Run: 2026-10-27-01M5YEF0H7W5RVBTN87XEZNF5Z

The rain had stopped before midnight, but Blackthorn House still dripped as though the storm remained inside its very walls. Detective Mara Venn found Sir Julian Vane beneath the library window, one pale hand curled around a small silver key. There was no blood upon the carpet, no wound beneath his collar, and no terror left upon his pale face. Upstairs, six guests waited behind locked doors, each insisting that the dead man had dined entirely alone downstairs that night. The mantel clock had stopped at eleven, though Mara could hear its mechanism ticking softly inside the polished wooden case. She knelt beside the body and saw fresh ink upon his thumb, blacker than the surrounding shadows on the carpet. Then the lights went out, and somewhere above her, a key turned inside a lock with slow and deliberate care.