He rushed toward the laundry room with breath tightening painfully, pushing open the door as heat and humidity struck him, thick air saturated not with steam alone, but with something heavier, something charged with silent harm. Julian stood pressed against the tiled wall, eyes fixed downward, shirt lifted just enough to expose angry red marks across his small torso, marks too deliberate, too patterned, too recent to belong to accident or childish clumsiness.
Marianne Keller, Adrian’s wife for less than eighteen months, turned slowly while holding a damp ceramic plate, her expression disturbingly composed, her posture radiating the unsettling calm of someone convinced that authority justified everything she had done. Adrian struggled to speak, because shock did not explode into immediate outrage, but instead collapsed inward, stealing sound before anger could rise.