[Shaun]

Iris never came back from her need for fresh air. She'd come close to being caught so many times before now - she even walked in on Faye looking at a photograph with her in it and Damien himself. Fond memories, she thought. Their romance in high school had always had macabre undertones - and their reunion just three weeks ago came as a massive surprise to Iris, who'd just graduated from college and completed police training. She'd no idea he'd undertaken the same path.

The murder of a teenage goth sparked a fire in her belly. She knew it was him, because they'd done it together many years ago. She refused to go for Damien whenever the chance came to point fingers, and he'd repaid that favour in never blaming her. They kept their history quiet and only communicated beyond pleasantries at home - concocting plans and crimes together, and deciding to tease the other, inept detectives with trivial clues.

The night Damien was arrested drove her insane. She couldn't believe he'd been so careless and given himself away so blatantly - he stuck out like a sore thumb. She took on the duty with glee, and when she'd convinced that stupid Fowley guy to let her have access to the power room, she set timers to blow fuses the next night. She was kinda glad that Destiny had allowed her and Georgia to go downstairs at the time of the blackout, because she could play the little-girl-lost routine whilst upstairs burned. She even left "rainbow-coloured" signs around - a subtle clue, she admitted, but as Iris was the greek goddess of rainbows, she figured someone might have a look into her name. After filing their report, she'd taken the back-stairs up to level five and found Fowley instead of her intended victim, so she shot him instead. She was a little sad to hear Georgia had also died, since she wasn't her first choice of target, but it left her one less body to dispose of.

A couple of days later she caught wind of Faye's intention to do some research. She knew Faye was a meticulous team member, and knew she couldn't risk anything, so she followed her. Finding Faye staring at a photograph of her in the same room as Damien caused her to panic: she sliced her quickly, before leaving some shoddy decoy clue at the graveyard. It was a long shot, but she figured someone might think the "Independent Woman Pt. 1" wordplay might point some blame at Destiny. She walked away from the library singing "sticks in your throat", a lyric stuck in her head after finding a song named after her by Emmy the Great. Cute. She'd even hired out the Voice to introduce the news to the detectives with a picture of a praying mantis - or, rather, to give it its latin name, an iris oratoria.

But this - the suicide of Omar - completely unravelled her plans. She was meant to get through all of them. She'd never seen a corpse that she wasn't responsible for before. She later heard from Destiny via text that he'd lefta latin phrase in his note that roughly translated as "to die without fear of death is something to be desired". He'd basically quit on his own terms. This didn't sit well with Iris. She needed to be in control - and yet, she'd been so foolish at the crime scene asking to be excused. Turning faint at the sight of a hanging but being perfectly fine with the reports of decapitation, drowning and slashing? Please.

She sent on her note to Damien, a man who'd never truly acknowledged her potential but rather saw her as a sidekick, and made her plans.

Adrian, Saul, Destiny and Harriet kept up their investigation and, having received word from a prison officer that Damien had received suspicious mail, they were able to piece together the sudden disappearance of Iris and the song lyric in his letter.
"I told you so!" Destiny gasped, pushing Adrian in the shoulder.
"For god's sake no you didn't," Harriet responded, and they carried on bickering.

The deaths stopped, and life carried on for these four. Iris hoped that, since she couldn't get rid of them herself, she'd leave them with the lesson that death is indeed something to be feared. She hoped this experience would haunt them for the rest of their days. Iris herself, however, agreed with Omar.

THE END