The Complicated Death
RONNY’S POV
The clock on my desk read 1:42 a.m., but I’d stopped checking it hours ago. Time didn’t mean much when your mind was running laps around a puzzle you hadn’t even figured out how to take apart yet.
The file sat open in front of me, papers spread in a half-moon arc across the desk, the edges curling from where I’d been shuffling them over and over. I’d told myself I’d give it one hour tonight, just to get the lay of the land. That was nearly four hours ago.
Liliana’s mother—Evelyn Arthur. Fifty-three, Wealthy. Respected. Known for her philanthropy and a knack for turning struggling businesses into goldmines. Six months ago, she’d been behind the wheel of her Bentley Continental GT—one of the newer models, sleek, custom-fitted, and maintained by the kind of specialists who could probably take apart the engine blindfolded. She’d been driving along the coastal road outside the city when the car had suddenly veered off, slammed into a guardrail, and gone over.
The police report was neat. Precise. It hit all the beats—time of day, weather conditions, approximate speed, witnesses. All very tidy. Too tidy.
I leaned back in my chair, rubbing the bridge of my nose, and picked up one of the photos again. The car was a crumpled mess at the bottom of a rocky embankment, its once-polished black paint now scraped to raw metal. The windshield was gone, the roof flattened.
Official cause of death: blunt force trauma.
No autopsy performed.
That last part sat wrong with me, like a pebble in my shoe.
The notes claimed the family had declined one—said Evelyn’s injuries were “consistent with the nature of the accident” and there was “no suspicion of foul play.”
But I’d met Liliana. That woman didn’t believe in coincidences, much less convenient conclusions. So why hadn’t she fought harder to get an autopsy?
Or had someone made sure she didn’t?
I flipped to another page, a maintenance report for the car. It was dated less than a month before the crash. New tires. Full inspection. Engine diagnostics. Everything had checked out fine. If anything, the Bentley was over-maintained.
I’d seen enough of these cases to know—expensive cars like this didn’t just fail. And if they did, it was usually after someone made sure they would.
I tapped my pen against the desk, my eyes tracing the neat black-and-white printouts of the accident scene. A stretch of empty coastal road, the sun setting low on the horizon in the background, casting everything in a warm glow that felt wrong next to the violence in the foreground.
Something in the photos pulled at me. I went through them again—close-up shots of the car’s crumpled front end, the bent guardrail, skid marks. Except… there weren’t many.
I frowned. A vehicle traveling at Evelyn’s reported speed should’ve left more of a trail if she’d slammed the brakes. But the report said the braking was “minimal.”
Minimal braking in a car barreling toward a guardrail.
Either she’d blacked out. Or she’d known something was about to happen and hadn’t had time to react.
Or…
Someone had made sure she couldn’t.
I sat forward, pulling the photographs closer until my elbows rested on the desk.
If Liliana was right—and I was starting to think she might be—then this wasn’t just an accident. It was a setup. A message, maybe. One that had been delivered with surgical precision.
Which meant the person behind it wasn’t sloppy. They were careful. Calculated.
And people like that didn’t leave loose ends.
I leaned back, staring at the ceiling for a moment, then sighed. The file was too clean. Every piece of evidence tucked neatly in its place, every answer provided before you could even ask the question.
That wasn’t how real life worked. Real life was messy. Especially when someone died.
I glanced at the photo of Evelyn again. The camera had caught her mid-laugh, her hand resting on the arm of some man in a tailored suit whose face was cropped out of the frame. There was a confidence in her posture, a brightness in her eyes that didn’t look like someone prone to reckless driving or sudden mistakes.
Liliana had her mother’s eyes. And her fire.
Which meant… if she said it wasn’t an accident, she’d seen something. Felt something.
But what?
I dug deeper into the file, reading through statements from two witnesses who’d been driving behind Evelyn that day. Both claimed they saw her car swerve suddenly toward the guardrail. One mentioned the brake lights flickering just before impact—like she’d tapped them once and then… nothing.
That detail sent a shiver down my spine.
Brake failure.
I closed the folder and stared at the wall for a long minute.
If the brakes had been tampered with, whoever did it had access to her car. And access meant proximity—someone in her circle, maybe even someone she trusted.
I hated cases like this. Not because they were difficult—they were. But because they meant betrayal. And betrayal had a way of rotting everything it touched.
The room was quiet except for the constant click of the pen in my hand. Outside, the city had gone mostly still. Even the occasional passing car was a distant murmur now.
I checked the time again. 2:57 a.m.
I should’ve gone to bed hours ago. Instead, I picked up another photo. This one showed Evelyn at some kind of gala, champagne flute in hand, her smile practiced but genuine. Her hair was done in perfect waves, her dress a deep emerald that made her silver eyes almost glow.
She looked untouchable.
But somebody had touched her. Hard enough to kill her.
I rubbed a hand over my face and closed the file.
I’d told Liliana I’d take the job, but part of me had already decided something else. This case wasn’t just about finding whoever ran her mother off the road. It was about figuring out what Liliana wasn’t telling me.
Because she was hiding something.
I could feel it.
Every look, every careful word when we spoke earlier—she was holding back. People didn’t come to me unless they were desperate. And desperation made them sloppy. But Liliana? She was too controlled for someone who’d lost her mother in what she believed was murder.
No, there was something else buried under all that steel and silk.
I stacked the papers back into the folder, tucking the photographs inside. My desk looked the same as it had when I started, except for the faint scuff marks my elbows had left on the wood.
By the time I made it upstairs, the weight of the day had finally started to settle in my bones. My bedroom was dark except for the sliver of moonlight slipping through the blinds. I didn’t bother undressing—just dropped onto the bed and let the mattress catch me.
The ceiling blurred as my eyes started to close.
Part of me told me to wrap this case up as fast as possible and get Liliana Arthur out of my life before she pulled me into whatever shadows she was walking through.
But another part—one I didn’t like admitting existed—wanted to stay in those shadows long enough to see what she was hiding.
And I sure as hell would.
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