They wiped the dirt

The drive was longer than she expected.

They left the estate behind, the iron gates closing in the rearview mirror, and plunged deeper into the countryside. The roads narrowed, the asphalt cracking, the trees pressing closer on either side until the canopy blotted out the sky entirely. The sun became a rumor, a pale glow filtered through layers of green.

He did not speak. He stared at his bruised knuckles, turning his hands over in his lap as if examining the damage for the first time. She watched the landscape blur past the tinted glass, counting the miles by the texture of the road beneath the tires.

When the car finally slowed, it was because the pavement had ended.

Gravel crunched beneath the wheels. The forest on either side thinned, giving way to a dead clearing—a stretch of earth where nothing grew, where the soil was a dark, wet brown that looked wrong against the surrounding green. The driver killed the engine.

"We are here," Adyant said. "Find it."

---

She stepped out.

The air was different here. Colder, somehow, despite the morning light. The wind moved through the dead branches with a sound like whispered warnings. She pressed her heels into the damp earth and felt the ground give.

He followed. She heard the crunch of his polished shoes on the gravel, the heavier weight of his stride as he stepped onto the soil behind her.

"Look at the soil," he said. His voice was completely hollow. "Any boot prints left behind?"

She looked. She studied the gentle swell and dip of the earth, the way the dirt had settled, the faint marks that could have been footprints or could have been wind. Nothing was clear. Nothing was certain.

"No."

His jaw locked tight. The cold wind whipped around him, catching the edge of his dark suit, molding the fabric against his frame. He stared down at the damp earth as if he could force it to confess by sheer will alone.

"They wiped the dirt," he said, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper. "Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing." She stated.

He turned away from the grave, his dark eyes narrowing. "We find them now."

"The picture of her body."

---

His body went completely rigid.

The wind whipped his dark suit, the sound filling the silence between them. She watched his shoulders rise and fall with a breath he seemed to be forcing into his lungs. When he turned to face her, his eyes were dark, hollow, hunted.

"You want to see what they did to her?"

He stepped closer. His voice did not rise above a whisper, and that made it worse. A shout would have been easier. A shout would have been something she could push back against.

"That evidence is heavily encrypted." He held her gaze, the darkness in his eyes carrying a weight that made her chest tighten. "If you think looking at my murdered sister's corpse will solve this, you are wrong."

She stared at him. At the rigid line of his shoulders, the way his hands were clenched into fists at his sides, the faint tremor in his jaw that he could not suppress.

"The picture stays encrypted," he said, his voice barely carrying over the wind. "Find your answers somewhere else."

---

He walked past her. Back toward the car.

She stood alone at the edge of the dead clearing, looking down at the disturbed earth where a woman's life had ended, and she understood something that she had not understood before.

This was not just a man who had lost his sister. This was a man who had lost himself in the territory of her death, who had scrubbed her traces from the earth because the alternative—leaving them there, untouched, unavenged—would have broken him entirely.

The car door opened. The engine turned over.

She followed him.

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