Liv didn’t sleep well—she rarely did with an open case—but tonight had rough edges. Part of her kept replaying the choice she’d made: letting a vigilante thumb through RCMP files. Was that trust? Or triage? On the other scale sat the thing stalking her city, and the weight of what she knew from cold cases: if you don’t stop a predator early, the count climbs.
Names drifted in that fogged space between waking and the kind of sleep that never rests you. Bundy, crossing borders like state lines were turnstiles—thirty-plus by his own mouth. Ridgway on the Green River—forty-nine convictions and still a nagging feeling that the truth was larger. BTK, ten murders threaded across decades because he understood routine and how to disappear into one. Pickton, a pig farm turning women into statistics before anyone could call them by name. The Zodiac—letters like open wounds, and no one in cuffs to this day.
And then the ones that bled into myth because the details were too many and the answers too few. Highway 16, the Highway of Tears—missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls strung across years and towns, likely more than one offender, but grief doesn’t care about counts. She’d read the files, sat with families, learned the way a map can start to look like a ledger of debts you’ll never collect on.
Good didn’t always win. When it did, it took its cut in scars. Evil had its days—plural—and every hour it ran free it carved something out of ordinary lives and didn’t bother to put anything back. So Liv lay there, somewhere between a bad dream and a worse reality, asking if the line she’d stepped over was really a line at all… or just a story people told themselves so they could sleep. She watched the ceiling turn gray with the first hint of dawn and counted the seconds until she could make coffee and go back to work.
Then there was Constable McDonald. A decent cop with a wife and two little girls—Kate and Lizzy—fighting for breath because a stranger with a blade wanted to make a point. The doctor had called it “touch and go.” Sunrise was a finish line he might not cross.
The words for it hit a cop in a place training doesn’t reach. “Cop killer.” It thuds in the chest, flips old switches you don’t like to admit are wired in—the bone-deep stuff, the handed-down myths about justice coming in .45 caliber, long rope and tall trees. She knew better; she’d lectured rookies on better. But lying there in the dark, she could feel the old frontier echo pressing against the modern badge, the way rage tries to dress itself up as righteousness.
She breathed through it, counted to five, then ten. McDonald wasn’t a symbol; he was a husband who joked about his wife “never letting him hear the end of it,” a dad who said his girls’ names like they were prayers. If he didn’t make it, the headlines would say “Officer Down,” and the world would move on. His family wouldn’t. And that, more than anything, hardened her resolve: stop Bloodletter now, with evidence and leverage and cuffs—before the city learned those girls’ names for the wrong reason.
It led to a harder question: if Bloodletter were gunned down—by a city cop, an RCMP officer, by her—would anyone shed a tear? Would she? It was too easy to sand off the humanity and call what remained a monster in skin. She knew better. Black-and-white got people hurt; most killers came with a “why”—trauma, untreated illness, a fuse someone kept lighting. She’d read files where the story bent that way: Aileen Wuornos, marinated in abuse and exploitation until violence felt like self-defense; Edmund Kemper, shaped by a mother who weaponized humiliation; Ed Gein, broken by isolation and pathological grief; Richard Trenton Chase, florid psychosis turning fear into slaughter. Reasons didn’t excuse—but they existed, and if you looked, you could trace the cracks.
What chilled her were the voids—the cases where the “why” collapsed into appetite or air. Israel Keyes, methodical and mobile, killing because the planning pleased him. Zodiac, turning murder into correspondence, motive a smirk in an envelope. Closer to home: Paul Bernardo’s slick sadism, Russell Williams’ curated double life, Bruce McArthur hiding bodies in planters while smiling for customers. Explanations that weren’t explanations at all—power for power’s sake, cruelty because it fit.
Maybe “gray” wasn’t comfort—just black and white shattered into pieces you couldn’t sort fast enough. Either way, her job didn’t change: bring him in alive if possible, with a case that holds on appeal. Stop him before another family learns a name the wrong way. And if the only thing between a blade and a body was the weight of her trigger, she’d carry that, too.
And she knew that if it came to it, she wouldn’t hesitate. RCMP training ran deep: if a threat warranted lethal force, you acted—no flinch, no second-guessing in the moment. What bothered her wasn’t the certainty of action; it was the part of her that feared she might want it. The sliver that wanted to be judgment, not just justice. It had haunted her since the first time she took a life in the line of duty.
A drug raid—biker compound, armed to the teeth, running guns and dope, not the sort to surrender without theater. The entry started by the book until a sawed-off thundered from another room and someone screamed “Officer down!” The air fractured. Adrenaline narrowed her world to doorways and muzzle flashes. ERT was en route, but chaos didn’t wait.
He came at her in a hallway washed with strobe-blue from a kicked-open exit, a big man with prison ink and a crowbar gripped like a promise. Her sidearm suddenly felt small. A shotgun lay on the tile where its owner had crawled for cover—Remington Model 870, action slick with dust and sweat. She snatched it up, planted, and worked the pump on instinct.
Three rounds. Twelve gauge. Center mass.
The details never left her: the concussive slap in her chest, the sting of burned propellant in her nose, brass skittering across linoleum, her ears ringing while the radio barked overlapping traffic. After, they called her decisive. Said she’d saved the operator who’d dropped the shotgun—maybe more. Commendations, paperwork, the ritual phrases about courage under fire.
None of it quieted the question that still waited at the edges: if it takes a hound willing to rip a throat to stop the wolves, how much of the wolf does the hound become? She carried that with her, the same way she carried her badge—weight you never really put down.
She wondered if it haunted others in her line—the soldiers, cops, even the capes—that quiet truth running through history: the people who stop killers are always people capable of killing. It takes a warrior to stop a bandit, a hero to end a monster, a sheriff to put down a gunslinger. Knights on horseback, samurai at a wooden gate, Mounties riding into a camp at dusk—different uniforms, same arithmetic. Violence ends violence more often than anyone likes to admit. Folklore dresses it up, but the lesson’s blunt: bad men are stopped by good people willing to do bad things—and then live with it afterward.
She didn’t romanticize it. “Maintiens le Droit” wasn’t a spell; it was a weight. You uphold the right with words if you can, with cuffs if you must, and with a muzzle flash only when there’s no other line left to hold. And when the smoke clears, you count the cost in the quiet and hope the ledger still reads human.
She rolled over and stared through the bedroom window into the Toronto night—high-rise constellations, a plane sliding low over the lake, the faint smear of siren-light somewhere two neighborhoods over. Peace didn’t live here tonight. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride; if wishes were warrants, she’d have Bloodletter in cuffs and a clean chain-of-custody by dawn.
Her thoughts pinballed anyway. McDonald—ICU monitors ticking like metronomes, his wife hunched in a plastic chair, two little girls asleep against each other. Jerry at the lab, running the sample on the quiet and triple-gloving because she’d asked him to. Internal Affairs, invisible until they aren’t. Leblanc’s tired eyes in the break room and that one slip of sincerity that complicated the picture. Vulpes, moving through the station like smoke, leaving only a bagged piton driver and the feeling of a line crossed.
She tried the tricks: four square breaths, catalog the room (clock, dresser, doorframe nick), tense and release. Her brain obligingly supplied exhibit lists instead—filler composition in smoke canisters, sharpening signatures, ER intake codes for puncture wounds and cautery burns. “Maintiens le Droit,” she told the ceiling, as if saying it aloud might slow the climb of her pulse. Uphold the right. Hold the line. Don’t drown in the gray.
The phone on her nightstand stayed dark. She turned the brass cartridge on its chain between thumb and forefinger and listened to the HVAC hum and the city’s distant buzz. When sleep finally came, it was thin and brittle, like ice you wouldn’t put your full weight on—ready to crack at the first vibration of a call.
She gave up pretending sleep would come on its own and padded to the kitchen. The fridge light hit like a flashbang in the dark—no-name cola, the plastic lemons and limes that were more theater than fruit, a chipped mug from a charity fun-run. Ice clattered; the sound felt clean. She reached for the bottle that sat in the cupboard like a guilty secret—spiced rum, dark enough to swallow the room. The first pour came out heavier than she meant, the cola not quite enough to hide it. Citrus squeeze, a quick stir.
Vanilla, clove, a little heat—college in a glass. It wasn’t fancy, but it was hers, the one thing that could slide the volume knob on her brain a few clicks down without wrecking tomorrow. The trick was always the line. She’d watched good people in uniform drift over it—self-medication turning into a lifestyle, a career into rubble. Half the reason she’d quit smoking was watching it take her father, cell by cell. Nicotine, ethanol, sugar—pick your poison; it was never the tool, it was the terms.
She lifted the mug and let the first swallow settle. Shoulders dropped half an inch. The second sip lasted longer. One drink, then water, then bed. She set the bottle back in the cupboard—out of sight, on purpose—and leaned against the counter while the ice cracked softly in the glass. Puritans could keep their lectures; tonight wasn’t a spiral, it was a truce.
Phone face-up on the table, volume high. McDonald. Jerry at the lab. The case file waiting like a patient animal. She finished the last of the rum-and-cola, rinsed the mug, and let the tap run cold over her wrists. Sleep still might be thin and brittle, but with the edge sanded down, it might hold.
Liv finally slid under, the city dimming to black—until the phone buzzed and chimed against the nightstand. She surfaced hard, snatched it up.
“This is Detective Benoit.”
A woman’s voice, steady but worn at the edges. “Detective, I’m calling from St. Michael’s on behalf of Dr. Young. It’s about Constable McDonald.”
The pause was a cliff edge.
“He’s stable,” the nurse said. “Outlook is good.”
Air she didn’t know she’d been rationing rushed back into her lungs. Relief didn’t sparkle; it thudded, heavy and grateful. “Thank you. I appreciate Dr. Young keeping me in the loop.”
“There is some not-so-good, I’m afraid,” the nurse added, professional gentleness in her tone. “He took a lot of blood loss. We’re monitoring kidney function for acute injury, and there are early signs of hepatic stress—likely from the shock cascade. He’s responding, but we’ll be watching labs closely today. He’s in ICU, sedated, and his wife is on the approved call list.”
“Understood,” Liv said. “If there’s any change—any—please ring me, day or night.”
“We will, Detective.”
“Thank you… for all of it.” She meant it, and let it be heard. The call ended.
She set the phone down and sat there a moment, elbows on knees, letting the weight shift: not gone, but lighter. McDonald had a fighting chance. That mattered.
The room still smelled faintly of rum and citrus. She scrubbed a hand over her face, swung her legs out of bed, and headed for the shower. Hot water hammered the fog out of her skull while she built the day in her head: swing by the lab, check Jerry’s progress on the quiet-channel sample, touch base with St. Mike’s, then back to the board. Vulpes, Bloodletter, press, paperwork.
Justice does sleep, she decided as she toweled off—just not as much as it would like to. She smirked at the mirror, pulled on a suit, and went to make friends with a too-strong coffee that was thick and dark as a mud pit.
