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  The house is a two-story brownstone terrace in Archway, Islington, the first and only property Lestrade has ever owned. She saved the money for years and finally bought the house after making Detective Inspector a few years ago. Sherlock has enjoyed learning more about Lestrade from observing the house. She still remembers the flat Lestrade used to live in, the one she was renting when they first met. It was a space that changed with the coming and going of Lestrade's lovers, men Sherlock never set eyes on but knew well enough through the flat. But this house? This house is all Lestrade. She hasn't had a lover since before she bought it.

  "Shall I put the kettle on?" Lestrade says as Sherlock reaches the kitchen.

  Sherlock nods, looking around the room from where she stands next to the round table as if she hasn't seen it before.

  Lestrade fills the electric kettle with tap water and sets it to boil. She's wearing a pair of baggy sweatpants and an oversized pullover. She's barefoot, and Sherlock wonders how the floor doesn't make her feet cold. Sherlock watches her as she takes the tea bags from one cupboard and two mugs from another, her voluminous curls like a halo of smoke around her head.

  Lestrade. First name Gayle. Forty-four years old, nine years older than Sherlock. A black woman with eyes that look like pure truth, luminous and hypnotic. Sherlock has forgotten herself before when Lestrade looks at her as if she's the only thing in the world. They met when Lestrade was still a detective sergeant, and Sherlock was a twenty-something cocaine addict, working as a government chemist and solving cold cases in her spare time.

  Lestrade comes to the table with the two mugs of tea and sits down. Sherlock follows, sitting across from her. They wait for the tea to cool in silence, listening to the rain.

  "I apologize," Sherlock says. "For the other day. I shouldn't have been cross with you."

  "It's fine," says Lestrade. "I understand."

  "I know you never suspected me."

  Lestrade looks at her and takes a preliminary sip of her tea.

  Sherlock touches the side of her mug to feel the heat.

  "Do you think there'll be another?" Lestrade says.

  Sherlock glances at her. "Yes," she replies after a pause.

  "Why?"

  "Because he's targeting me. He won't stop until he's caught or until he destroys me in whatever way he wants."

  "Do you think he's homeless? Someone who knows about you through your network?"

  "I doubt it," says Sherlock. "If he was, my contacts would know about him and want him removed from the streets for their own safety. No, he's someone who's smart enough to know the homeless are easy targets. Someone who knows about my connections to them."

  "You must have ideas about who he is," Lestrade says, looking at Sherlock with her hands around the base of her mug.

  Sherlock is quiet, staring into her tea. She's been mentally reviewing the criminals she's identified in the last few years, filling in the blanks with her written logs and Watson's journals. There are only so many who are no longer in prison, but even once she eliminates the men on the list who don't fit the crime, there are too many possibilities. She doesn't have enough information yet to pursue just one potential suspect, and pursuing them all would be a waste of time and energy.

  "No," Sherlock says. "Not yet."

  "Well," says Lestrade. "I don't either—but we'll find him."

  Sherlock drinks her tea and doesn't respond. She knows the man will continue to kill until he's neutralized, and if she fails to identify and locate him in a timely manner, he may well come to her. She isn't worried about catching up with him. That part is inevitable. She's not even worried about him coming for her. She just can't stand the idea of more victims. She usually doesn't take responsibility for the crimes of serial killers she hunts, but this time, it's personal. This time, the guilty man has killed a woman to target Sherlock. Every future victim falls onto her shoulders.

  "How've you been?" Lestrade says, a tinge of concern in her voice.

  "Fine," says Sherlock, "considering the circumstances. I've been working."

  "That goes without saying."

  Sherlock finally looks at Lestrade, really looks at her. "I told Watson I was staying here tonight."

  Lestrade blinks. "Good," she replies. "We can go over the case file, maybe put something together we haven't seen individually."

  "I didn't come here to work," Sherlock says.

  Lestrade pauses, looking at Sherlock carefully. "Okay. I was going to make dinner, but we can order take away if you like. What do you want to do besides eat?"

  "The sofa was good, a couple weeks ago."

  Lestrade smiles. "Yeah?"

  "Yes. Didn't you think so?"

  "It was nice," Lestrade says and drinks some tea.

  They order Thai food from the little restaurant down the street and eat in the sitting room with the radio on. Cross-legged and barefoot on the oversized floor cushions, they sit around the coffee table and pick food from each other's cartons. They listen to LBC talk radio and drink wine, finishing off one bottle and moving onto a second. By the time they're finished eating, they're warm and woozy and don't want to move or talk. Lestrade lights one of the fat, white candles she keeps in the room and turns out the lamps.

  They lie down together on the sofa, and Lestrade pulls a blanket over them. Sherlock's on her back, with Lestrade pressed to her side and her arm around the other woman. Lestrade holds onto Sherlock too, resting her head on Sherlock's shoulder. They close their eyes and listen to the rain and the crackling hush of the radio. Sherlock tilts her head toward Lestrade, feeling her weight and body heat, smelling her—that sweet, earthy smell she finds in all of Lestrade's clothes and in her bed. Whenever Sherlock is alone and thinks of the other woman, the scent is what comes to her first. Cocoa butter, vanilla lip balm, loose tobacco, Earl Grey tea.

  Gayle Lestrade is many things to Sherlock: mentor, friend, colleague, someone who has saved her life on more than one occasion, her access point to the homicide cases that thrill her more than anything. They've come to know each other well after ten years, but Sherlock still doesn't feel as certain about Lestrade as she does about most people. There's an element of unpredictability to Lestrade that isn't based on her record but on Sherlock's intuition—a feeling that at any time, Lestrade will surprise her in a totally unforeseeable way. And almost nobody surprises Sherlock Holmes.

  "Sherlock," Lestrade says.

  Sherlock opens her eyes and looks into Lestrade's, their faces close enough that they can feel each other's breath. Sherlock doesn't know what she sees in Lestrade's eyes. She doesn't recognize the emotion. Emotions aren't her strong suit, as Watson put it so delicately. They stare at each other in silence for a long beat, Sherlock's arm still wrapped around Lestrade's back and Lestrade's hand on Sherlock's belly.

  "I love you," Lestrade says.

  "I know," says Sherlock, after a pause. "I love you."

  Lestrade searches her eyes, her face, and Sherlock can't imagine what she's looking for. After a moment, Lestrade settles her head against Sherlock's breast and hooks her arm around Sherlock again.

  This started years ago, when Sherlock was a young, precocious private investigator just starting to establish herself, addicted to cocaine and miserable beyond description. Back then, the physical affection between her and Lestrade only happened in conjunction with Sherlock's drug use: when she crashed after a high, when she was in withdrawal, when she injected the coke instead of snorting it and needed supervision for her safety. Lestrade would hold her when she had the shakes, nurse her when Sherlock lay drug sick on Lestrade's sofa in the detective's old flat, rub her back and allow Sherlock to grip her knee whenever Sherlock tried to quit using on her own and suffered the side effects.

  After Sherlock got clean for good, she and Lestrade spent years barely touching. Sherlock missed the contact but she was afraid to ask for it without an excuse. She would savor the moments of spontaneous touch that happened in the heat of intense situations on the job,
when one or the other's life was threatened or when one of them was harmed. About a year ago, they fell asleep together by accident, right here on the sofa, and ever since then, they cuddle whenever Sherlock comes to Lestrade's flat by herself and stays for the evening. Sometimes, Sherlock spends the night, and they sleep side by side in Lestrade's bed.

  They've never had sex. As far as Sherlock knows, Lestrade still considers herself heterosexual. Sherlock has never been interested in sex or romance. She does like the physical affection and intimacy of her relationships with Lestrade and Watson, much more than she could've anticipated before experiencing it, but she doesn't have sexual thoughts about either woman. She loves Watson and Lestrade with a fierceness she has only ever felt for her work, and if there's a difference between her feelings for one versus the other, she doesn't recognize what it is. She and Lestrade haven't discussed their relationship or their physical intimacy since it increased, and Sherlock assumes, whether out of logic or misunderstanding, that Lestrade shares her attitude about keeping things simple.

  They lie together in the darkened sitting room, passing in and out of a shallow sleep. The rain beats against the windows in a steady stream. After a couple hours, Lestrade stirs and leads Sherlock to her bedroom upstairs. Sherlock strips off her clothes and puts on one of Lestrade's pajama t-shirts, slipping into the bed and finding Lestrade's warm body in the dark. The other woman's scent is the last thing Sherlock senses before she goes under.

  *~*~*

  She's in the water again. Floating under the weak light, in the cool, darkened blue. Below her is the bottomless, black deep. She doesn't feel like she's moving or sinking, just floating somewhere in between the light and the darkness. She's alone, no sea life in sight.

  She feels the water suddenly turn cold. His face—it's his face rising out of the depths, rushing up at her. Flat shark eyes and death white skin, his open mouth full of glistening teeth. He's smiling. He looks like he'll start to laugh any moment, a silent cackle.

  James Moriarty.

  *~*~*

  Sherlock wakes up in the dark and doesn't remember where she is at first. The palest light peeps through the crack in the window curtains, still too dim to illuminate anything beyond the window. She sits up and looks over to her right, recognizes Lestrade's silhouette in the bed and feels a bit of relief. She breathes just to feel the air in her nose and her lungs, to replace the water.

  She hasn't dreamed of Moriarty in a long time. Why now? She hasn't thought of him lately, and his last letter showed up two months ago. He's written her several times since he started serving his life sentence in prison, but she stopped dreaming about him in reaction to the letters after the second one she received. She's never written back to him or seen him since the trial. Mycroft monitors him closely but never mentions him to Sherlock. And she doesn't ask him about Moriarty either.

  Sherlock picks her watch up from the night table and checks the time. Lestrade won't wake for another hour. Sherlock isn't going back to sleep, so she sits there for a minute and tries to decide what to do. Part of her wants to lie awake with her arms around Lestrade until the other woman gets up. She could go make coffee. She could pick up breakfast somewhere and bring it back.

  But she feels a tug in the pit of her stomach—the impulse to leave. She's never done that before: make Lestrade wake up alone. It shouldn't matter, and probably wouldn't, not really. Yet Sherlock feels wrong about it anyway. As much as she wants to be alone, to shed the presence of Moriarty away from Lestrade, she doesn't want to make her think something's off between them.

  Sherlock slips out of bed and out of the room and shuts herself in Lestrade's bathroom. She turns the water on in the shower and waits for it to heat up, looking at herself in the mirror. She lets the trouble surface on her face, in her cold blue eyes. Tries not to see him laughing at her.

  She steps into the shower and just stands in the hot water for a little while, feeling it blast the chill from her skin, tasting it on her lips to make sure it isn't salty. She washes her body clean and ignores the lingering sense of him on her, around her. She doesn't have much hair—her head is shaved almost bald on the sides, dark hair long enough on top to run her fingers through it—but she washes it with Lestrade's shampoo.

  She doesn't hear any noise on the other side of the door when she turns off the water and steps out of the shower. She rubs herself dry with a towel and slips into Lestrade's bathrobe, gathering her borrowed pajamas in one arm before exiting the bathroom.

  Sherlock finds Lestrade awake in bed, slouching against the headboard in the diminishing dark. She's got a look on her face.

  "What?" Sherlock says.

  Lestrade hesitates, and Sherlock knows before she opens her mouth.

  "There's been another one."

  *~*~*

  This time, the victim is a boy, no older than sixteen or seventeen by the look of him. He's skinny, his lips chapped enough to peel, his clothes and his skin dirty. His green eyes are open, glazed with death, his expression full of shock and fear. There are tear tracks down his cheeks, white lines in the thin layer of grime. The bruising on his neck and the blown blood vessels in eyes indicate strangulation, another man's hands marking the pale flesh black and purple. Had he been a boy with a home, well-fed and cared for, he might've been strong enough to fight off his attacker, but he was too weak from starvation and malnutrition to do more than squirm. He's naked from the waist up, his layers of removed clothing strewn on the ground around him, his ribs poking against his almost-translucent skin.

  SHERLOCK has been cut across the boy's chest, above the nipples, the surrounding skin stained with blood. The wounds are uglier than the ones cut into the first victim's forearm, the letters bigger, the cuts deeper. They've already started to scab at the edges, still glistening wet in the middle, the flesh puckered and angry pink bordering the letters.

  Sherlock squats next to the corpse and grimaces. The kid hasn't been dead long enough to give off the stench of death, but he's already stiff.

  "Fuck," she whispers and looks away, her eyes landing on a cluster of uniform police several yards from her. They look at her not with the typical cynicism coppers harbor for Sherlock but with something new, something she doesn't recognize right away. Her stomach feels hollow when she realizes they think she's guilty, that she's the one who killed the boy and signed her name into his body.

  "Hey," says Watson, standing on the other side of the body. "Are you okay?"

  Sherlock looks up at her. "No," she says. She stands up and sighs, deciding to ignore anyone who isn't Watson or Lestrade. "What do you see?"

  Watson purses her lips and for a moment, it seems like she's going to offer Sherlock reassurance. But she answers the question instead. "Likeliest cause of death is asphyxiation induced via strangulation. He wasn't beaten like the first victim. There's bruising around his neck and on the face, clearly, but not any defense injuries I can see. Our man pounced on him and got him on the ground quick. The boy didn't put up much of a fight, if any. He might've been on something, or he might've just been weak. Maybe both. There's no trace of alcohol or drugs here, but it's still possible he was intoxicated."

  "And the wounds?" Sherlock says, her gaze searing but her expression impervious. Watson is avoiding comment on the wounds, and Sherlock won't let her get away with it.

  Watson glances from the victim, back to her. "They're garish but non-lethal. Definitely inflicted after death. No sign of the weapon anywhere. It might be the same knife used on the first victim, but it's hard to tell. There aren't any other cuts on the body I can see that could've come from the weapon—so our man isn't one to get carried away. He isn't mutilating the bodies for mutilation's sake or out of rage toward the victim. The cutting is controlled. He only does it to—to leave your name."

  Sherlock lowers her eyes to the boy again. "The violence is directed at me," she says. "He wishes he were killing me instead of these homeless. So why doesn't he come for me?"

  She walks off bef
ore Watson can respond, heading for the main road, hoping she can catch a cab. She feels Lestrade watching her from where she stands with the other police detectives but doesn't look at her.

  *~*~*

  She waits twenty-four hours before going to the ring, letting herself stew in the juices of murder number two. She's always been able to compartmentalize her work, to keep her cases and everything they've taught her about human beings and men in particular in a mental box miles away from her heart. She is not an emotional woman. She's been accused of insensitivity more than once, of being cold and callous, remote and unfeeling. It's true she hasn't wasted any tears or even pity on any of the hundreds of victims she's helped vindicate during her career, though she has felt a cerebral kind of anger on their behalf, more and more lately. But this, these murders of the homeless, weighs on her.

  When her brother Mycroft wants to decompress, he sits in his private room at the Diogenes club with the newspaper, a bottle of expensive scotch, and a cigarette. When Sherlock needs to blow off steam, she comes here, to the basement of The Black Horse, a two-hundred-year-old pub in Fitzrovia. She fights men, most of whom have no formal training, and she wins more often than anyone expects. As far as she knows, she's the only woman to set foot in the Black Horse ring, and she's been fighting long enough that the regulars know who she is, even bet on her sometimes.

  Sherlock doesn't enter the pub through the main entrance on the ground floor. She goes around to the back and takes the stairs leading down to the basement door, which only the pub staff and regular fight-goers use. The hot, humid air and noise of men's voices hit her as soon as she steps inside, and she passes through the dark, heading toward the crowd obscuring the ring. She hangs her coat on the long coat rack adhered to the wall, already dressed in fight-appropriate clothes: a sports bra, exercise pants, and trainers. She takes her hand wraps and her mouth guard out of her coat pocket and goes to find the overseer who stands back behind the crowd and keeps track of the fighters, winners, and losers on a clipboard. Tonight, it's Davey. She asks him if he has anyone in her weight class coming up; she's always stuck to opponents within ten pounds of her, lighter or heavier, which limits her pool of opponents but ensures she has good odds of winning and better odds of escaping major physical harm.