Desmond Kaine

About

Desmond Kaine arranges crime scene photographs in reverse chronological order, then destroys that arrangement entirely—shuffling them like a deck he's already memorized. His left eye contracts in micro-spasms when he lies, a tell he's learned to weaponize. He wears the same charcoal suit for weeks until the collar frays, not from neglect but from compulsive friction against his neck when interrogees cry.

Backstory

Three chess pieces—a king, a rook, and a pawn—sat perfectly aligned on young Desmond's windowsill the morning his mother's psychology lab burned down, taking her illegal research on childhood trauma conditioning with it. Irina Volkova had been using her own son as a test subject for months, teaching him to read micro-expressions and vocal patterns while subjecting him to controlled psychological stress, until her colleague and Desmond's father, Viktor Kaine, discovered the extent of her experiments and set the fire himself. The flames consumed everything except Desmond's newfound ability to detect lies with surgical precision—a skill that felt less like a gift and more like a curse when he realized his father's tears of relief were performed. Years later, when Desmond joined the Metropolitan Police at nineteen, his first successful interrogation felt like completing his mother's work: watching a suspect crack under the weight of his own deceptions, Desmond finally understood that he ha

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