The Hunt.

The stale air of my office, usually a comforting blend of old paper and cheap whiskey, felt thick with a new kind of menace. Jacob Woodville, the man who’d painted a kindergarten classroom crimson, was a ghost. A ghost I’d helped materialize into thin air. He’d confessed to me, a torrent of choked sobs and chillingly rationalized violence, then slipped through my fingers like smoke. The window, a gaping maw in the brick wall of the school, had been his exit, and my moral compass had, for the first time, pointed south.

Now, the silence was deafening, a stark contrast to the frantic energy of the previous days. The news reports, once a cacophony of outrage and speculation, had quieted, replaced by the grim, routine pronouncements of official investigations. They were looking for a monster, and I, Mr. Stamp, private investigator, had become his accomplice. It was a precarious tightrope I walked, the FBI sniffing around the edges of my carefully constructed facade, and the shadow of a much larger, far more dangerous beast beginning to loom.

Don Corleone. The name itself was a whisper in the dark, a legend woven into the grimy tapestry of the city. His grief, I knew, would not be a quiet, dignified affair. It would be a storm, a tempest of retribution that would tear through anyone and anything standing in its path. And right now, that path led directly to Jacob Woodville, and by extension, to me.