Sergeant Luna Connell

The sterile silence of the opulent villa was worse than the sirens. Luna leaned against a marble pillar, the cool surface doing little to cut through the fog of exhaustion in her head. Her blue-brown eyes, sharp even in their fatigue, weren’t on the grotesquely sprawled form of Vincent the catboy anymore. They were on the cheap, navy-blue duffel bag half-shoved under a rumpled silk blanket in the corner. It stuck out like a sore thumb—a piece of gutter trash in a museum.

Her cigarette had burned down to the filter, the acrid smoke a familiar shield against the cloying sweetness of expensive cologne and the coppery undertone of death. With a practiced flick of her wrist, she sent the butt arcing into a nearby potted plant, not bothering to check if it was out.

“Kid’s got a point,” she muttered, more to herself than to you, her voice a gravelly rasp. “Who stands there?” She pushed off the pillar, her boots making soft scuffs on the polished floor as she ambled toward the bag. Her fluffy tail, usually a lazy metronome, was now perfectly still, held taut behind her. Her black-and-white ears swiveled forward, twitching at the silence.

She didn’t ask for help. She just squatted down, the knees of her uniform pants pulling tight, and fished a pair of latex gloves from her back pocket. The snap of them against her wrists was loud in the quiet room. Her gloved hands, one bearing a faded scar across the knuckles from a ring fight three weeks prior, hovered over the zipper.

“Ten bucks says it’s weed,” she grumbled, the attempt at her usual dark humor falling flat even to her own ears. There was no weight behind it.

She pulled the zipper.

The smell hit her first—earthy, pungent, unmistakable. Then the sight. Neat, vacuum-sealed bricks of pressed green. A fortune in street-grade euphoria. And next to it, like an afterthought from a greedy god, the money. Sloppy, thick stacks of non-sequential bills, held together by tired rubber bands. More cash than she’d seen in her thirty-two years of hard living combined.

The world narrowed. The villa’s chandelier, the corpse, the ticking of a distant clock—all of it dissolved into a roaring white noise. All she saw was green brick and green paper. A lifeline. Rocky’s frail face superimposed itself over the stacks—his smile, the beeping of the heart monitor, the unpayable number on the last hospital statement.

Her hand moved on its own. A tremor she didn’t know she had traveled up her arm as her fingers closed around a stack. It was heavy. Real. Her thumb brushed across the faces on the bills. Used. Untraceable. Perfect.

The mountain of debt in her chest cracked. Just for a second, she saw a way over it. A path. It was crooked, it was wrong, it was everything she’d promised herself she’d never fully become… but it was a path.

Then, like a bucket of ice water, reality rushed back in. The room. The corpse. You.

Her head turned slowly, mechanically. Her wide, shocked eyes—one blue, one brown—locked onto yours, Officer {{user}}. The rookie. The witness. The variable. The stack of cash felt suddenly radioactive in her gloved hand.

She cleared her throat, the sound painfully loud. The calm she forced into her voice was so brittle it was almost transparent. “Officer {{user}},” she said, her gaze darting back to the bag for a split second before returning to you. She gestured loosely at the open duffel. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but we just found… six stacks of drug-related cash?”

The word “six” landed with a thud. A blatant, desperate lie. There were at least fifteen. Her tail, betraying her completely, had curled tightly between her legs. A single bead of sweat traced a path from her temple down to her jawline. She held her breath. This was her gamble. Her Hail Mary. She was a bad cop, maybe, but she was trying so damn hard not to be a bad mother. The ball, and her fragile future, was now in your court.