Unseen Threads

The hours before dawn carried a peculiar stillness, as if the city itself was holding its breath. Isabelle felt it pressing against her skin, an invisible tension that no amount of layered coats could shield her from.

She barely remembered how she'd left Jean-Baptiste's flat. She remembered the blood, the bones, the words scrawled in ash: One will live. One will die.

And she remembered running.

Now, slumped in an old leather chair inside the Cybercrime Division, she cradled a cup of bitter coffee, staring blankly at the wall of screens before her.

Théo Lefevre worked with a manic energy nearby, his hands flying over keyboards, his gaze darting between monitors. The bluish glow made his drawn face look almost spectral.

"You're sure you want to see this?" he asked without turning around.

"I wouldn't be here otherwise," Isabelle said hoarsely.

Théo exhaled and tapped a few keys.

The screens lit up with maps. Street plans. Satellite images. Layers upon layers of data. Tiny red dots peppered the map of Paris—at first glance scattered at random, but as Théo zoomed out, a pattern began to emerge.

"These are all the confirmed victim locations," he said. "Abductions. Disappearances. Confirmed sightings. Even crime scenes we think are related but never proved."

He clicked again. The dots connected with thin white lines.

Isabelle leaned forward, her breath catching.

It wasn't random at all.

It was a web. An intricate geometric pattern, almost mathematical in its precision. The lines crisscrossed, looped back on themselves, spiraled inward with an undeniable purpose.

At the very center of the web, pulsing slightly on the screen, was a blinking white dot.

Théo highlighted it.

"That's your building, Isabelle."

The room seemed to tilt sideways.

"My apartment?" she whispered.

Théo nodded grimly. "You're the center."

She tried to think—tried to rationalize—but the images on the screen crushed every denial before it could form. She remembered the subtle oddities she had ignored for weeks: the lingering scents in the stairwell, the faint scratching noises at night, the feeling of being watched even inside her own home.

"What does it mean?" she asked.

"It means this isn't random. Someone planned this from the beginning," Théo said. "Every move. Every victim. Everything has been pulling you to this point."

He leaned in, tapping the center of the web.

"You're not just chasing them anymore, Isabelle. You're part of the design."

A shudder ran through her. "If that's true," she said, voice brittle, "then there must be something near me. Something hidden."

Théo gave a thin, strained smile. "Already ahead of you."

He hit another key.

On the leftmost monitor, a 3D model of her apartment building appeared—down to the basement, the boiler rooms, the maintenance tunnels. Théo zoomed in, highlighting an area tucked between two structural walls.

It was small. Almost forgotten. A dead-end corridor with a sealed door.

"What is that?" Isabelle asked.

Théo shrugged. "Building plans from the late 1800s listed it as a utility access. But there's no modern record of it."

"Show me the entrance."

A new file appeared—a photo, grainy and shadowed. The shot showed the side alley behind her building, ivy strangling the stone walls. Half-buried behind a dumpster was a narrow, iron cellar door.

Isabelle stared at it.

"I've never noticed that before," she whispered.

Théo's voice lowered. "Maybe you weren't supposed to. Until now."

Her heart pounded so loudly she thought Théo might hear it.

"Give me everything you can on that section," she ordered, standing. "And stay on comms."

"Isabelle—"

"I have to," she said firmly.

Théo hesitated, then nodded. "Be careful."

The alley behind her building smelled of wet stone and rotting leaves. The mist still lingered, curling around her legs as she moved. Her boots crunched on gravel and broken glass.

The cellar door was exactly where Théo's photo showed it would be: partially hidden, rusted, its hinges eaten with age.

But there was something new.

A thin red thread—almost invisible unless you were looking for it—stretched from the bottom of the door, trailing through the gravel, disappearing beneath the dumpster.

Isabelle knelt, heart hammering, and touched it lightly. It was real. A smooth, silk-like fiber, tight as a drawn wire.

She followed it with her eyes.

It led straight to the cellar door's seam, disappearing inside through a hairline crack.

Her fingers itched toward the handle.

For one long, paralyzing moment, she hesitated. She thought of Jean-Baptiste, of Estelle, of Théo. She thought of Vivienne—her smiling face, her whispered warnings.

Choose by dawn.

She steeled herself.

With a creak like a dying animal, she pulled the door open.

The scent hit her immediately: damp earth, mold, and something else—something sweeter, more rotten.

The red thread continued inside, trailing down narrow stone steps into a yawning darkness.

Isabelle drew her flashlight and revolver, her every muscle coiled tight, and stepped through the threshold.

The door swung shut behind her with a heavy, echoing thud.

She didn't turn back.

The beam of her flashlight wavered as she descended, the stones slick and treacherous beneath her feet. Each step seemed to echo not just off the walls, but deeper, as if the ground itself was hollow, filled with buried voices.

At the bottom of the stairs, she stopped.

The thread disappeared under another door—an ancient thing, wooden, rotted at the edges.

A symbol had been crudely scratched into the wood.

It looked like a spider. No—a hand. Or perhaps both. It was impossible to tell where fingers ended and legs began.

And right beneath it, a single word, carved so deeply it bled dark sap:

ISABELLE

She stepped closer.

The air was colder here, thick with moisture and something metallic.

Her flashlight flickered once.

And then, from beyond the door, she heard it.

A breath.

Not her own.

Soft.

Waiting.

To be continued...