The idea made my stomach twist. Thrax had lived for over a millennium with people who believed he was a murderer, but the real tragedy was that someone had loved him enough to die for him.
She was content dying in his place.
He had not killed her, yet the moon had seen it differently, interpreted it as his sin.
I splashed cold water on my face, trying to quiet the racing thoughts, then dried myself off. After pulling myself together, I returned to the bedroom just as my phone dinged on the bedside table.
I had clearly dropped my phone along with my bag in the sitting room last night. But it didn’t surprise me that it was here.
I picked it up and sat on the edge of the bed. Three text messages lit up the screen, all from the same number. My thumbs hovered before I tapped, and from the first message, I knew who it was.
Unknown
You probably know the basic things
about him, so I’m going to get straight
to the point. You might think we know a
lot about him, but we don’t.
She had sent it last night. The last message, sent only minutes ago, read:
Unknown
Not even a thank you?
I exhaled, more of a sigh than anything, and clicked the second message. Attached was a three-page PDF.
Three pages?
That was it? She had to be kidding me. She hadn’t even attached photos of evidence like I thought she would. No documents. No snapshots. Just words she’d typed out herself. And most of them were things I already knew—or could piece together if I thought hard enough.
Still, I scrolled, read, skimmed, and then froze at one paragraph.
Did you know he’s the founder of Verlnic Ju University? The one in the city. Yup, that university. The one that’s been standing for over two hundred years. It’s his. He’s sat on fortunes that could buy out nations, and yet he lives like some quiet recluse, pretending he’s noone, when in reality he’s been pulling strings and has enough money to go around for ten generations to come.
The words blurred as I stared too long, my stomach knotting. Verlnic Ju had always felt…untouchable. Prestigious. Powerful. It was an ancient university, the kind of place you only gossiped about if you weren’t worthy. It was the university of every child’s dream. Mine, too, but I heard it was hard to get into. And she was saying he had built it? Two hundred years ago?
I scrolled further, but the rest were scattered notes on how his wealth was endless, though he hid it; he owned popular places, then erased himself, passing them to trustees so the world wouldn’t see how he never aged.
At the end, Amelia wrote that after they found him two years ago, they began tracking back his activities—where he had lived, places he’d been.
The towns and cities were listed neatly beneath. I skimmed them, my heart pounding harder with each name. At first, it felt harmless. Thrax had already told me these things, and I knew we’d lived in the same places before.
But what made my jaw drop wasn’t the places.
It was the dates. The years. The exact months he had moved.
They lined up perfectly with mine.
The same month my mother and I had relocated was the same month he moved, and the next cities we had lived in were the next cities he’d lived in. Every single one.
A chill prickled across my skin.
What was happening?
Could this really be a coincidence?
