Chapter One:
Bad Blood Doesn’t Freeze
Greybridge Homicide Division, 3:14 a.m.
Greybridge never really sleeps. It twitches. It sweats. It whispers like an old drunk trying to remember where the bruises came from. Between the midnight shift and last call, the city becomes a half-lit confession booth for sins no one repents.
Rain smeared across the windshield in crooked veins. Streetlights blinked like tired eyes, and the wet asphalt shimmered under them like an oil-slick mirror.
Detective Frank “Mack” MacNamara sat behind the wheel of an unmarked sedan that smelled of old coffee, gun oil, and the long, bitter decay of lives gone sideways. The city outside breathed slow and heavy — the kind of breath that came before the storm.
He lit his fourth cigarette and didn’t offer one to the passenger beside him. Not because he was rude — because she wouldn’t take it. He’d watched her turn down offers of smokes, drinks, and flirtation a dozen times now. Always polite. Always distant. Like she was made of glass and consequence.
Mara Ellison. Internal Affairs turned field investigator. Wrong side of beautiful for this job. Too sharp for most men to feel comfortable around. Too restrained to be trusted.
She didn’t belong in this car.
Which, Mack figured, was exactly why she chose to be here.
“You really picked the short straw working with me, Ellison,” he said, voice like gravel dragged over steel. “You know that, right?”
She didn’t turn her head. Her eyes stayed locked on the flickering neon above the bar’s front door. “I was Internal Affairs. I don’t believe in straws. Just choices.”
He grunted. “Lotta people in this department think you’re crazy. Pretty white girl backing the angry old Black drunk. Makes ‘em nervous.”
“Good,” she said, cool and dry. “I like people better when they’re nervous.”
He exhaled through his nose — a soft sound, almost a laugh but not quite. He’d heard cries like that in the holding cell at four a.m. from men who knew the story had already ended.
“You’re gonna get yourself killed one day with that mouth.”
“Maybe,” she replied. She finally looked at him — eyes pale blue, unblinking. “But not today. And not sitting next to you.”
Time slowed again. Rain softened. The bar lights buzzed behind warped glass. A broken neon beer sign flickered, casting red shadows across a payphone that hadn’t worked in a decade.
Mack let the silence stretch between them. It wasn’t dead air. It was weight. Something solid they both knew how to carry. There was a rhythm to their quiet — the kind forged from years of watching backs, chasing ghosts, and learning how to breathe in rooms thick with rot.
The door opened and a man stumbled out. Half-lit. Too drunk to stand tall but sober enough to know the street was watching.
Mack’s fingers slid instinctively toward the Glock on his thigh. The motion wasn’t panic. It was habit. Muscle memory baked in from thirty years of dark corners and dead ends.
“You sure this guy’s worth sitting in piss-soaked seats for four hours?” he asked.
Mara checked her notebook. Her handwriting was neat. Almost surgical. “Witness in a missing persons case. Said he saw Detective Arliss outside that bar the night the girl vanished.”
“Arliss?” Mack’s upper lip curled. “That son of a bitch has been dirty since ‘07. But he’s got friends. Real ones. The kind with bars on their collars and city contracts in their pockets.”
He didn’t need to look at her to know she already knew that.
She didn’t respond. Just kept watching. Outside, the sleet started to fall. Soft at first, then sharp — stinging the pavement like glass dust. Mack’s knee flared with dull heat. Scar tissue remembering a hollow-point from the late ‘90s. Bronx. Wrong door. Wrong skin color.
“You don’t talk much,” he said.
“You talk enough for both of us.”
He liked that. Not the words. The delivery. No drama. No neediness. Just truth, like a blade laid gently on the table.
“You don’t flinch either,” he muttered. “Even when half the squad talks about you like you’re sleeping your way to power.”
She finally looked at him — really looked.
“You ever wonder why I don’t punch them?” she asked.
Mack blinked. “Thought maybe you were waiting for the right moment.”
“No,” she said. “Because they want me to. If I swing first, I become exactly what they say I am.”
Mack flicked ash out the window. “That’s smart. Cold, but smart.”
“I’ve had practice.”
The bar door creaked open again. A different man this time — lean, alert, moving like someone with something to hide.
“Clock him,” Mack said.
“Jackson Rhames,” Mara murmured. “Arliss’s CI. Last guy to see the Vic alive.”
Mack leaned forward. “Think he’s here to clean up loose ends?”
Mara reached for the recorder in the glove box, clicked it on. “Only one way to find out.”
Mack sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I’m too old for this stakeout shit.”
“You say that every time.”
“Yeah. And I get older every time.”
She smiled. Barely. But it was real. And for just a moment, Mack saw something behind her eyes — not softness, but conviction. The kind of conviction they used to write about in precinct plaques before the ink dried and turned to mold.
His hand paused on the door handle. He caught a sliver of his reflection in the side mirror — and froze.
Once, a long time ago, he used to talk to God.
He used to believe in something. Justice. Brotherhood. Redemption.
Then came the lies — stacked like bricks in a crooked wall. Paperwork that vanished. Testimony that changed. A Black suspect dead in a holding cell, and nobody asking the questions Mack couldn’t stop hearing in his sleep.
He asked God one question. Just one: Why do the good ones bleed while the bad ones rise?
He never got an answer.
Only silence.
The kind that cries out only when you’ve already drowned in it.
So he stopped asking.
And he drank. Hard. Fast. Mean. Let the bottle wash away the memories until all that was left was grit and a badge no one respected anymore.
He would’ve died that way, too — if it weren’t for her.
Not Mara. Someone else. A woman from a shelter, of all places. She didn’t give him scripture. She gave him a cup of coffee and a stare that cracked through thirty years of armor.
Now he stayed sober. Mostly.
God stayed gone.
That part never changed.
Mack killed the engine.
“You ready, Ellison?”
She opened her door. Rain hit her like judgment — cold, sharp, final.
“I was born ready,” she said. Then added, quieter, “That’s the problem.”
They stepped out into the sleet — two shadows walking the fault lines of a city that had long since given up on saints.
Somewhere behind them, a streetlamp buzzed once and went dark.
A fly landed on Mack’s sleeve — stubborn, wet, defiant. Like the city itself. He brushed it away, but more would come. The flies always do.
Behind them, Greybridge kept breathing. Heavy. Corrupt.
And very much awake.