Pale City didn’t sleep — it lurked. It watched from rain puddles and crooked windowpanes, a thousand wet eyes waiting for the moment your back turned so it could grind another soul into the gutter. Detective Adrian Vale had learned that the hard way. Hell, the city had carved the lesson right into his ribs.

He crushed a cigarette into the ashtray of his battered sedan, a graveyard of ashes and half-smoked regrets. The air inside was thick enough to bottle. Another night bleeding into the next. Another corpse waiting at the other end of a police radio.

“Det. Vale, radio in please.” Dispatch screeched like a rusted hinge.

“Vale here. Hit me.”

“Homicide at 11901 Crescent Moon Drive. Penthouse level, Graywick Tower. Victim: Vivienne Moreau. Multiple lacerations, blunt force trauma. Locked room. No forced entry.”

Adrian muttered, “Of course it’s the Graywick…”

The Graywick Tower wasn’t a building — it was a bad habit the city couldn’t quit. Locals called it The Grinning House, because every body pulled from it wore the same twisted, impossible smile. Fires that shouldn’t start. Suicides that didn’t match physics. Tenants vanishing between rent cycles. Serial killers, ghosts, mob safehouses, satanic hobbyists — you name the darkness, the Graywick rented it a room.

So why live there? Cheap rent. And ignorance but Pale City cured ignorance fast.

To Adrian, it was a soul-sucking silo, another playground for nightmares wearing good shoes. And Vivienne Moreau? Just another story the building wanted to tell.

He flicked on his headlights and pushed into the rain-slick night. Steam curled out of the alleys like the city was exhaling its sins. Neon puddles trembled back at him, almost… aware.

Pale City — the new Hollywood, people said. Sure. If Hollywood drowned its dreamers in gin then sold their ghosts season passes.

Speakeasies hid beneath laundromats. Piano bars outnumbered gas stations. You had grimey dives where the whiskey tasted like heartbreak, and velvet palaces where crime bosses toasted to their newest star. Actors flocked here to take their shot at fame. Most just took a bullet instead.

Vivienne Moreau’s penthouse glittered with the kind of wealth that comes with strings attached — strings wrapped around throats. Velvet drapes. Crystal decanters. Perfume still floating like a ghost that hadn’t realized its host was dead.

And the mirrors. So many mirrors. The biggest one lay shattered across the far wall, a spiderweb of silver shards glittering like frozen lightning.

Adrian crouched beside the body. Vivienne — the city’s newest nightclub darling — sprawled on the marble floor, her throat bruised, wrists sliced, eyes open wide enough to reflect every mistake she’d ever made. Suicide? In Pale City? In the Graywick? That was a bedtime story for children. The marks on her neck told the truth — someone had choked the life out of her.

But there was something else.

The mirror shards… shifted.
Not moved — shifted.
As though each fragment remembered something it wasn’t supposed to.
Movement flickered at the corner of his eye, but stopped the second he stared.
The room hummed like a throat clearing.

Footsteps behind him.

“Keene, reporting in!”

Adrian sighed before turning. Aria Keene. Fresh transfer from Chicago — badge shiny, stride confident, eyes sharp enough to fillet a liar. Headquarters sent her to learn from him. Lucky her. Pale City wasn’t Chicago. Pale City was Chicago’s nightmares after a three-day bender.

“You’re late,” Adrian said.

“I was across town. And this place is creepy.”

“This whole damn town is creepy.” He pointed at the door latch. “Look. Locked from the inside. Steel. Reinforced. Someone killed her and sealed it on their way out.”

Aria blinked. “Locked-room homicide? First day? They warned me about you.”

“I don’t attract these cases,” Adrian said. “The city does. I’m just the poor bastard stuck cleaning them up.”

She opened her notebook. “Who we looking at?”

Adrian exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. “Half the building, probably.”
Tobias Crane, the building manager, hovered nearby — twitchy, eager to please, too eager. Promised access to footage, files, anything they needed.

The suspects lined up like a cast auditioning for the role of murderer:

Marco DeLance — Vivienne’s ex-manager, formerly her lover. Relationship ended last week. Vivienne had threatened to expose the affair to Marco’s wife unless he catapulted her career.

Elena Voss — a jealous backup singer with a rap sheet long enough to wrap around the block. Stalking charges, threats, altercations. She left a breadcrumb trail of obsession.

Julian Hart — wealthy patron, a temper, and a keycard. Lavished Vivienne with gifts like he was trying to buy himself a soul. Most of those gifts now sat in her room — paid for by his account.

But none of them explained the locked room.

Unless one of them had learned how to walk through walls.

Residents reported hearing a violent argument, but no one saw a single person leave. Cameras showed only Vivienne entering her room. No exit. No shadow slipping out. No trick of the light.

Hours passed. Aria dozed off in the passenger seat as they circled the city, but Adrian’s mind sharpened behind the wheel. The open road always whispered answers.

After another lap through Pale City’s veins, he dropped her at her apartment.
“Get some sleep, kid,” Adrian murmured.
He meant it for both of them.

Aria showered off the cigarette smoke and death-stink of the Graywick, but something gnawed at her. A moment from the scene. A detail she couldn’t unsee. She crawled into bed, opened her phone, replayed the crime scene videos.

Then she saw it.

Something that cracked the case wide open.

She was up before dawn, back at the Graywick, chasing the truth. Adrian was already there — but he wasn’t alone.

A shadow moved by Vivienne’s shattered vanity.

Adrian’s hand drifted to his gun.
“If you wanna get shot, move an inch.”

“These things are expensive,” Julian Hart protested, holding a fistful of jewelry and a Louis Vuitton purse. “I merely wanted them back.”

“There’s no ‘merely’ at a crime scene. You’re under arrest,” Adrian growled. Too much evidence pointed his way. Motive. Access. Obsession. The whole toxic cocktail.

Then — a sound.

A soft click from behind the wall.

A hidden door creaked open.

“Adrian!” Aria’s voice erupted from the darkness. “Get down!”

He ducked just as a figure lunged from the secret passage — gun raised, eyes manic. A single gunshot cracked the air. Tobias Crane — the building manager — collapsed, his gun unfired, his secrets spilling onto the marble.

Adrian wheeled toward the darkness, weapon ready.

Julian panicked, dropping the jewelry and scrambling for a hidden pistol. Before he could fire, another shot exploded from the secret doorway.

Julian fell backwards. Dead.

“Don’t shoot! It’s me!”
Aria stepped from the shadows, gun trembling but still steady enough.

Adrian stared. “What in the hell is going on?”

“It was both of them,” Aria said, voice low. “Tobias and Julian. They killed her together.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

Aria didn’t answer — she showed him.

She knelt beside the mirror fragments. Her flashlight hit them just right, and the shards began to flicker. Images swirled in the glass like trapped smoke. Vivienne screaming. Hands grabbing her. A figure behind her — not DeLance, not Elena. Two shapes. Two killers. Both going into the hidden passage. They got in the same way they escaped.

Aria held up one shard. “See that?”

Adrian squinted. “Looks like a reflection.”

“Watch.” She said as she moved her hand. Her reflection followed. Vivienne’s did not.

Adrian’s breath caught. “Well, ain’t that some shit,” he whispered. “Welcome to Pale City.”

Aria pulled up the video she had created — digitally reassembling the shattered mirror like a jigsaw puzzle. The moment the last fragment aligned, the killers’ faces emerged, clear as daylight.

Aria smirked softly beside him.
“You’re welcome, partner.”

The sound of a match igniting killed the silence. Adrian took a long drag of his cigarette.
“Alright, rookie… I owe you one.”

Outside, the rain washed blood from Adrian’s wingtip shoes. The Graywick Tower stood like a giant with a crooked smile, its windows glistening like watching eyes.

“You did good, Keene,” Adrian said. “But let me give you some advice.”

She raised a brow. “Yeah?”

“In Pale City…the case is never really closed.”

Aria glanced up at the Graywick’s darkened windows and swore she saw a shadow move behind one.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I’m starting to see that.”