The painting was wrong.

Not the style. Not the technique.

It was wrong because it showed the future.
 And that future… had already turned into the past.

The canvas depicted an empty room. A woman lying on the floor, eyes staring into nothing. A broken vase. A flower snapped in half on the carpet.

Then the woman entered the real room—the one in the painting.

And found herself.
 Dead.
 As foretold.

Edrick Veil stared at the note left by the Harlequin—the one found beside Eleanor Voss’s coffin. He turned it over in his fingers, as if searching for another layer. A second meaning. A hidden code.

There was nothing.

Only theater.

Lira walked in, shaking off the rain, and handed him a sealed folder.

“Three bodies,” she said. “Three paintings. All finished before the victims died.”

Edrick looked up, then opened the file. Crime scene photos.
 Each death was a scene.
 Each scene, a canvas.
 Each canvas… unsigned.

“Precognition?” he murmured. “Or staging?”

Lira didn’t answer. She showed him the third photo. A woman, sitting on the floor, crying. On the wall behind her: her own blood drawn into a spiral.

Every painting depicted the crime scene with surgical precision.

And each victim… knew the painter.

Tomas Valner’s studio stood at the edge of the old city. A gray house, choked by ivy and sealed shutters.

Silence welcomed them.

Then a voice, calm as winter.

“I don’t see them. I hear them.”

The painter sat in the center of the room. A gaunt man with sharp features. His eyes were sewn shut with red thread. But his hands kept painting.

Edrick hesitated. “Who asked you to paint them?”

Tomas smiled. A slow, unreadable gesture.

“A refined man. Theater mask. He said every work would have… a perfect ending.”

His fingers moved across the canvas as if reading the flesh of the world in Braille.

Lira stepped closer. “Can we see the others?”

Tomas nodded. He pointed to one, still covered.

“This is the last one. I painted it in a dream. But I’ve never dared look at it.”

Edrick lifted the cloth.

And time froze.

The painting showed the two of them—Edrick and Lira—lying in a Blackglass street. Dead. Their blood mingled with the rain. At their feet, a shattered mask.

Behind them, a figure applauded. Harlequin mask. The only one still standing.

“He’s put us on stage,” Lira said quietly.

Edrick didn’t reply.

He had already realized they’d been performing for a long time.

On the studio wall, a pocket watch was nailed in place. It ticked.
 But the minute hand was stuck at midnight.

Above it, written in dried blood:

“The final canvas will be completed… at the twelfth chime.”