Ashes and Silk

Paris had a way of swallowing sound at night. The rain softened its sharp edges, and the world shrank to the quiet shuffle of tires along wet pavement and the distant, hollow wail of the last Metro cars disappearing beneath the city's skin.

Isabelle Laurent stood by the window of her apartment, unmoving, her gaze unfocused on the rain-slick street below. The names carved inside the church's confessional looped through her mind like a broken reel of film.

One of them wasn't just familiar. It was personal.

Vivienne Laurent.

Not a stranger. Not a victim she had to piece together from police reports, forensic diagrams, or old social media profiles. But her sister. The sister whose face she could still recall with frightening clarity even two years later — the gap in her front tooth when she laughed, the dimple that only appeared when she was half-smiling, the way her fingers always smelled like oil paint no matter how often she washed them.

For two years, Isabelle had lived with the absence like a stone in her chest.

But she had never expected to see Vivienne's name scrawled inside a wooden booth, under layers of scratches from other lost souls, all fighting for attention in the silence of confession.

She thought she had done the right thing back then — separating her sister's case from her own work. The moment Vivienne had gone missing, Isabelle handed the lead investigator her badge and stepped aside. A hard line. A professional boundary. The only thing that kept her from slipping under the weight of her grief.

But the lines were blurring now. Worse, the lines were folding in on themselves.

The Leroux disappearance wasn't random. The other missing women weren't random. The case wasn't random.

And now, neither was Isabelle's involvement.

The rain continued through the night, and she let it. Sleep wouldn't come, not with the confession booth still echoing inside her ears. Instead, she sat at her desk, sifting through old case notes and older memories.

Vivienne had vanished on a night not much different from this one — a quiet April evening, where the city still smelled faintly of spring but the rain hinted at winter's refusal to loosen its grip. The last text Isabelle had received from her was casual, almost boring: Running late, save me some coffee.

But Vivienne never arrived.

Her apartment door had been locked from the inside, her art studio untouched, and her bag, phone, and scarf were still hanging by the door.

That scarf. Isabelle's mind caught on the detail like a snare.

It had been Vivienne's favorite. A soft violet silk with tiny gray moths stitched around the border, a birthday gift from years ago. Isabelle had bought it from a quiet boutique along Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, knowing Vivienne would fall in love with the pattern.

She never saw her sister wear it again.

And now the confession booth, the growing number of disappearances, and the puzzle she'd spent the last two years pretending to stop solving were snapping back into place.

She pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk and lifted a faded file folder. It was unmarked — deliberately — but the contents were burned into her memory: old missing person reports, photographs, handwritten witness statements, her own sketches of the timeline and suspected locations.

This wasn't just about Leroux anymore.

The pattern stretched backward further than anyone had wanted to see.

She had tried, back then, to believe the official line: no signs of foul play, no forced entry, no evidence suggesting a kidnapping. But her gut had never accepted it. And now her instincts whispered even louder.

Vivienne had been one of the first. Isabelle had been chasing this shadow long before the rest of the department even knew there was a case to open.

A sharp rap on her door jolted her from the fog of thought. Her heart stuttered — the knock came too late for visitors, too cold for neighbors, too heavy for coincidence.

She stood slowly, glancing through the peephole. The hallway was empty.

But at her feet, something sat. A small box, wrapped neatly in plain brown paper. No label. No return address.

Her breath hitched.

She bent to pick it up, the weight featherlight in her hands, as if it were barely there at all. She set it on the dining table, studying it for a moment, fingertips hovering over the tape.

A part of her already knew.

The blade of the letter opener glided along the seam with practiced ease, peeling the tape back. Inside the box, resting atop a layer of tissue paper, was silk.

Violet silk.

The scarf.

Her sister's scarf.

The moth pattern swam into view, instantly recognizable. She lifted it out with trembling fingers, the soft threads catching slightly on her calloused fingertips. The faintest trace of perfume clung to it — a note of sandalwood and rain — one Isabelle hadn't smelled since Vivienne disappeared.

Her chest tightened. She hadn't imagined it. This was real. Someone had held onto the scarf, preserved it, waited for the right moment to return it.

Tucked beneath the scarf, folded with the same careful precision, was a piece of white paper.

A single sentence was typed in clean, mechanical font.

You were always meant to find her last.

The paper slipped from her hand, floating soundlessly to the floor, as her mind struggled to catch up with the weight of the message.

She glanced back toward the window, the rain still streaking down the glass. Across the street, a figure stood under a broken streetlight — motionless, unbothered by the weather, its face hidden beneath the brim of a wide black hat.

And then the streetlight flickered, the figure gone in an instant, as if it had never been there.

The scarf lay heavy in her lap, cold despite the warmth of the room, like ashes wrapped in silk.

To be continued...