CHAPTER 1
809 Words
The body lay sprawled across the marble floor, eyes frozen in shock, a neat bullet hole between them. Blood pooled around his head, staining the pristine white tiles of the penthouse.
Detective Ethan Voss stood over the corpse of Tyler Grayson, a tech tycoon with too much money and too many enemies. The crime scene was textbook forced entry, single shot to the head, and an overturned whiskey glass on the bar counter. But something was wrong.
“Victim’s last memory is ready,” said Officer Miller, handing Ethan a sleek tablet.
Ethan exhaled, rubbing his temple. Memory dives the supposedly infallible crime solving tool of their time. The dead left behind their final moments, stored and accessible through neural tech. No more unreliable witnesses, no more guesswork. The truth, captured forever.
He tapped the screen, and Tyler Grayson’s last recorded memory played.
A shaky view of his penthouse. The front door bursts open. Heavy footsteps. A figure steps into frame—a woman with dark hair, holding a gun.
“Please,” Grayson’s voice trembled in the recording. “You don’t have to do this.”
The woman raised the weapon. One shot. The screen went black.
Ethan looked up, frowning. “Who is she?”
“ID match came through a few minutes ago.” Miller swiped his holo-display, pulling up a file. Sera Nix, 28. Works at a data processing firm. No criminal record.
Ethan narrowed his eyes at the screen. The woman in the memory wasn’t a hitman. She wasn’t a hired gun or a known associate of Grayson. She looked scared, almost like she didn’t want to be there.
“You bring her in?” Ethan asked.
Miller nodded. “Arrested her an hour ago. The weird thing? She claims she doesn’t know Grayson. Says she was at home all night, nowhere near here.”
Ethan’s jaw tightened. Either the woman was a liar, or
He turned back to the corpse.
someone had just manipulated the memory of a dead man.
Ethan Voss hated interrogations.
Not because he wasn’t good at them—he was. He could break liars with a stare, squeeze the truth out of criminals with a single well-placed question. No, what he hated was innocent people who looked guilty. The ones who were too scared to fight back. The ones who had no chance against the system.
And right now, Sera Nix looked exactly like that.
She sat in the interrogation room, arms wrapped around herself like she was trying to disappear. Her dark hair was tangled, her gray eyes red from crying. The room’s fluorescent lights cast a sickly glow over her pale skin.
She wasn’t a killer. Ethan knew that much just by looking at her. But the memory evidence said otherwise, and memories didn’t lie.
Except, apparently, they did.
Ethan walked in, closing the door behind him. No cuffs. No chains. Just him, her, and the truth sitting somewhere between them.
Sera flinched when he pulled out the chair. Guilty people didn’t flinch. Guilty people got angry.
He slid the tablet across the table. “You know who this is?”
She glanced down. The screen showed a frozen image of Tyler Grayson’s last moment—her face, mid-murder, gun raised. Sera sucked in a sharp breath, shaking her head violently.
“No. I mean, yes, I—” She clenched her fists. “That’s me, but I didn’t m — I wasn’t—”
“You weren’t there?” Ethan leaned forward.
“No! I was home. I was in my apartment all night! I don’t even know this man!” Her voice cracked, panic rising. “Please, you have to believe me!”
Ethan studied her. No eye twitch. No shift in body language. Just raw terror.
And then she said something that made his stomach tighten.
“You’re the third cop I’ve told this to.” She exhaled shakily. “The others already decided I was guilty. They told me memory records are perfect. That I could fight it in court, but—” She met his eyes for the first time. “You don’t believe them, do you?”
Ethan tapped his fingers against the table.
The thing was, she was right. Every cop trusted memory evidence. It was the foundation of modern law. But the crime scene didn’t match the memory.
Forced entry. Overturned glass. Signs of a struggle. None of that appeared in Grayson’s last recording.
Someone had tampered with his mind before he died.
Which meant Sera Nix wasn’t a suspect.
She was a target.
Ethan stood up, grabbing the tablet. “You’re coming with me.”
Sera froze. “What? Where?”
“Somewhere safe.” Ethan headed for the door. “Because if someone went through the trouble of framing you, they won’t stop until you’re dead.”
- Writer
