로그인Chapter 39: Cassian's povAshara was quiet in a way that felt absolute.Mist clung to the mountains most mornings and refused to burn away until the sun was high. The air always carried the scent of wet stone, pine, and cold earth. Sound travelled strangely here—footsteps on the gravel paths outside my small residence arrived muffled, voices from the chapel reached me thinned by distance and altitude. Even the wind seemed to move with care, as if it had learned not to disturb the people sent to this place to vanish.I knelt on the thin cushion in front of the simple wooden shrine in the corner of my room. The rosary beads were warm from the heat of my hands. I had already completed four full decades. This was the fifth. The repetition had become the central structure of my days—priestly duties in the small mountain chapel, the quiet work of listening to the few souls who still came for confession, and then this: hour after hour of prayer that was equal parts discipline and penance.A
Chapter 38: Elias pov The corridor back toward the computer science building felt longer than usual.My footsteps sounded too loud against the polished floor. Students passed in loose groups, voices overlapping, the faint scent of coffee and printer toner drifting from open doors. None of it registered clearly. My mind kept replaying the garden—the cool air under the tree, the steady sound of the fountain, and the way Lucian had spoken Cassian’s full name as if it belonged in ordinary conversation.Father Cassian Riven.No one at Caldrith Crown should have known that name. I had been careful. I had left Saint-Mireille without leaving obvious trails. The voicemails went into a void. The searches I ran stayed private. Yet this man—broad-shouldered, calm, carrying himself with the same controlled grace that still haunted me—had said the name without hesitation. The question of *how* sat like a stone in my chest. Black-market information. Old syndicate connections. Something worse. I co
Chapter 37: Lucian’s pov Force would make him guarded.I had seen it the moment I stepped into his path—the flicker of calculation, the quick mapping of exits, the way his body prepared to run even while his face remained carefully blank. Elias Voss responded to pressure by closing ranks. Pushing harder would only drive him further behind whatever walls he had built. So I chose the slower route. Calm. Measured. The kind of patience that looked like courtesy.We sat on the stone bench beneath the tree. The garden held its late-morning quiet—the soft fall of water from the fountain, the occasional rustle of dry leaves across gravel, the distant, muted sound of lectures continuing behind glass. Cool air moved through the hedges and carried the damp scent of earth and the faint metallic edge that always seemed to cling to Caldrith. I kept my posture open, hands visible, voice level.Internally the decision had already hardened.Elias was not the prize. He was the bait.Cassian Riven had
Chapter 36: Elias pov There was something about the man who had stepped into my path.It was not only the way he blocked the corridor without raising his voice. It was the stillness, the absolute certainty that I would stop. I had never seen him before, yet the air around him felt heavier than the usual campus noise, as if the space itself adjusted to his presence. The corridor lights cast a cool, even glow across the polished floor. Students moved past us in both directions—laughter, the scuff of shoes, the faint scent of someone’s perfume trailing behind them—but none of it seemed to touch the small pocket of quiet that had formed around him.I had never been to the garden he mentioned. I did not even know there was one worth walking to. The idea of leaving the familiar routes between lecture halls and laboratories sent a low pulse of unease through me.Thoughts arrived in rapid, disordered succession. Seraphine. This could be her. A quiet form of revenge for the refusal at the pa
Chapter 35: Julian's pov Two weeks had passed since the file landed on my laptop, and my interest in Elias Voss had only sharpened.The name itself had been the first hook. The rest of the information—transfer records, limited digital footprint, the quiet way he moved through Caldrith Crown without leaving easy traces—had done the rest. I had not approached him immediately. Information from the black market required verification. Faces could be altered. Histories could be fabricated. I had spent the intervening days confirming every detail through secondary channels until I was satisfied the file was clean. Only then did I decide to close the distance.Caldrith Crown had never been closed to me. I was a senior. More importantly, my father’s money had helped raise half the newer buildings on campus—the glass libraries, the expanded laboratory wings, the east-side housing blocks that the children of senators and syndicate heirs preferred. Doors opened. Access was assumed. I walked the
Chapter 34: Elias POV Caldrith in late autumn carried a constant low thrum. The air held a sharp, metallic edge that came off the river and the glass towers. Traffic moved in dense, impatient streams. Somewhere distant a train horn cut through the morning haze. The university itself never fully quieted—footsteps on polished stone, the hiss of automatic doors, the overlapping voices of students who treated every corridor like a stage. Lectures began on the hour with the same dry precision: projectors humming to life, laptops opening in near-unison, professors speaking in measured tones that assumed everyone in the room already wanted to be excellent.Two months since I had arrived. Two weeks since the freshman party.Time had collapsed into routine. Classes. Laboratory hours. The slow, deliberate work of networking concepts and system logic. Nights spent in front of the laptop until my eyes burned. And always, at the end of the day, the call to Cassian’s number. The line still rang i







