Chapter 3 Ashes in the system
The night after finding her own name in the ledger, Mira didn’t sleep.
Her apartment, a dim box in the south block of Crescent Heights, seemed smaller, more suffocating, as if the walls were closing in on her. The hum of the radiator sounded like a pulse, uneven and mocking. She had replayed the moment again and again—her fingers trembling against the brittle page, the inked letters forming her name with cruel precision. Not a coincidence. Not a mistake.
The ledger had written her in.
But what did it mean? That she was a future victim? That she was already chosen?
Her phone buzzed once on the desk, startling her. An unknown number.
She almost didn’t answer, but the silence was worse.
“Mira Cross,” a voice said, low and deliberate. Male, accented, yet oddly calm. “You shouldn’t have opened it.”
She froze. The ledger was still in her bag. Hidden. Her mind flicked to the digital recorder on her shelf, but her body refused to move.
“Who is this?” she asked.
A pause. Then a soft chuckle. “You already know.”
The line went dead.
Her reflection in the darkened window stared back at her, pale and wide-eyed, as though mocking her disbelief. Her hands shook so violently she had to set the phone down.
---
By morning, Mira forced herself back into routine. Coffee, black. Hair pulled into a tight knot. The act of dressing for work became ritual, a shield. Her badge—Detective Cross, Financial Crimes Division—hung around her neck like a talisman.
If the voice had meant to rattle her, it succeeded. But Mira had learned long ago that fear was useless unless sharpened into focus.
At the precinct, she slipped into her cubicle before anyone noticed her nerves. Her partner, Detective Hal Bishop, lumbered over carrying two cups of coffee, one already half-drained.
“You look like hell,” he said.
“Thanks for the compliment,” Mira muttered, grabbing the files stacked on her desk.
“Late night?” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Or did the ledger keep you company?”
Her head snapped up. “What did you say?”
Hal blinked. “The ledger. The case files. You’ve been buried in them for days.”
Her breath steadied. He didn’t know. Couldn’t know.
“Yeah,” she said flatly, flipping open a folder. “The case files.”
---
The day dragged with routine fraud reports, bank subpoenas, and spreadsheets that felt deliberately designed to anesthetize thought. But beneath the monotony, Mira felt the pulse of something deeper—threads connecting in ways her colleagues couldn’t see.
Every high-profile collapse she traced, every embezzlement, every rigged audit—it all linked back to shell companies. And those shell companies, in turn, matched the initials and coded marks she had seen in the ledger.
By noon, her chest tightened with certainty: the ledger wasn’t just a record of killings. It was financial, too. A shadow economy that fed off blood.
She printed nothing. Saved nothing. Just handwritten notes tucked into her inner jacket pocket.
When Hal offered to grab lunch, Mira waved him off. “I’m not hungry.”
She was starving, but not for food.
---
After hours, when the precinct emptied and the hum of fluorescent lights became the only sound, Mira crept into the records room.
The air smelled of dust and stale paper, heavy with forgotten cases.
She pulled out a box marked 1998 – Seized Assets. Inside were files of a bank collapse—dozens of names, transactions, offshore accounts. Most written off as corporate mismanagement.
But one signature caught her breath.
A clean, looping scrawl she had already seen. On the first page of the ledger.
She traced it with her finger, her pulse racing. Whoever kept the ledger wasn’t just cataloging deaths—they were engineering collapses, pulling strings that crippled entire systems.
And her name—her name—had been written beside one of the accounts.
---
“Mira.”
Her heart stopped.
She spun, clutching the file to her chest.
Detective Marcus Vane leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed.
Her ex-partner. The one she hadn’t spoken to in over a year.
“What are you doing here?” she hissed.
“Could ask you the same.” His eyes flicked to the file. “That box is off-limits.”
“You’re not even Financial Crimes anymore.”
“And you are walking into things you don’t understand.”
The way he said it—calm, measured, almost pitying—set her teeth on edge.
“Why don’t you enlighten me?” she snapped.
Marcus’s jaw tightened. For a moment, he seemed ready to speak. But then his eyes shifted, scanning the shadows behind her, as if afraid of being overheard.
“You should burn that file,” he said finally. “And forget what you saw.”
He left without another word.
The records room door clicked shut.
And Mira knew, with absolute clarity, that Marcus Vane wasn’t warning her to protect her.
He was protecting someone else.
---
That night, back in her apartment, Mira spread the ledger pages and the copied file across her table. Connections mapped in ink and memory. Dates. Signatures. Transactions. Deaths.
The pattern was undeniable.
The ledger wasn’t just prophecy.
It was an accounting.
Every death balanced against money. Every collapse feeding into something larger. A shadow system where blood and finance were one.
And she—Mira Cross—was written into its balance sheet.
Her phone buzzed again. Another unknown number.
This time she didn’t hesitate.
“You’re in over your head,” the same voice murmured.
Mira steadied her breathing. “Then pull me out.”
A pause. Then, soft amusement. “No. You’re exactly where you need to be. The ledger has chosen. And you’re not here to solve it, Detective. You’re here to finish it.”
The line clicked dead.
Mira’s hand trembled as she set the phone down.
For the first time, she realized this wasn’t just about survival.
The ledger wasn’t following her life.
It was writing it.
