“There’s no need for a background,” I tell her. She pauses. “I’m going to meet him.”
Clara turns back slowly. Blinks once. “That’s a bad idea.”
“You know me,” I say. “Bad ideas and I have a long-standing relationship.”
“Massery wouldn’t approve.”
“Which is why,” I reply evenly, “you won’t tell him.”
She folds her arms. “You’re asking me to keep secrets from your father.”
“I’m asking you to trust me.”
Her gaze sharpens. “You know what they say about curiosity.”
I lean back in my chair. “Curiosity is due diligence, Clara.”
She snorts. “That’s not what it looks like from where I’m standing.”
Maybe not.
But whatever Rowan Hale has started—whatever fire he’s poking with words he doesn’t yet understand—I’m not going to watch it burn from a distance.
I’m going to step right into it. And see if he still believes in his ideas when he’s standing face to face with the monsters he’s been dancing with.
8
JUSTIN
Rowan Hale.
The name is music to my ears. Because now Anonymous has weight. Shape. A place to stand.
The name lingers on my tongue like a sin I haven’t decided whether to confess or commit. I murmur it once under my breath—low, deliberate—then lean back in my chair as Goliath’s servers slip into their steady, mechanical chant around me.
The search builds itself, crawling through encrypted archives, municipal servers, all the little corners of the internet that think they’re locked. The monitors bathe the room in a cold blue glow, tinting the shadows with the color of sleeplessness. To anyone else, it’d look like a standard background check. To me, it feels like peeling back the skin of an enigma, until I get to the bone.
I don’t know what he’s looking for yet—but I will. And now the writer’s on my radar for more than curiosity. He’s a variable, and I don’t leave variables unaccounted for.
The screen beeps, sharp and insistent, dragging my focus back to it.
Lines of data begin to populate beneath a grainy school yearbook photo, neat and clinical.
I frown.
Because the face staring back at me isn’t what I expected.
It’s a girl.
Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Hair pulled back too tight, expression guarded, eyes already tired in the way only girls learn to be. A high school portrait, all neutral backdrop and forced stillness, her name printed clearly beneath the photo like a quiet accusation.
Rowan Hale.
I shake my head and rerun the check. Once. Then again, slower this time, as if that might change reality. It doesn’t. The same profile fills the screen. The same photo. The same immutable line of text confirming what I don’t quite believe yet.
There is only one Rowan Hale enrolled at St Augustine’s University. And she’s a woman.
I let my gaze linger on the picture again. She’s pretty in an unassuming way. All-American. Girl-next-door enough that people would think her ordinary.
