Stella: into the Shadow
Blackwood knows how to keep secrets: beneath the neon, behind polite smiles, in offices with no nameplates. Stella is searching for a missing friend and realizes too late that she was let in for a reason.
Samantha returns to Stella’s life as suddenly as she disappears: a tense meeting in the city center, a late-night message… and silence.
An old address, an irritated neighbor, an ex’s name, rumors of night work — each fragment seems too small to prove anything. But together they form a direction Stella can no longer ignore.
The further Stella follows the trail, the less Samantha’s disappearance looks like a random personal drama. Behind scraps of conversation, hidden deals begin to surface, along with old city connections and people used to deciding other people’s fates behind closed doors. Blackwood is not as sleepy as it first seemed: beneath its familiar streets, cafés, and offices lies another city, one where the past never truly disappears. It simply waits for the right moment to return.
The trail leads to Shadow: an exclusive nightclub where neon slides across dark walls, guests speak too quietly, and every pass opens more than just a door. To find Samantha, Stella agrees to enter this world from the inside and soon realizes that, here, listening is more dangerous than asking questions.
Before she disappeared, Samantha had been looking for something. Something connected to the city administration, the old museum, the land by the lakes, and the people who have grown used to treating Blackwood as their private property.
Stella is not a detective, and she is not some heroine from a newspaper clipping. She has simply spent too long choosing the safe life. Until one day, safety starts to look like just another form of running away
Victor is used to trusting facts, protocols, and whatever can be proven. But Blackwood leaves traces as if it is deliberately laughing at people with folders and badges.
Samantha disappeared, but her investigation did not stop. It remained in other people’s words, old documents, banking traces, and the fear of those who thought she would never understand anything.
David runs Shadow as if the entire city is a stage, and he is the only one who knows where the light should fall. He is charming, dangerous, and far too good at understanding what people want to hear.
The deeper Stella is drawn into this story, the clearer it becomes: in Blackwood, the truth does not lie on the surface. It seeps through wet asphalt, old clippings, other people’s silences, and the fog over the water.
