Chapter 2 Unbalanced
Detective Mira Ellison woke to the rattle of rain against her bedroom window. For a disorienting moment she thought she was still at the banker’s apartment, still standing in front of the black ledger with her pulse drumming in her ears. But then she felt the rough cotton of her sheets against her legs, smelled the faint bitter trace of last night’s cigarette smoke lingering in her apartment, and the memory of the slip of paper slid back in with a sharp chill.
YOU ARE ALREADY WRITTEN.
She sat up too fast. The note was still on her nightstand, folded neatly where she had left it, a thin blade of menace against the pale wood. The ledger lay beside it, locked inside her briefcase. She had checked the locks twice before trying to sleep. Didn’t matter. The warning had wormed into her dreams.
She showered, dressed, and brewed coffee strong enough to burn her tongue. None of it cleared the fog in her head. Her instincts screamed at her: file the ledger, log the note, let the department take the heat. But the same instincts told her the department was already compromised. You don’t sneak a threat under a detective’s front door unless you’re sure someone in her building, maybe even her unit, is looking the other way.
Her phone buzzed. Text message. Marcus Vane: “Heard about the banker. Meet me at 9. Same diner.”
She stared at the screen, coffee halfway to her lips. Vane.
The name still burned in her head from the ledger. Written cleanly, without a date, without a line through it. Not dead yet. Maybe not guilty either. But he was there, between pages of corpses and ghosts.
She typed back: “Fine.”
---
The diner hadn’t changed in ten years. Red vinyl booths patched with duct tape, a flickering neon sign in the window, a waitress who never smiled. Mira slid into a booth, set her briefcase beside her, and waited. The ledger seemed to thrum against her leg like a second heartbeat.
Marcus Vane arrived late, as usual. Crisp navy suit, cufflinks, hair slicked back. He looked more like a corporate lawyer than a detective, but Mira knew better. Vane thrived on appearances.
“Ellison,” he said, sliding into the booth opposite her. “You look like hell.”
“Good morning to you too,” she muttered, wrapping her hands around the mug of burnt diner coffee.
Vane leaned forward. “So. Banker slices his wrists in a penthouse and leaves his affairs in perfect order. Doesn’t smell right. What’s your read?”
Mira studied him carefully. His eyes were sharp, calculating, but too calm. She thought about pulling out the ledger, slamming it on the table, demanding an explanation for why his name was inside. Instead, she said, “Doesn’t feel like suicide.”
“Agreed.” He nodded, tapping his fingers against the Formica tabletop. “But Hodge already called it clean. That’ll be the official report.”
“Too fast,” Mira said. “Way too fast.”
Vane smirked. “You’d think we’d get tired of cover-ups, wouldn’t you?”
Her stomach tightened. He said it casually, like he was testing her. Watching for a crack.
“You think this one’s connected?” she asked.
“To what?” His smile didn’t falter, but his eyes flickered just slightly, and Mira knew she had brushed against something he didn’t want touched.
She leaned back, keeping her face blank. “Forget it.”
The waitress arrived with Vane’s order—black coffee, scrambled eggs, nothing else. He dug in, eating with the efficiency of a man who hated wasting time.
“You still chasing shadows, Ellison?” he asked between bites.
She forced a thin smile. “Depends whose shadow it is.”
They ate in silence after that, the diner buzzing faintly with chatter from the morning crowd. But Mira’s thoughts weren’t on the food. They were on the ledger burning in her briefcase and the name written inside it.
When Vane finally pushed his plate aside and stood to leave, he placed a twenty on the table. “Be careful on this one,” he said. “Bankers don’t die without leaving debts behind.”
Mira froze. The phrasing. Debts. Almost the exact word the man on the phone had used last night.
By the time she looked up, Vane was already gone.
---
Back at her precinct desk, the ledger weighed heavy in her drawer. She had sealed it inside an envelope, labeled it with a false tag—“miscellaneous papers”—to keep curious eyes away. But she knew it wasn’t safe. Not here. Not where half the department owed favors to people who would rather see the ledger burned.
She opened her computer, logged into case files, and started cross-referencing.
Briggs. Judge Harold Dent. Councilwoman Rivera. Names from the ledger. She compared them against death reports. Cause: heart attack, drowning, overdose. All plausible. All neat. Too neat.
She jotted notes, arrows, patterns. Each line she drew pulled the web tighter until the air itself seemed to constrict around her.
A shadow fell across her desk.
“Working hard?”
Mira snapped the ledger shut—too fast—and looked up. Dana Hodge leaned against the cubicle wall, smirking.
“Always,” Mira said evenly.
“You and Vane this morning?” Dana asked, tilting her head. “Heard you two were cozy at the diner.”
Mira’s pulse ticked faster. “We talked. That’s it.”
Dana studied her for a beat longer, then shrugged. “Careful. Vane plays his own game.”
When Dana walked away, Mira let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
---
That night, Mira drove to the river. She parked beneath a broken streetlight, briefcase on the passenger seat, city lights flickering across the black water. She opened the ledger again, flipping through page after page until she landed on something new.
At the very bottom of one page, smaller than the rest, a single line had been added since she last checked.
Mira Ellison — Pending.
Her throat went dry. The handwriting was identical to the other entries. Neat. Precise.
But she hadn’t left the ledger out of her sight all day.
Which meant whoever kept the ledger didn’t need access to it anymore. They already had her name. They were updating it from somewhere else, in ways she didn’t yet understand.
The rain picked up, streaking across her windshield. Mira closed the book slowly, fingers trembling.
For the first time, she felt the truth press down like a weight she couldn’t lift.
She wasn’t chasing shadows.
She was already in them.
