2026-09-02 20:23:51Marcus's fingers tightened around Valerie's waist as the rumpled sheets shifted beneath them.
The bedroom was dim, illuminated only by the warm glow spilling from the bedside lamp in the corner. Valerie's breathing was heavy and ragged, yet her instincts quickly caught that something was wrong. Marcus was usually highly controlled, even in the most intimate of moments. Tonight, however, there was an odd impatience in his every move. A roughness that made it painfully clear his mind was elsewhere.
Valerie turned her head, studying the man's face. "What's wrong with you tonight?"
Marcus didn't answer.
"Did the conference go poorly?"
"My conference was perfect," Marcus replied. His voice was flat, almost mechanical.
Valerie watched his face for a few moments. "Then what is bothering you?"
Marcus finally looked at her. His dark eyes emanated a tension he rarely displayed. "One name."
Valerie frowned. "Whose?"
Marcus remained silent. Valerie studied his expression, rewinding recent conversations and events in her mind, until her eyes narrowed slightly.
"Adrian Kaelen?" she guessed.
Marcus's body went stiff for a split second. A microscopic reaction that did not escape Valerie's notice.
"So it is him," Valerie murmured. Marcus's jaw tightened. "He's just a student," Valerie continued, her tone laced with disdain. "A rather pathetic one, if you ask me. He barely even stands out in my class. Why would someone as useless as him bother you so much?"
Marcus still didn't answer. Instead of speaking, his movements became more demanding, allowing his frustration to spill over into the intimacy between them.
Valerie caught her breath. "Marcus..."
"I want you to find out everything about him." Marcus's voice was low and dangerous.
"Everything?"
"Everything."
Valerie swallowed hard. "His academic record?"
"Yes."
"His family?"
"Yes."
"His friends?"
"Yes."
Valerie hesitated for a moment. "Why?"
Marcus's gaze sharpened like a blade. "Just do it."
Valerie stared at him in silence. Marcus leaned closer, locking onto her gaze. "Find out who he really is."
Valerie nodded slowly. "All right."
"Not tomorrow."
Valerie instantly understood the urgency in his tone. "I'll do it tonight."
Hearing that, Marcus finally looked satisfied. His hand moved to stroke Valerie's hair as his expression slowly reverted to the calm mask he always wore.
Meanwhile, Elias stopped in front of the door to Room 402.
Leo stood beside him, still clutching the empty paper coffee cup he had brought from the library.
"Well," Leo said, breaking the silence, "that wasn't as terrible as I expected."
Elias glanced at him flatly. "Your understanding of forensic pathology is far worse than I thought."
Leo let out a hollow laugh. "Hey, I warned you."
Elias reached for the doorknob. He was just about to turn it when a familiar red notification suddenly flashed aggressively across his vision.
[WARNING.]
Elias's movement froze in mid-air.
[Unidentified individual detected.]
[Prohibited from bringing another individual into the Host's room.]
His hand remained suspended right above the metal knob.
Leo turned to look at him in confusion. "What's wrong?"
Elias kept staring at the door. He remembered the previous warning. The pain that had torn through his temples. The System's absolute refusal when he had tried to access Adrian's personal information. He had learned the hard way that ignoring this entity's rules always carried consequences.
Maybe this restriction was different. Maybe it wasn't. But he had absolutely no intention of testing it right now. Elias slowly pulled his hand away.
[WARNING.]
[Second warning.]
Elias completely withdrew his hand, shoving it into his jacket pocket.
Leo raised an eyebrow. "Why aren't you going in?"
Elias didn't answer.
A mischievous smirk appeared on Leo's face. "Wait a minute." He leaned in, trying to peek over Elias's shoulder. "Are you hiding a girl in there?"
"No."
"A secret girlfriend?"
"No."
"A dead body?"
Elias shot him a stare as cold as ice.
Leo laughed awkwardly. "I'm just kidding." The young man then reached for the doorknob himself.
Elias moved with lightning speed. He stepped between Leo and the entrance, completely blocking access with his body.
Leo stopped dead in his tracks. "Whoa."
Elias looked straight at him. "Library."
"What?"
"We finish your assignment there."
Leo stared at the tightly shut door, then looked back at Elias with a furrowed brow. "Why?"
"Because I said so."
Leo's eyes narrowed. For a moment, the young man looked as though he was gearing up to shove Elias aside and force his way in. However, after meeting Elias's uncompromising gaze, he sighed in defeat. "Fine. Whatever you say."
They turned and walked back down the hallway toward the library. Neither of them noticed the faint red notification still hovering at the edge of Elias's vision, waiting patiently for him.
[Identity Integrity Protocol remains active.]
The campus library was nearly empty.
Most of the students had already returned to their respective dormitories, leaving only a handful of people scattered among the long rows of tables flanked by towering bookshelves.
Elias sat across from Leo and pulled the assignment sheet toward him. He was just about to scan the title of the task when his eyes suddenly locked. He read the professor's name printed there. Then he read it again.
His expression shifted instantly. Leo, who had been watching him, noticed it right away. "What's wrong?"
Elias didn't answer. His eyes remained fixed on the bottom of the page. A name was clearly printed right below the assignment instructions.
Professor Valerie Sterling.
The name was not unfamiliar. Elias had heard it before. More than once. A forensic academic. A researcher whose work had occasionally intersected with the cases he handled in the past.
And, years ago, Elias had met her in person once. Only once. But he remembered the woman. He remembered the look in her eyes. Her voice. And far more importantly, he clearly remembered who was standing beside Valerie Sterling when they first met.
Marcus Vance.
Elias slowly lowered the paper. For the first time tonight, the vortex of his thoughts shifted away from Marcus. A mere coincidence?
Leo was still staring at him searchingly. "Adrian?"
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Chapter 16
The number stayed with Elias long after he returned to the suffocating quiet of his dormitory.3.It was stamped into the back of a piece of metal that had once belonged to him.Not Adrian Kaelen. Not some faceless stranger.Him.E. THORNE.Elias placed the scratched identification tag on his desk, letting it rest beneath the pale, harsh circle of his reading lamp.For several minutes, he didn't touch it. He simply looked.The metal was cold, scored with years of use, and slightly bent along one edge. The black engraving had faded in places, but the name remained entirely unmistakable.His old identity. His old life.And beneath it—MERCER — 3Elias finally picked it up. He turned it over, his thumb brushing the smooth surface.Nothing else. No department initials. No date of issue. No hospital registry number. No hidden compartment. Just three words.He placed it back beneath the light and examined it the way he would have examined physical evidence at a fresh crime scene.Scratches.
Chapter 15
Elias barely slept.By morning, the laptop was still sitting exactly where he had left it, its dead, black screen reflecting the faint gray light leaking through the dormitory curtains. His phone remained face up on the desk beside it, displaying the same two messages that had kept him awake for most of the night.Stop looking for the man you used to be. He already failed once.Elias had read them so many times he no longer needed to look at the screen to remember every syllable.He picked up the phone again.He wasn't interested in the threat itself. He was interested in how it had been delivered.Elias opened the message details and examined everything the device would allow him to see. Sender information. Transmission data. Timestamps.Nothing useful.The number had been masked through a service that exposed almost no useful sender information. There was no recoverable carrier data, no obvious geographic origin, nothing that would allow him to simply point at a map and say, There.
Chapter 14
Memory was an unreliable witness.Evidence wasn't supposed to be.So Elias stopped asking himself what he remembered. He started asking what could be proven.The dorm room was pitch black except for the cold, pale glow of the laptop screen. It was well past two in the morning, but Elias had barely moved a muscle since reading the final, terrifying message from the System.[You were already investigating it.]Daniel Mercer.The name now sat dead center in the middle of everything.Not because Elias remembered the man. He didn't. That was the problem.He remembered his own murder with agonizing, unbearable clarity. He remembered Marcus. The sterile chill of the St. Jude autopsy suite. The glint of the syringe. The liquid fire of the poison entering his bloodstream. The suffocating helplessness.But Daniel Mercer was a complete blank space in his mind.If Elias Thorne had truly been investigating Mercer before his death, then there was a massive, critical part of his own life that Elias
Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen — The Dead Tell No LiesMarcus had not forgotten him.Elias was almost certain of that now.The question was no longer whether Marcus remembered the erratic student who had confronted him outside the conference hall.He did.Elias had seen the recognition flash across Marcus's face during that brief, suspended moment when their eyes met at the beginning of the lecture. He had seen it again in the deliberate, calculating way Marcus had singled him out during the discussion.What Elias could not determine was what exactly Marcus remembered.Was Marcus looking at Adrian Kaelen—a strange undergraduate who had suddenly developed an unsettling interest in Elias Thorne's death?Or was he looking past the young man's face, searching for something far more impossible?A ghost.A dead pathologist.A man who should have been buried months ago.Neither of them could afford to make the first mistake.The lecture hall had nearly emptied when Marcus closed his leather-bound notes an
Chapter 12
Marcus Vance began the lecture as if nothing unusual had happened.That demeanor, more than anything else, unsettled Elias.There was no hesitation in Marcus's movements, no lingering glance in his direction, no sign whatsoever that the professor standing at the front of the room had any reason to remember the young man sitting among the students.The man simply continued."Forensic pathology is not the art of finding an answer," Marcus said, pacing slowly in front of the projector screen. "It is the discipline of determining whether the available evidence permits us to reach a conclusion."The students listened with rapt attention.Marcus dissected the material effortlessly. He discussed blunt force trauma, toxicological interpretation, postmortem redistribution, decomposition, and the dangers of relying too heavily on a single finding. Every explanation was sharp and precise. Every case example was chosen with a high degree of care.It was a near-perfect presentation.And Elias abso
Chapter 11
Before he knew it, Elias had spent the better part of the week acclimating to the monotonous and suffocating life of Adrian Kaelen. The coursework was trivial. His dorm room was nothing more than a tolerable prison cell. The System remained irritatingly silent as long as he didn't cross the line. But the university itself was beginning to become a nuisance, particularly the people who, for whatever reason, felt entitled to his time. Leo was the chief offender among them. They sat across from one another in the campus cafeteria, enveloped by the midday cacophony of overlapping conversations, scraping chairs, and the mechanical hum of vending machines. Elias held a paper cup of black coffee, his expression perfectly flat, while Leo absentmindedly picked at the remains of his lunch. "So," Leo said around a mouthful of fries, "what are your plans for this weekend?" "Something." Leo looked up, raising an eyebrow. "That sounds highly suspicious, like an answer specifically designed to
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