I'm back at the morning I'm named as a suspect on the news.

The silence in Room 104 was no longer the clinical quiet of a police facility; it was the suffocating, static-charged stillness that settles over a prairie right before a tornado touches down.

Bradley stood with his back pressed against the heavy steel door, his chest heaving under his navy tactical sweater, his fingers digging into the seams of his trousers. The sweat was visible now, glistening along his hairline, dripping down into his neat, trimmed sideburns.

"You think you're clever, don't you, Nate?" Bradley whispered, his voice shaking with a terrifying, venomous vibration. "You think some blurry night-vision footage is going to clear you? A good defense attorney might get you a mistrial. Might get you a second hearing in three years. But you’ll sit in county the whole damn time."

I didn't answer. I leaned back against the concrete wall, crossed my ankles, and looked at the clock above the door.

7:18 AM.

In my first life, this was the exact moment they had marched me down the hallway to the magistrate's bench for the preliminary arraignment. The hallway had been packed with local reporters, church members who had known my parents, and Arthur’s country-club friends, all of them shouting questions, spitting insults, their faces twisted into masks of self-righteous fury. Bradley had walked beside me then, his hand firmly on my elbow, playing the protective lawman while whispering into my ear that if I pleaded out, he’d make sure I got a facility with an outdoor yard.

"Where is Arthur, Bradley?" I asked, my voice calm, level, and entirely devoid of anger.

Bradley let out a sharp, ragged bark of laughter that had no humor in it. "He's dead, Nate. You know that better than anyone."

"Arthur's not dead," I said.

Bradley froze. The laughter died in his throat like a swallowed bone.

"What did you say?" he breathed.

"Arthur’s not dead," I repeated, leaning forward, resting my cuffed hands on my knees. "He wasn't at the quarry. He wasn't behind the batch plant. And that blood on the timber wedge you pulled out of my truck? It's not Arthur's. It's yours, isn't it?"

A drop of sweat rolled off Bradley’s jaw, falling onto the collar of his sweater with a tiny, dark stain.

"You cut your forearm on the fence wire three nights ago," I continued, reciting the facts that had taken my second-life appellate team eighteen months to uncover after it was too late. "Climbing through the breach behind the municipal impound lot. You needed fresh Type-A negative blood to prime the wedge before you planted it. Arthur’s blood type was O-positive. The state crime lab in Joliet would have caught the discrepancy within forty-eight hours—which is why your buddy in the property room was scheduled to 'lose' the primary blood tube during transport this afternoon."

Bradley’s mouth parted slightly. His eyes widened until the whites showed all the way around the irises—the look of a man who has suddenly realized the floor he’s standing on isn't concrete, but thin, rotted ice over forty fathoms of black water.

"How..." Bradley choked out, his voice reduced to a dry, rattling squeak. "Who told you that? Who've you been talking to in Springfield?"

"Nobody in Springfield, Bradley," I said softly. "Arthur told me."

That was a lie. Arthur hadn't told me anything; Arthur was currently sitting in a private suite at the Grand Lucayan Resort in Freeport, Bahamas, drinking gin and tonics under an assumed name, waiting for Bradley to wire the eight-million-dollar insurance settlement through an offshore shell company in Grand Cayman. In my first life, Arthur had spent that money for two years before an overdose in a Miami nightclub finally put an end to his miserable existence.

Bradley’s mind, already splintering under the weight of the surveillance video, snapped on the bait.

"Arthur... Arthur wouldn't talk to you," Bradley stammered, stepping toward the table, his hands reaching out as if to grasp something that wasn't there. "He couldn't. He didn't have the codes—"

He stopped himself. The silence crashed back down on him like an avalanche.

The heavy steel latch on the door rattled.

The lock solenoid clicked once, twice, and the door swung open.

Standing in the doorway was not Sergeant Miller.

It was Captain Thomas Vance—their uncle, the commander of the criminal investigation division—flanked by two uniformed officers from the Illinois State Police Special Investigations Unit, their maroon windbreakers bright against the drab institutional green of the hallway.

Behind them stood the Cook County Assistant State's Attorney, a sharp-featured woman named Sarah Sterling, holding a tablet computer that was currently displaying a high-resolution, four-panel video grid.

On the screen, playing in a continuous, high-definition loop, was a crystal-clear infrared shot of Bradley Vance standing in the bed of my Chevy Silverado at 2:14 a.m., carefully sliding an iron timber wedge beneath a false sheet-metal partition.

Sarah Sterling didn't look at me. She looked at Bradley, her expression carved from solid granite.

"Detective Vance," she said, her voice cutting through the room like a sub-zero draft. "Step away from the suspect. Place your service weapon, your badge, and your credentials on the table."

Bradley took half a step back, his spine hitting the cinderblock wall. "Uncle Tom... listen to me... it's a deepfake! It's an AI video! He’s an engineer—"

"Shut your mouth, Bradley," Captain Vance said, his voice trembling with a mixture of profound shame and murderous fury. "We pulled the raw telemetry from the cellular tower on North Ridge Road. Your personal phone pinged the mast four hundred yards from Hayes’s driveway at two-fifteen this morning. While you were supposed to be sleeping in your bed in Schaumburg."

The State Police officers stepped into the room.

The first officer—a tall, broad-shouldered trooper with ice-blue eyes—reached out, unclipped Bradley’s duty belt, and stripped the gold shield from his chest with a single, brutal tug that tore the stitching on his navy sweater.

RIP.

The sound was tiny, but to everyone in that room, it was the sound of a dynasty ending.

"Bradley Vance," the trooper said, his voice flat, professional, and entirely indifferent to the family drama unfolding on the concrete. "You are under arrest for Aggravated Perjury, Tampering with Public Records, Obstruction of Justice, and Fabrication of Physical Evidence in a Capital Proceeding. You have the right to remain silent..."

As the steel cuffs ratcheted around Bradley’s wrists, his head dropped forward, his forehead resting against the cold pea-green enamel of the wall.

He didn't look at his uncle. He didn't look at the prosecutor.

He looked back over his shoulder at me—at the man who had sat in that chair, silent and motionless, while the trap he had designed for another closed around his own throat.

"Where is he, Nate?" Bradley wept, actual tears finally breaking free and rolling down his pale, ruined face. "Where's my brother?"

I stood up slowly, holding my cuffed hands out toward the second State Police officer, who immediately stepped forward with a key to unlock the iron jaws.

Click.

The steel fell away from my wrists.