The Crooked Man’s Hook
Golden lights swung gently above roaring crowds while acrobats flew like fallen stars through clouds of glitter and smoke. Fortune tellers laughed behind lace veils. Violin music wept somewhere beyond the curtains. Children ran between performers with candied apples clutched in their tiny hands, their laughter swallowed by the endless hymn of carnival bells and carousel songs.
And in the very center of it all stood Alec.
Smiling.
Always smiling.
With crimson painted across his cheeks and starlight sewn into his costume, the clown moved through the circus like he belonged to another world entirely—light-footed and warm, making flowers bloom from empty sleeves and coaxing laughter from even the most exhausted souls.
Officer Angel Rodes had boarded the circus train only to hunt a killer.
Instead, night after night, his eyes kept drifting back toward the boy in white makeup beneath the carnival lights.
Toward the strange gentleness hidden behind painted smiles.
Toward the boy who looked unbearably lonely whenever nobody else was watching.
And somehow, without Angel noticing, the circus stopped feeling like a crime scene and started feeling dangerously close to home.
But beyond the laughter and dazzling performances, death followed the caravan silently.
In every town they visited, someone vanished.
And days later, bloodless bodies would appear among cemetery graves like offerings left for the dead.
They say fate has the cruelest ways of helping you find the person you were looking for.
For Angel Rodes, fate led him to a traveling circus.