The Vulpes returned to the Den sometime past three A.M.

She didn’t stride in like a triumphant predator. She carried herself like someone spent—each step heavy, her shoulders slouched beneath the weight of armor, sweat, and failure.

The Den welcomed her with silence.

She moved through the shadows of her sanctuary with the kind of slow, practiced grace only exhaustion could shape. Her boots scuffed softly against concrete. Her cape hung like a dead weight from her shoulders. Her eyes, beneath the yellow lenses, were red-rimmed and hollow.

She had done everything she could.

She’d stopped the Bloodletter—from finishing his latest piece. She had kept two people alive who were never supposed to survive that encounter. And still… It felt like it wasn’t enough.

After the sirens, after the flashing lights and triage, she’d gone back out. Tried to pick up his trail. Scoured rooftops, alley mouths, drainage grates, even backyards. The route he’d vanished into might as well have swallowed him whole.

He was good. Too good.

Like trying to follow smoke through fog.

Her jaw clenched behind the mask.

He got away.

She peeled off the mask first.

Then the armor, piece by piece—each segment heavier than the last, each movement slower. By the time she reached bare skin, her limbs ached with a soreness that was settling in deep, like cold into old bone.

The wound along her arm had dried—crusted red against angry bruising. A shallow gash. Her suit had taken the worst of it, but it still needed tending. She double-checked the damage with practiced detachment, cataloguing scrapes, scruffs, impacts. Nothing critical. Nothing she hadn’t dealt with before.

She just hadn’t dealt with him before.

That came later.

First came the shower. Then the antiseptic, bandages, and bitter-tasting ointments.

She went through the motions like a machine—precise, quiet, distant. She didn’t let her mind dwell on the failure to stop him. Didn’t let herself spiral into what-ifs. What if she hadn’t been there? What if he struck again tomorrow? What if next time, she wasn’t lucky?

Because that’s all tonight had been—luck.

A fluke, really. A coincidence of timing.

And as her grandfather had taught her: luck is great—until you need it. That’s what skill is for.

Still drying her hair with a towel slung around her neck, Coraline padded barefoot through the dimly lit Den and collapsed onto one of the spare cots.

The manor was too far. Her bed, too distant. This was close enough. She needed rest, not comfort. And even then, she doubted she’d get much of either.

Because her mind was still working. Still racing.

What disturbed her most wasn't just that he’d escaped.

It was how he’d fought.

He was good—very good. Not refined, not trained in the way martial artists were, but practiced. Natural. His body moved like it knew how to kill. And those blades? They weren’t just tools. They were limbs.

That axe toss hadn’t been beginner’s luck. That was muscle memory.

Then there was the way he had shot the bystander—not to kill, but to force Coraline into an impossible decision. And when she’d hesitated? When she’d chosen to protect the innocent over ending him?

He had vanished.

Calculated. Cold. Not a man reacting to panic, but anticipating it.

And then he’d forced her hand.

Forced her to try to kill.

She should have. She should have ended him. One life on her conscience would be a small price to pay to stop the horrors he was still planning. The fact that she hadn't…

…haunted her.

She lay on her side in the dark. The Fox Den was quiet, but her thoughts weren’t. They circled like vultures. Picking over every choice, every moment, every missed opportunity.

She took cold comfort in one fact—the spike had gone in deep. He was hurt. Badly.

And that meant he needed time to recover.

Which meant she had time, too.

She just didn’t know what to do with it yet.

***

Elsewhere in Toronto, the locks of a modest apartment clicked in sequence—metal on metal, precise and habitual.

Detective Liv Benoit stepped inside, shut the door with the heel of her boot, and turned the deadbolt with a dull finality. The quiet that followed wasn’t peace—it was weight. The kind that settled in the joints and lived in the spine.

She made her way to the bathroom, flicked on the harsh overhead light, and met her own eyes in the mirror.

Dark circles. Sallow skin. Jaw tight. Eyes dull with exhaustion.

“You look like hell, Benoit,” she muttered, voice flat and unimpressed.

Cold water splashed against her face. She let it sit for a moment, dripping from her chin into the sink, as if the chill might wash away what the night had done. As if her reflection might blink and offer answers. It didn’t.

Nothing would be that easy.

LeBlanc was still skulking around like a hawk looking to peck the eyes out of her case file. She didn’t trust the suit from Ottawa—never had. And as much as she hated to admit it, the man wasn’t stupid. Persistent, political, a pain in the ass—but not stupid.

Still, he was the least of her problems.

Two people in ICU.

One of them a cop.

Masked vigilante involvement, and not just a cameo—a direct intervention that saved lives. And that? That was a legal and political firestorm waiting to ignite.

Worse yet, she had to re-evaluate the Bloodletter.

He wasn’t just a sadistic creep with a taste for the theatrical anymore.

He was smarter. Braver. Bolder. Willing to go after a police officer—willing to risk exposure to make a statement. That elevated him. Made him more dangerous, more unpredictable.

And LeBlanc?

He’d be all over her about this. Already drafting the memo about how she needed to bring Bloodletter in "by the book." How the Vulpes wasn’t a registered Special, wasn’t authorized, wasn’t sanctioned. How her interference jeopardized everything.

Never mind that she’d saved two lives.

Never mind that she was the only reason they weren’t pulling two body bags off the pavement.

It looked bad, having a masked civilian do the job the force was supposed to. And it opened a legal nightmare if Bloodletter ever went to trial.

Liv braced her hands on the edge of the sink and closed her eyes.

She had a few hours before she had to face it all again.

And she had no damn idea what her next move was.

She stepped out of the bathroom and caught sight of the couch in the living room.

It wasn’t far—but it looked impossibly inviting. Closer than her bed, easier than effort. She didn’t think twice. Her body knew where it wanted to be before her brain did. She sank down, then stretched out, the cushions giving beneath her with a quiet creak.

Her hand drifted down to the floor on instinct.

And for a second—just a breath of a second—she half expected to feel the rough fur of Marko’s head press against her palm.

But there was only air.

He’d been gone a while now, but muscle memory wasn’t bound by calendars. It remembered the weight of him at her side. The way he used to huff and grumble, the warmth of him when sleep came heavy. Her hand hovered there a moment longer, then closed slowly into a fist.

Marko had been a hell of a cop.

Old injuries and creeping age had caught up with him, sure—but he’d served. Busted drug dens. Sniffed out a bomb threat at Union Station. Took a bullet for his handler and kept going. His joints had gone stiff in the end. His eyes cloudy. Sometimes he’d forget where he was.

But Liv didn’t give up on good cops.

Not the two-legged kind.

Not the four-legged kind, either.

He’d earned more than a quiet dismissal. He’d earned a couch to sleep on. A backyard to laze in. A warm meal that didn’t come from a stainless-steel bowl.

She let her hand fall to her stomach and stared at the ceiling, the shadows unmoving, the city silent for once.

The couch still felt like his place.

And part of her liked it that way.

She had been a rookie then. Still in uniform. Green around the edges and trying not to look it.

It was her second month with the RCMP when she’d heard about Marko.

A decorated K-9 officer with a dozen collars to his name and one scar from taking a bullet that should’ve ended his career years before it finally did. Now he was old, tired, and slipping fast. His handler had been transferred. No family. No fallback.

No one to take him.

Liv had listened to the discussion—some brass saying he’d probably have to be put down. “Shame, but that’s how it goes sometimes,” someone had said, like they were talking about a busted cruiser.

But Marko wasn’t a piece of equipment.

He was a cop.

And good cops—real ones—they earned better.

She’d stepped forward before she even thought it through. Said she’d take him. Papers were signed. Keys handed over. No ceremony, no thanks. Just a hand-off.

Didn’t matter.

She brought him home that night, gave him a blanket and the couch, and swore quietly to herself that however many years he had left, they’d be good ones.

He'd earned that.

They all had. Her grandpa, who wore the Mountie red with pride. Her father, who walked the line until cancer took him faster than any bullet could. Her aunt, who never missed a shift and never backed down from a fight. They had given everything to the badge.

And God willing—maybe someday—so would she.

But with rest. Not with a file folder snapped shut and a name on a wall.

Marko had passed on the same couch she lay on now, his head in her lap, breathing slow and steady until it stopped.

He hadn’t been afraid.

She hoped she could say the same someday.

She shut her eyes.

Forced her mind to go quiet. To stop chasing every thread of the case. To stop replaying the night, over and over, like it might end differently the next time.

Because that day—her day of rest—wasn’t coming any time soon.

She had work to do.

She was going to bring in the Bloodletter.

Come hell or high water.

Just like her grandpa used to say, back when the world still made sense and the good guys still got to ride off into the sunset.

Liv had only just nestled into the couch, her body sinking into the worn cushions, when her eyes drifted shut—just for a moment.

A single breath of sleep.

Then her alarm clock shrieked from the bedroom like a drill sergeant with a grudge.

She jolted awake, heart thudding once, the sharp blare of the alarm echoing through her apartment like it had crawled in through the walls. She rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her palm and winced at the faint stiffness in her neck. Through the window, the first dim signs of dawn were beginning to bleed into the Toronto skyline. The city looked deceptively peaceful bathed in that soft light.

She grunted and pushed herself upright, her bones protesting the motion. Three hours of sleep, maybe. If she rounded up. And ahead of her? A metric ass-ton of things to deal with.

“Wonderful,” she muttered, voice gravel and sarcasm.

Still, she moved. Shower. Clothes. Badge. If she was lucky—and she knew better than to count on luck—she might snag a decent coffee and an everything bagel with cream cheese on the way into the department.

One could dream.

The Bloodletter's victims were still on her mind as Liv drove into work.

Officer McDonald—Toronto City Police, not RCMP—but that didn’t matter. Not really. A badge was a badge. A uniform was a promise. Federal, municipal—lines drawn on paper. What counted was that he’d stood between people and danger, and now he might die for it.

She didn’t know him personally. Had never shared a coffee or a conversation.

But she knew enough.

A wife. Two young daughters.

And now they were waking up to the worst kind of morning. The kind every cop’s family dreads. The kind where the phone rings, and everything changes.

Wounded in the line of duty was better than killed, sure—but just barely. McDonald was still in rough shape. Internal damage. Blood loss. If the rumors about the scene were true, he was lucky the Vulpes got to him when she did. Lucky to be alive at all.

But luck has a shelf life.

And Liv knew better than most how fast it ran out.

The girl—Liv still hadn’t gotten a name—was supposedly one of the city’s working girls. Wrong place, wrong time. That was the word floating around.

But what really stuck with Liv was how they’d found her.

Curled beside McDonald, like she’d been trying to help. Shot for her trouble.

Most people would’ve run. Hell, should’ve run. But this one had stayed, had tried to stop a cop from bleeding out on the concrete. A stranger. A cop. Both.

That wasn’t common.

Especially not in this city.

Her chances were good, according to the last update, and Liv hoped that held. People like her—who put themselves in the line of fire not for money, not for glory, but because someone had to—they were rare.

And both of them, McDonald and the girl, only had a shadow of a chance at all because a woman in a fox costume, who liked to take the law into her own hands, had shown up at just the right time.

Vigilante justice was a nightmare on paper.

But in the real world?

Sometimes it was the only reason someone got to wake up the next day.

Liv pulled into work expecting the worst.

A media circus. Cameras crowding the sidewalk. Reporters with too much hairspray and too little sense trying to jam microphones into anyone with a badge.

Instead?

Quiet.

Too damn quiet.

She parked, finished the last bite of her bagel, and drained the dregs of her coffee as she walked up the steps. The building looked the same as always. Like nothing had happened. Like a cop hadn’t almost bled out in an alley and a masked vigilante hadn’t thrown down with a serial killer just hours ago.

Inside, the fluorescent lights buzzed, the floors were scuffed, and the scent of burnt coffee lingered like always. Too normal. Unsettlingly normal.

She paused at the front desk and gave the duty officer a look. “Morning, Simmons. You seen any vultures circling the station yet?”

Simmons glanced up from her monitor, adjusting her glasses. “Leblanc has them penned at City Hall. Called a press release early this morning. Looks like he decided to get ahead of the circus.”

Liv raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

Simmons nodded. “Swear to God. Press briefing, official statement, the whole nine. Said he didn’t want reporters clogging up the lobby and spooking victims.”

Liv blinked, then gave a small, surprised nod. “Huh. Nice to see Leblanc doing his job for once. Keeping the spotlight off us so we can actually do ours.”

She didn’t trust the man—never had—but credit where it was due. Maybe he wasn’t just a suit after all.

Or maybe he just wanted to look good for the cameras first.

She nodded to Simmons and moved on, heels clicking steadily down the corridor as she headed toward forensics.

There was a mountain waiting for her.

She had to review everything from last night—photos, evidence tags, statements from responding officers. She needed to reassess the profile she’d been building on the Bloodletter. Something was off, something big. That attack on McDonald had changed the game.

She also needed updates. On McDonald. On the girl. On anything that might give her a foothold in the chaos that was about to unfold.

A dozen tasks, maybe more. Each one urgent. Each one clawing for her attention.

Just another day at the office, she thought grimly, turning down the hall.

And she knew—it was going to be a long one.