In a world where every person was born with exactly three lies to spend in their entire lifetime, truth became sacred and lies—dangerous currency.

At birth, each child was marked with three pale dots along their collarbone, faint as mist. One dot vanished with every lie spoken with intent. No one knew how the system worked, only that it did. The dots glowed briefly when a lie was told, signaling to all nearby that a truth had been traded for convenience, protection—or deceit.

Some used all three by adolescence. Others saved them like precious heirlooms, never uttering a falsehood, not even to spare a heart. Lying, after all, was irreversible. Once the final dot faded, any deliberate falsehood after that resulted in immediate death. Quiet and painless, but final.

---

Elias Merrow had one dot left.

He was thirty-six and had spent his first on a childhood dare: *“I didn’t break the window.” The second came years later, when his mother lay dying in a hospital bed and asked, *“Will you be okay when I’m gone?” His voice cracked when he answered, “Yes, I promise.” The glow was soft, mournful.

The third dot had remained ever since silent, waiting, a sentinel of restraint.

Elias had become a detective, a profession where truth mattered more than anything. Ironically, it also made lying a temptation, sometimes even a necessity. But he never used his last. He’d rather lose a case than lose that final sliver of escape. The third dot became a kind of talisman. His badge of restraint. Proof that he hadn’t given up entirely on honesty—or survival.

---

Then came the Marlowe Case.

A girl had vanished from a town that practically hadn’t seen crime in a decade. Her name was Cassie Marlowe—eleven years old, braces, wild red hair. The investigation was brutal. Weeks of interviews, tips, dead ends.

Elias had a suspect: the girl's piano teacher, Lionel Vask, a man whose alibis frayed at the edges, whose smile never quite reached his eyes.

They brought Vask in for questioning. No confession. No hard evidence. Just threads of suspicion and the gnawing certainty in Elias’s gut.

Then came the moment.

Cassie’s mother, a wraith of grief in a wrinkled cardigan, caught Elias in the hallway outside the interrogation room.

“Do you think she’s still alive?” she whispered.

Elias froze. The question wrapped icy fingers around his throat.

He could tell the truth: “No, I don’t think so.”

Or…

He could use his last lie.

He looked at the remaining dot on his collarbone, pulsing faintly beneath the skin. It was all he had left. No second chances.

He looked back into the mother’s eyes, desperate, searching for hope like oxygen.

“Yes,” he said gently. “I believe she is.”

The third dot vanished in a flicker of light. Final.

---

Three days later, they found Cassie—alive, disoriented, but unharmed. She’d escaped, all on her own. Lionel Vask was arrested the next morning.

Elias sat alone in his apartment that night, collarbone bare of light. He poured himself a drink with trembling hands and looked out the window.

He had lied. And he had told the truth.

He didn’t regret it.

But now, with no lies left, he understood the weight of every word from here on. Truth wasn’t just a virtue anymore.

It was the only thing keeping him alive.