“Too smart for obvious security,” Axle muttered quietly behind us.
Century tested the chain-link gate once, then shook his head. “Locked.”
I stepped forward and pulled a set of cutters from my belt. “Not for long.”
Ten minutes later, we were inside.
The building smelled wrong the second we entered. The stale, dry scent of paper, dust, old wood, cleaning solvents, and carefully controlled humidity filled the air. My flashlight swept slowly across the interior while every instinct in my body tightened harder with each passing second.
Rows of shelving units filled the massive room.
I moved closer and saw that acid-free preservation boxes lined entire walls, each one labeled meticulously in Magnus’s handwriting. Some shelves held old books and restoration materials. Others had leather-bound journals stacked in chronological order. Carefully cataloged binders sat arranged by date and subject matter like a museum’s inventory. And everything was organized with horrifying precision.
“This isn’t a fucking kill room,” Axle muttered behind me, his voice low with disgust.
My flashlight drifted slowly over the shelves again. “It’s an archive.”
This was creepy as fuck. Unlike typical serial killers, Magnus wasn’t just collecting trophies. He thought he was preserving history.
Shifter opened one of the storage boxes carefully while Century moved deeper into the room with his weapon drawn. Inside the box sat dozens of handwritten notes, old photographs, restoration sketches, and ritual diagrams preserved in plastic sleeves.
“All cataloged just as carefully,” Shifter murmured.
I moved toward another shelf and pulled one of the journals free. The pages were filled with neat handwriting detailing symbolic pairings, historical references, ceremonial staging, body positioning, herb usage, clothing selection, and ritual timelines. There were side-by-side comparisons between historical memorial portraits and Magnus’s intended recreations.
My jaw locked tighter the further I read. The psychotic motherfucker wasn’t improvising any of this. He’d built an entire methodology around it.
“Son of a bitch,” Century muttered from somewhere deeper in the room. “Asshole isn’t fucking here.”
I stepped toward a large worktable near the center of the room, where dozens of papers sat spread beneath a green banker’s lamp.
It was clearly Magnus’s desk. And as I looked it over, that was when shit hit the fan.
The files spread across the surface weren’t random notes or historical research anymore. They were women.
Fuck.This was victim research.
Photographs paper-clipped beside typed behavioral notes. Schedules. Work routines. Symbolic matching criteria based on appearance, education, profession, and personality traits. Magnus had reduced human beings into historical components he could organize and classify.
My pulse slowed dangerously, my body and mind going cold as I got even more focused and fucking lethal.
I flipped through page after page while fury built inside me with every detail I absorbed. Then my hand stopped abruptly. Surveillance photographs. Looking at the dates, they were recent ones—going back to shortly after I stopped seeing signs of someone watching the compound.
They were all of one woman. A young blonde who resembled Delaney in a lot of ways, except for the round glasses often perched on her nose. She was mid-twenties, maybe. According to his notes, she was a museum employee, and her badge was visible in several shots. The photos tracked her movements—coffee shop, parking garage, university archive building, apartment entrance. Every image had handwritten notes in the margins. Observed behaviors and isolation tendencies. Physical similarities. Symbolic suitability.
Then I spotted a photo that wasn’t from a modern camera. It was just as Delaney described. A funerary portrait of two women, ones who closely matched the appearance of Delaney and the woman in the photographs. It all turned my stomach.
Until I flipped that over to scan the final page, clipped neatly to the stack. It was a preparation schedule. Then my blood went ice cold.
“Fuck,” I growled.
The room went still behind me, and Axle appeared at my side. “What?”
My tone was low and deadly as I held up the sheaf of papers.
“He’s already picked his replacement.”
14
