at the black plastic lid of the laptop, his brain short-circuiting. The image of Nails’ grinning face, of Camila’s trashing body, burned behind his eyes.
He had done this.
It wasn't Romano. It wasn't Knuckles or Slick or that sadistic freak with the claws. They were just the machinery. Jack was the operator who had fed an innocent woman into the gears.
A wave of pure, unadulterated self-loathing washed over him. It was a physical sickness, a roiling mass of bile and despair rising in his gut.
"FUCK!"
He screamed, the sound tearing from his chest, echoing in the small office. He stood up, the chair screeching against the floor, his body shaking with impotent rage.
"FUCK! FUCKING HELL! GOD DAMN IT!"
He turned, searching for something, anything to vent the torrent of guilt that was drowning him. His eyes landed on the desk. The half-read newspaper, the unpaid bills, the empty bourbon glass.
With a roar of frustration, he slammed his fist onto the wooden surface.
CRASH.
The empty glass shattered into a hundred shards. Papers flew everywhere. The old rotary phone jumped in its cradle.
He stood there, breathing heavily, his hand stinging, blood welling from a small cut on his knuckle where a shard of glass had nicked him. He didn’t feel it.
He looked up. Past the mess, past the window where the city was drowning in the rain. He looked at the corkboard.
Elena’s portrait stared back at him. Her smile was still bright, still hopeful. But now, it looked different. It looked like an accusation.
Six months. He had spent almost six months staring at that face, promising her father, promising himself, that he would save her. And what had he done?
He had taken another name, another face, and added it to the wall.
Jack leaned against the wall next to the board, his forehead resting against the cool cork. He closed his eyes, but he couldn't block it out. He could still hear the sound.
"NAAAA-HA-HA-HAT THE TOOO-HO-HOOOOES!"
He was a detective. His job was to find the truth. Well, he’d found it. The truth was that he was a failure, a coward, and a monster by proxy.
Jack Derringer stood alone in the dark office, the pieces of his broken world shattered around him. He had tried to light a fuse to blow open a prison. Instead, he’d just locked another innocent soul inside. And this time, he knew, there would be no key.
Next Chapter (6) - Vince
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