All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

The words hung above the time clock on a chipped wooden sign, the kind of kitschy workplace decoration someone had probably picked up from a dollar store clearance bin. The font was faux-whimsical, painted in cheerful red cursive, as if to soften the crushing monotony of clocking in day after day.

Blue eyes looked up at it—cool, sharp, and unreadable—as he sipped weak, over-steeped breakroom coffee from a paper cup that had begun to leak along one seam. He let the bitter taste sit on his tongue. He liked bitterness. It reminded him that at least some part of the world still had teeth.

They try so hard, he mused silently, staring at the sign. So very hard to give meaning to their dull little lives. A joke here, a poster there. A birthday cake in the lunchroom. A plastic plant in the corner and an inspirational quote taped to the fridge. They plod through their days like cattle, never realizing how utterly insignificant they are.

He glanced at the calendar beside the time clock—someone had drawn a smiley face on today's date in Sharpie, marking some coworker’s birthday. He smiled too, but not for the same reason.

But I give them meaning, he thought. I make them immortal.

He closed his eyes and saw their faces—not his coworkers, no. The others. The ones who had screamed. The ones who had wept. The ones who had bled so beautifully beneath his hands. He remembered each expression, each final moment etched into memory with the precision of an artist’s signature. And the media helped, bless them. The media gave them names. Headlines. Legacy.

Mary Ann Nichols. Annie Chapman. Elizabeth Stride. Catherine Eddowes. Mary Jane Kelly.

Five women, barely remembered by history—until Jack made them more.

He opened his eyes again and smiled faintly at the sign. "All work and no play…" Indeed. Without play, life was just bone, gristle, and offal. But play—art—was transformation.

He would never compare himself to Jack, of course. Jack was crude. Primitive. A curiosity of his time. Five victims and a flurry of mystery, yes, but in terms of raw output? Unimpressive. And the theories—so tiresome. Was he a surgeon? A freemason? A demon in human skin? Jack wasn’t a man to admire, he was a moment—a point in history. Flashy, but brief.

No, there were far greater artists in the decades since. Men and women whose galleries he had visited through digital crypts on the dark web. Files upon files. Photos. Scans. Notes. Patterned and precise, chaotic and savage—each had their style. Some he admired, even envied. Some he dismissed. But all had left something behind, a splatter of legacy on a world that refused to remember the ordinary.

And now, it was his turn to add his brushstroke to the canvas of history.

His coffee cup crumpled in his gloved hand with a soft crack. He dropped it in the waste bin beside the sink and turned toward the door. The meat locker beckoned with its sweet, metallic chill. The others here thought him strange—quiet, fastidious, too precise for a place that stank of blood and bleach. But they tolerated him. He was good with a knife. Very good.

The cold, sterile hum of refrigeration followed him as he stepped through the door, and he felt it again—that sharp tingle in his fingers, the whisper of inspiration curling through his veins like electricity.

Let the world grind on in boredom. I will make art.

And they would thank him for it. Eventually.

Slowly, he stood, joints creaking with a satisfying stiffness. He rolled one shoulder, then the other, the muscles in his back shifting beneath the layers of his butcher’s smock. The fluorescent light above flickered, humming faintly as if it too held its breath.

There was work to finish first—always work. Always routine. Always patience.

But soon... oh, soon.

A sliver of a grin curled beneath the edge of his surgical mask as he reached for his apron and wiped invisible specks of blood from his gloved fingers.

After all, he thought, slipping back into the humdrum cadence of the day, the finest art is never rushed.

And when the time came to play again, oh, what fun he would have.

Real fun.

Red fun.

After all, what kind of artist would he be if he didn’t love his work? If he didn’t revere his tools? If there was no passion behind the cut, no spark behind the eyes?

Then he was no better than the butchery machines—those cold, droning automatons grinding meat without thought, without care. A bone saw spinning in silence, severing with no soul.

No, not him. Never him.

He knew every blade in his collection by name, by balance, by weight. Some serrated, some clean and slender as a whisper. His favorites didn’t just cut—they sang. Sang when they parted sinew and slid between ribs. Sang when they found the sweet spot, the place where pain met revelation.

He didn’t rush the process. He honored it.

Because true art demanded attention. It demanded love.

And he loved his art.

***

Olivia leaned back in her chair, exhaling slowly as her eyes swept over the spread of files and crime scene photos cluttering her desk. Three victims. Three very different lives. No apparent connection. No shared profession, background, or social circle. No ties to gangs, drugs, or anything else that might offer a thread to tug.

Even the weapons had changed.

The first—a woman in her thirties—had been split open with something heavy, a cleaver or maybe a hatchet. Brutal. Crude. Yet precise where it mattered.

The second, a young girl barely into adulthood, had been torn by something serrated—jagged, ugly work. The kind that didn’t just kill but shredded.

And the most recent, a man in his forties, had been carved like game meat. Neat, controlled cuts. A slender blade. A hunter’s hand.

Three different blades. Three different methods.

And yet... the staging. The careful posing of the bodies. The surgical drainage of blood from arteries no average killer could identify, much less target with such confidence. The missing parts—always taken after death—lifted like some kind of morbid calling card. Trophies, she suspected. Or worse, keepsakes.

She hated cases like this.

Give her a turf war, a bar stabbing, a mob hit. At least those had motives—money, power, revenge. Something human. Something you could follow. But this?

This was something else. Something that wasn’t just violent. It was thoughtful.

And that made it dangerous.

Liv reached instinctively for the inside pocket of her coat, fingers brushing nothing but the edge of a crumpled pack of nicotine gum. Right. She was trying to quit. Again.

Her jaw clenched as she popped a piece into her mouth and chewed like it had personally wronged her. It didn’t help—not in the way a cigarette used to. There was no sharp burn, no weighty drag to ground her nerves. Just artificial mint and the persistent itch of a craving left unsatisfied.

Perfect time to quit, Benoit, she thought dryly.

She stared down at the crime scene photos again, the overlapping shadows of trauma. This wasn’t rage. Wasn’t heat-of-the-moment or some drunken mistake. This was careful. Cold. Practiced.

Serial killers were a different breed. They didn’t kill for impulse or gain, not usually. They killed for need. For ritual. For the sick satisfaction of control, of seeing something done just so. And that was how you caught them—not by understanding the violence, but by understanding the rules they lived by. Because even the most chaotic of them had patterns, even if they didn’t realize it themselves.

It was the only comfort in a case like this. A slim one.

This Bloodletter didn’t want to disappear into the shadows. No, he wanted the world to see. That was the difference between a butcher and an artist—the artist signed his work.

And that meant, if she could just see the shape behind the blood and horror, if she could find the signature he was so desperate to leave behind—she could stop him.

She shut her eyes and let the silence of the office settle around her like a weighted blanket, blotting out the flickering fluorescents and the faint hum of traffic outside. Just her and the facts now. The corpses. The patterns.

She breathed in slow.

Three victims. Three blades. Three different methods—but all precise, all controlled.

She could almost feel the edges of it, the shape of a mind hiding behind the cuts.

She was certain the killer was a man. It wasn’t just statistical—though the numbers made it likely. It was in the strength required, the clean penetration of tissue, the calculated brutality. The morgue’s preliminary notes backed that up—deep cuts from a higher angle, the kind made by someone tall, powerful, and practiced.

Not that a woman couldn’t be those things. She’d seen her share of dangerous women in her time, had arrested more than a few. But everything about these murders screamed a masculine kind of violence—clinical, posturing, performative. Someone showing off.

And it wasn’t random.

He knew anatomy. That much was obvious. He had gone for arteries with uncanny precision, drained the blood deliberately, carved clean around bone and muscle like it was second nature. The kind of skill you didn’t pick up watching horror movies.

This wasn’t some rage-killer, some unhinged lunatic swinging wildly. No. This was someone who’d studied. Someone who knew what each cut would do before he made it.

That, more than anything, chilled her.

He was careful. Methodical. Patient.

She slowly stood, her chair creaking as it rolled back slightly. Her legs needed to move, her mind needed space, and her nicotine cravings were stabbing at her focus like a dull knife. Pacing helped—a little. Not as much as a cigarette would, but she wasn’t going to break now. Not because of him.

This case was already crawling under her skin, and she refused to give it anything more than it had already taken. No sleep. No peace. But she wasn’t giving it her self-control too.

Her boots tapped steadily against the worn linoleum as she moved back and forth across the narrow space between her desk and the filing cabinets, eyes unfocused but her brain spinning like an engine.

Three scenes. No prints. No hair. No trace DNA. Nothing left behind.

That wasn't luck. That was deliberate. Meticulous.

He knew how to clean. Probably used bleach or industrial solvents. Maybe kept his tools in airtight containers, sterilized them before and after. Wore gloves—of course he did. Maybe even doubled them. But that wasn’t all. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense: he probably wore a mask and that wasn’t to hide his face. It was to contain everything—hair, sweat, spit. Any shred of organic evidence that might betray him.

He wasn’t sloppy. He wasn’t impulsive.

He was a planner. A thinker.

The kind of killer the old profiler textbooks used to swear was rare. The kind that didn’t match the toothless, drooling maniac stereotype—the ones people liked to tell themselves were easy to spot. No, this one could pass for anyone. A coworker. A neighbor. Some quiet guy wearing a mechanic’s coveralls or a suit. Invisible.

If he hadn’t wanted attention, he could’ve kept doing this in secret for years. But this one wanted his work seen.

And that made him dangerous in a different way.

He had the patience of a ghost and the ego of a stage magician. He was taunting them.

And unless Liv found a crack in the façade—some pattern, some sliver of mistake—he’d do it again.

She glanced at the chipped coffee mug sitting on her desk like a faithful, if mildly humiliating, companion. It was a gag gift from her sister—a birthday present wrapped in too much pink tissue paper and topped with a bow that screamed I know you hate this but I love you anyway. The raised letters across the front still made her grunt every time: “The Right to Remain Sexy”—complete with an image of bright pink fuzzy handcuffs dangling below it.

Classy.

Still, it held coffee. And right now, caffeine was the only vice she had left that wasn’t trying to kill her.

Liv snatched it up and took a long swig of lukewarm brew. Bitter. Burnt. Just the way the office machine liked to ruin it.

She grimaced, but didn’t stop drinking.

“Better than nothing,” she muttered to herself, her voice dry and gravel-edged from too many sleepless nights. If she couldn’t have a cigarette, she’d have this. She needed something to push back against the gnawing exhaustion, to keep her focused—on the files, on the puzzle, on the bastard who thought he could turn her city into his personal gallery of gore.

He’d left no evidence.

But she had her instincts.

And he’d left bodies.

She’d find him. She had to.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Olivia called, her voice roughened by caffeine and frustration.

The door creaked open to reveal Officer McDonald—older, thick around the middle, still wearing his street uniform and clutching his hat like it might shield him from the storm he was walking into.

“Detective Benoit,” he greeted with a respectful nod. His tone was casual, but there was something clipped beneath it, like he wasn’t sure how his next sentence would land. Olivia, still sipping from her chipped novelty mug, offered a tired glance up from the bloody photos on her desk.

“McDonald,” she said, voice unreadable. “What have you got?”

“Well,” he began, shifting from foot to foot, “rumor mill’s been grinding again. Word is that our local freak in the fox costume was spotted prowling around Bloor Street last night.”

Olivia blinked slowly, then took a long, deliberate drink of her coffee. “And?”

McDonald hesitated, his brow furrowing slightly. “Well… some of the guys were saying—just saying—that maybe the fox is our guy. You know, vigilantes are dangerous. Homicide’s not exactly outside the wheelhouse for some of them.”

Olivia set her mug down, the soft clink of ceramic on wood somehow louder than it should have been. She tilted her head slightly, eyes narrowing—not in anger, but in the way a scalpel narrows the distance between skin and understanding.

“Seems unlikely,” she said coolly. Then, with the precision of a scalpel, she went in. “Vigilantes—at least the ones who survive more than a few weeks—rarely deviate from their modus operandi. The Vulpes has a clear profile: non-lethal interventions, high-level target selection, a focus on corruption, abuse of power, and systemic rot. She doesn't lash out randomly. She doesn't stage her scenes like theatre. And she doesn’t leave bodies drained, dissected, and posed like grotesque still lifes.”

McDonald blinked, caught halfway between apology and explanation.

“Look,” he said, “I get it. Just… you know how it is. Cops don’t like unregistered masks. Never have. And you have to admit—”

“I do know how it is,” Olivia interrupted, sharper now. “I know the tension between us and the vigilante element runs deep. I know there are cowboys out there who abuse the mask, just like we’ve had officers who’ve disgraced the badge. But you don’t accuse someone—anyone—of a triple homicide on nothing more than a bad feeling and some midnight sightings.”

Her voice remained calm, but her words hit like iron. “Let’s not let our biases turn into blind spots, Officer.”

McDonald shifted uncomfortably, his face reddening. “Fair enough,” he muttered. “Just figured you’d want to know what’s being whispered around the bullpen. Better from me than from some green rookie with more opinions than brains.”

Olivia moved to sit in her chair and  leaned back, fingers steepled in front of her, gaze unreadable. The tension pulsing behind her eyes beat steady and hard, but she kept her voice measured.

“I appreciate that, I do. But next time someone wants to float a theory like that, tell them to bring me facts—not gossip.”

She picked up her coffee again, letting the silence hang in the air just long enough to cut through whatever awkwardness remained. McDonald nodded, more firmly this time.

“Will do, Detective.”

He turned to leave but paused with one hand on the doorframe. “For what it’s worth… I think you’re right. About the Vulpes. Doesn’t feel like her style.”

Olivia raised an eyebrow. “That an instinct, Officer?”

“More like a gut feeling,” he said with a faint shrug. “She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s not… this. This is different.”

She watched him go, the door clicking softly shut behind him. Her gaze lingered for a moment before slowly drifting back to the array of crime scene photos spread across her desk.

Different was one word for it.

Calculated. Artistic. Cold.

The Bloodletter wasn’t improvising. This was someone playing a long game—a personal one. A performance staged for an audience they hadn’t invited, but wanted desperately to impress.

And the Vulpes?

No. No matter what whispers scuttled through the precinct, she wasn’t the type to gut someone in an alley and pose the body just to make a point.

Olivia had seen enough of the vigilante’s work—an unconventional justice, yes, but there was a line. The Vulpes danced close to it, but she never crossed it. Hell, if she was being honest, Olivia respected her. Could never say it out loud—but she did.

This wasn’t the fox. It was Something darker.She exhaled slowly, long fingers curling around her pen.Enough distractions.There was work to do.