Chapter 553 Chapter 553. The Board Was Only the First Layer of Skin, and I Was Not Prepared

Chapter 553: 553. The Board Was Only the First Layer of Skin, and I Was Not Prepared

That night, the academy library did not feel like a place of learning; it felt like a tomb for secrets. The towering shelves of leather-bound books cast long, skeletal shadows across the floorboards, and the air was thick with the smell of parchment, dust, and old wax.

The librarian had been persuaded to retire early with the solemn promise that not a single volume would be disturbed, leaving the grand reading hall to them alone.

The only light came from a handful of candles that burned low and steady, their flames guttering in the drafts that haunted the high ceilings. Olivia had claimed the largest oak table in the center of the hall, transforming it into an altar of evidence.

She spread her papers across the scarred wood with military precision: bank records stained with ink, stolen orphanage ledgers with crumbling spines, and the thin, damning summary sheet Albert had handed them.

She arranged them in neat, overlapping rows like a general laying out the terrain for a bloody campaign.

Lia sat on one side of the table, her spine perfectly straight despite the hour. She worked with mechanical focus, sorting every document by date, cross-referencing names, and recording findings in a column so precise it looked engraved.

Across from her, Kaela had lasted exactly forty minutes of vigilance before exhaustion claimed her. She was now slumped in a velvet chair, one boot propped insolently on the table and her mouth slightly open, her breathing heavy and rhythmic in the silence.

William sat directly opposite Olivia. He kept his elbows planted on the wood, his body coiled with a restless energy he couldn’t quite discharge.

Propped against a stack of heavy encyclopedias was the orphanage photograph. He kept it positioned so he could glance at it without appearing to stare at a small, pale ghost watching them from the past.

His mind kept circling back to Marta’s words: ’A room with a lock on the outside.’

The image of that little girl with the unnervingly calm eyes burned behind his eyelids.

Olivia worked in a silence so absolute it felt pressurized. When she reached the deepest layers of the problem, her entire demeanor changed.

The tip of her tongue poked out from the corner of her mouth, a telltale sign of intense cognitive exertion, and her index finger traced down each column of figures like a surgeon’s needle following a groove in bone.

For three hours, the only sounds were the scratch of Lia’s quill, the occasional pop of a candle wick, and the distant creak of the academy’s ancient bones. Then, abruptly, Olivia stopped.

"There is a pattern," she said. Her voice was quiet, but it cut through the darkness like a blade.

William straightened, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Is that good?"

"That depends entirely on what you define as ’good,’" Olivia replied without looking up. "If you mean ’predictable,’ then yes, it is magnificent."

"If you mean ’safe,’ then we should all start preparing for a funeral."

She tapped a specific column of figures with the tip of her quill. "Look at these transfers..."

"Every single payment made to the orphanage’s private accounts over the last decade passed through three different intermediaries shell companies, offshore trusts, untraceable couriers."

"But the trail isn’t random... All three chains, no matter how convoluted, eventually funnel into one singular account."

Lia leaned in, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the numbers. "The amounts are always even... Perfectly round, even numbers."

"Not just that," Olivia continued, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that made the hair on William’s neck stand up. "The timing is precise."

"The funds never arrive at random intervals... They always arrive exactly forty-eight hours before the new moon."

"That sounds... unusual," William said, though the word felt inadequate.

"Unusual?" Olivia finally looked up, her eyes bright with a cold, analytical fear. "No, William... Unusual would be a coincidence."

"This isn’t a coincidence... This is a ritual." She paused, a frown deepening the lines of concentration on her face as she stared at the numbers as if they were malevolent symbols. "I have seen this exact financial signature before."

"In a text I thought was burned centuries ago."

Olivia dived into her satchel with a desperate, clawing motion, producing an old notebook bound in cracked leather that looked as though it had survived fire and flood.

The pages rattled violently as she flipped through them, her breathing becoming shallow and rapid, the sound of someone racing against a horrific revelation. Then, she stopped.

The silence that followed was deafening. The color drained from Olivia’s face, leaving her skin pale and sickly beneath the candlelight.

Her lips parted, but no sound came out for several seconds.

"Corwin," she finally whispered.

The name sounded like a curse. "The payments we traced during the Corwin investigation... the shell companies, the three-step laundering process, the specific timing of the lunar cycle... it is identical."

"The same intermediaries... The same untraceable banks... Even the same cursed signature in the ledgers."

The temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees. Nobody moved.

Lia froze mid stroke, her pen hovering millimeters above the parchment like a suspended guillotine.

Across the table, Kaela didn’t wake up so much as she snapped into consciousness; her eyes flew open, sharp and predatory, and she sat upright in her chair without making a single sound, her hand instinctively finding the hilt of her blade.

"That means," Olivia said, her voice cracking, barely audible above the guttering flames, "that whoever funded Ellie’s ’upbringing’ is the same hand that fed Corwin’s ambition."

"They aren’t just connected... They are part of the same machine."

"Hollow Circle," William said.

The words didn’t carry emotion; they were cold, flat stones dropped into a deep well. "The organization we thought was a myth... A ghost story told to frighten ambitious men."

For several long minutes, the only sounds in the vast, cavernous library were the mechanical, mocking tick of the grandfather clock and the occasional wet pop of a candle wick drowning in its own wax.

William found himself staring at his own hands. His knuckles were pale.

His mind betrayed him, dragging him back to the visceral memory of Corwin’s death the way the man’s flesh had begun to slough off like wet paper, the wet, hissing sound of his bones dissolving into gray ash while Catherine screamed in horror.

Corwin had spoken of a ’Board,’ a council of unseen architects. William had believed that the Board was the apex, the final boss of this conspiracy.

He realized now he had been catastrophically wrong. The Board wasn’t the end; it was merely the first layer of skin.

Beneath it lay something infinitely more ancient and far more cruel.

"So they’re the ones," Kaela said.

The sleepy softness was gone from her voice, replaced by something hard and dangerous. "They’re the ones who broke her... They’re the ones who turned a child into a... into whatever Ellie is now."

"Or at least they are the ones who knew how to exploit what she was," Lia corrected, her voice measured, though her fingers trembled slightly as she gripped her quill. "We cannot leap to conclusions, Kaela."

"We lack the forensic proof to connect the funding directly to the experiments."

"Fuck the proof," Kaela snapped, her voice rising with a dangerous edge. "We have enough to be angry!"

"We have enough to burn this whole rotten system to the ground!"

"Being angry and being certain are two very different things, Kaela," Lia said softly, though there was no conviction in her tone. "Anger makes you sloppy... Certainty makes you lethal."

Kaela leaned forward into the candlelight, her eyes reflecting the flames like twin embers. A slow, terrifying smile spread across her face, the smile of someone who had already decided how many bodies she was willing to leave behind.

"I don’t need to choose, Lia," Kaela whispered. "I can do both."