Mira froze on the top step, breath caught in her throat. The little room smelled of dust and blood scent as if it were implanted in its core. Cüneyt sat in the centre, back against the window, hands bound to the chair with hospital-grade straps. The straps looked recent—tight, clinical. For a long second, she simply watched him, trying to read the expression on a face she'd thought she knew from the asylum.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded, voice thin with shock and more than a little suspicion.
Cüneyt blinked as if waking from a dream, then fired back with a grin edged in sarcasm. "What are you doing here!!"
Mira let out a breath she hadn't known she'd been holding. The bindings calmed her irrational fear: he couldn't lunge, couldn't disappear into violence. A nervous half-smile creased her face. She lowered herself to the doorway, folding her arms. "You seem happy that I can't move, right?"
Frank's amusement softened the dry lines at the corner of her mouth. She answers, "Frankly? Yes." He laughed once, small and sharp. Then, as if remembering their old roles, he leaned forward and put on a mock solemn tone. "Haha—fun's over. Care to explain how I owe this pleasure of seeing you again?"
Mira tightened her jaw. "I just followed the tip you gave me," she said. "About Ozan. I wanted to see for myself. Turns out he was a pervert and—" Her voice trailed. She tasted disappointment like iron. "He got what he deserved."
Cüneyt hummed and gave a one-shoulder shrug, eyes bored. "Well. I don't know. Don't care much. At least you got what you wanted, right?"
"Not really." She stepped closer, scanning the room like someone cataloguing exits. "Then why are you here—at Ozan's house—at the crime scene?"
"Playing football," he retorted immediately, ridiculousness loud in his tone. "What do you think?!" He shook his head, and the sarcasm fell away. For a second, his eyes went raw. "Look— I don't know how I came here. I don't know who put me here. But they'll pay. They'll all pay."
Mira's lip curled into a contemptuous half-smile. "Who's going to care for a cuckoo brain like yours?" she said, the insult sharp but not cruel.
He glanced at her, amusement flaring back, and his grin widened. "Hey—hey—hey. Keep it civil. I have bad relations with my uncles, sure. But they need me alive to run my father's business. They can't just kill me—nor shove me away when it's politically messy." He leaned his cheek on his shoulder, suddenly half-proud, half-weary. "I'm Cüneyt Vural. Not exactly nameless. I've got enemies—plenty. People who'd love me gone. But if I die, it all goes to charity. So I'm oddly useful."
Mira let the information fall like stones into a still pond. Then, almost without thinking, she moved to the knot at his wrists. "I'll untie you," she said, voice low.
"AH—AH—AH!" he barked, startling her. "What are you doing?"
"Helping you," she replied, as practical as if untying shoes.
"You have a death wish, you stupid—do you not think if I go missing or run away, whoever brought me here will surely come after you next?" His tone was sudden and sharp, a sliver of panic under the bravado.
Mira's hands froze on the knot. "So you don't want me to help you?"
He sighed theatrically. "I wouldn't waste this opportunity. I want food. Water. I'm starving!"
She stared at him, incredulous. "You want me to feed you but not untie you or call the police?"
He inclined his head. "Yes. Because if you just call the police now, whoever did this will vanish. I want to know who it is before the state gets involved. Do you have a camera? Something you can leave a recording of when you go?"
She blinked. Her mind ran through possibilities—cameras, neighbours, patrols. "I don't have a camera." Her fingers found the old phone tucked deep in her bag, the spare she barely used. "But I have this. It's old, not the daily one."
He brightened like someone who'd been handed a small key. "Good. Put it on record. Delete the data. If it's found, you should disappear its trail. Don't log into it. Leave it recording, hidden. If they check the phone, they'll find nothing." He watched her with sudden intensity, the funny man gone for a heartbeat. "If you're being watched, discretion matters."
She nodded, hands already moving—deleting caches, clearing histories, setting the old phone to video and placing it where it would capture the stairwell and the front door. Her fingers were clumsy with adrenaline. She fed him in silence—toast soaked in milk, water from a bottle she cracked with trembling hands. He ate like someone who hadn't seen food in days, hunched, intent.
"Are you sure about this?" she asked as she helped him drink water from the cup. The light from the window slashed across his face.
He took it, swallowing slowly, a corner of amusement returning. "Positive. And—one piece of advice?" He set the cup down and met her gaze directly. "Always think through the little things someone might notice if you're hiding something or from someone. Dirt under nails, wet boot prints… the smallest clue tells the story." He smiled, a real flash of gratitude and mischief. "And thank you, Mira."
She straightened, her chest tight with a mix of fear and an unfamiliar, guilty satisfaction that she'd been useful. She moved with Cüneyt's calm directions—rearranging the chair, wiping footprints from the floor with a scrap of cloth, tossing the blanket back over the window seat as if nothing had happened. He instructed her with a steady practicality that made the room feel less dangerous and more like a stage they both knew how to reset.
When she stepped outside into the rain, the mud she'd dug out of the tree hole clung stubbornly to her nails and splattered the hem of her jeans. The old phone was secure in the place Cüneyt had told her to leave it. As she slid into the driver's seat, his final words looped through her mind like a warning and a benediction at once: think of the possibilities. Think of what others can see.
She stopped at a small nursery on the way home and bought three cheap flower pots—white daisies that would sit innocuously and brightly on the windowsill of the study. She thought of the flowers as camouflage: pretty things that would distract, that would make muddy fingerprints and hurried soil seem like part of a day's labour, not an excavation. She scrubbed at her nails in the parking lot until the dirt thinned to faint grey under the light of the fluorescent sign.
In the car, rain clattered on the roof. The advice replayed again, steady now, settling into her bones. She realised the game had changed: she was no longer only searching for answers. She was being watched—maybe by the people who had left Cüneyt in that chair, maybe by Alden in a different way. Every small choice, every smear of mud, every little detail would have to be thought through.
She drove back toward the city with the pots in the passenger seat, their fragile green heads bobbing in the motion. The house, the study, Alden's calm: everything felt rearranged by the knowledge of what she'd found, and by the man who'd been both a nuisance and an ally in the space of an hour. The tension inside her tightened, a taut thread, but beneath it something else had shifted too—a steely, dangerous focus. She would follow Cüneyt's advice. She would think of the possibilities.
Outside, the rain slowed to a mist. In the rearview mirror, her hands still trembled, and a line of mud clung just beneath a thumbnail like a secret she couldn't scrub away.