“Well, I mean… he's so hot, right? Whichsucks.”
“I guess he’s decent-looking,” Jeremiah said, shrugging. “But obviously Dylan is more my type.”
Ginny turned her gaze to me. “Vee, you know what I mean, right? He’s like, the literal blueprint of hot guys. But it’salwaysthose guys who are the biggest assholes on the planet. I guess it’s some sort of cosmic balancing thing.”
Something she’d just said was tugging at the edge of my mind, but Jeremiah was already responding, cutting off my train of thought.
“Even calling him the biggest asshole on the planet is putting it mildly. The guy's clearly a straight-up psychopathic—"
Ginny's phone buzzed, and she pulled it out, her expression immediately shifting. “Oh, shit,” she muttered. “Sorry, I have to go. My sister's calling.”
“Is everything okay?” I asked, forehead wrinkling.
“Yeah, she just… sorry, I really need to take this now. Jer can tell you why.” She was already backing into the aisle as she spoke. “I'll catch up with you guys later!”
She hurried out, and the quiet settled back over the stacks.
“Is she okay?” I finally asked.
Jeremiah sighed. “Her little sister has cancer. Something with her blood. It's treatable, but...” He trailed off, shaking his head. “The whole family's still stressed to the max about it.”
My chest tightened. “God, that's awful.”
“Yeah. Ginny tries not to talk about it much, but I know she's scared.” He pulled another book down. “Just the thought of losing a sibling like that... I can't even imagine what she’s going through.”
“Yeah, it’s not easy,” I murmured.
He winced. “Shit, sorry, that was so insensitive of me,” he said. “You don’t need to imagine it. You’ve already lived it.”
“It’s okay,” I said, giving him a faint, reassuring half-smile. “Other people are allowed to have problems too.”
We fell back into our search, but my mind kept wandering. Poor Ginny, and her sister too. I hoped the treatment worked, and I hoped her family never had to feel what my mother and I felt when we got that awful phone call about Calista.
I pulled another box down from the shelf. More old meeting minutes, some correspondence between early deans and donors. Nothing about the Dionysus Club. Nothing about secret societies at all.
Whatever Piermont had been trying to tell me, I wasn't finding it.
The blueprint of hot guys.
Ginny's earlier words floated back to me all of a sudden, and I froze.
Blueprint. Not just a figure of speech. Architectural plans. Building schematics.
“Oh my god, my brain isnotworking today.” I turned to Jeremiah, pulse quickening. “Piermont specifically mentioned architecture as well as historical buildings. So what if he wasn’ttalking about the structures themselves, but theplans? The blueprints. There could be something in those.”
Jeremiah was already moving toward the card catalog near the Special Collections desk. “Let me check where those are."
I followed him, hope sparking in my chest.
Jeremiah found the entry a few minutes later. “Okay, looks like that stuff is in the next aisle over from where we were just looking.”
We headed there together, and it took another ten minutes of rummaging through dusty folders before Jeremiah let out a sharp breath. “Got something.”
I joined him at the table, brushing dust off the cover of a rolled-up map labeledBlackthorne Harbor University Grounds, 1786.
He unrolled it carefully, pinning the corners flat with a few old books. The blueprint showed the campus as it had been over two centuries ago—fewer buildings, more forest—but the strangest thing wasn’t what was there. It was whatwasn’tthere. At least not anymore.
“Look,” I said slowly, tracing my finger over a faint dotted line that snaked westward from the Chapel of Saints. “This pathway… it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s all gardens and lawn there now. I saw it on that campus tour I did last week.”
