Chapter 565. Someone Cut the Page and Left a Thank-You Note, Which Is Frankly Rude

Chapter 565: 565. Someone Cut the Page and Left a Thank-You Note, Which Is Frankly Rude

William stared at the severed edge of the parchment. His pulse wasn’t just racing; it was a violent, irregular hammering behind his ribs that made his vision swim.

His mind instinctively recoiled to the letters he had read weeks ago, those stained documents written in bleeding red ink that he had kept buried in the deepest recesses of his memory.

Those letters, the ones that spoke of ownership and inevitability, that he had never dared to speak aloud.

Now, the evidence of that horrific history had been surgically excised.

The thief hadn’t just stolen information; they had stolen a piece of the truth.

"Someone came in," William said.

His voice sounded foreign to his own ears—flat, dangerous, like steel sliding against stone.

"Not just someone," Albert replied, his hands trembling as they hovered over the mutilated folder. "Someone who knew precisely what to remove."

"Someone who knew exactly where the truth ended and the lie began."

William reached out and closed the chest. The click of the wooden lid sounded unnaturally loud in the tomb-like silence of the Archive.

As he did, the fractured pieces of the last fortnight began to accelerate through his mind, each one slamming into the next with bone-crushing force.

Clara.

Her strange, desperate requests for time. Her haunted eyes.

Corwin.

The way the payment patterns from the black market had aligned with his movements like clockwork.

The Hollow Circle.

That terrifying fortnight of silence that had followed the initial chaos—a silence that hadn’t felt like peace but like the suffocating stillness of a predator holding its breath before the final spring.

Someone had been playing a game of shadows.

Someone had been watching Ellie from the moment she arrived, not as a threat to be neutralized, but as something to be cultivated.

Something to be harvested.

’They weren’t hiding from us,’ he realized, a cold fury beginning to boil beneath his skin. ’They were waiting for us to finish their work.’

He turned to leave, his instinct screaming at him to find Ellie, to arm himself, to hunt. But as he moved to withdraw his hand from the table, something caught the peripheral edge of his vision.

Something pale and small resting at the very bottom of the chest, pressed flat against the dark oak grain.

His brow furrowed. He was certain, absolutely certain, that the bottom of the chest had been bare when they first opened it.

"Albert," he said sharply.

The old man looked up, confusion flickering in his tired eyes. William reached into the chest and retrieved the object.

It was a small square of high-quality vellum, folded once with mathematical precision. The paper felt unnaturally smooth beneath his fingertips.

He tilted it toward the lantern light. The flame danced across the surface, casting long, jagged shadows that seemed to writhe against the stone walls.

When he unfolded it, he saw the handwriting. It was small, tidy, and utterly alien—the script of someone who possessed terrifying patience.

There was no signature.

No threat.

Just a single sentence that turned William’s blood to ice:

’Thank you for caring for her until she ripened.’

...

The morning after the discovery of the mutilated page did not bring sunlight; it brought only a cold, gray clarity that made the shadows seem deeper than before.

When William and Catherine reached the base of the spiral staircase, Albert was already there.

He looked as though he hadn’t slept at all; his eyes were bloodshot, and his hands trembled slightly as he produced a padlock the size of a dinner plate.

It was a monstrous thing, a hulking mass of blackened iron that seemed to absorb what little light the torches provided.

Attached to it was a chain so thick it looked less like security and more like something pulled from the hold of a warship.

The links were as wide as a man’s wrist, forged with a crude, brutal purpose.

William could tell immediately that this hadn’t been bought from a legitimate merchant; it had been acquired in haste from some underworld smith who had promised Albert that nothing short of a siege engine or a dragon’s breath could breach it.

With grim deliberation, Albert wrapped the heavy links around the iron door three times. The metal groaned as it met metal, a harsh, grinding sound that echoed off the stone walls like bones breaking.

When he finally turned the key, the click of the mechanism sounded final, almost like the cocking of a crossbow.

"There is exactly one key," Albert said, his voice cracking like dry parchment.

He held it up between two fingers, the metal gleaming wickedly. "I carry it on my person at all times..."

"There are no copies. No duplicates. No exceptions."

Catherine stepped forward, her face a mask of icy frustration. "There was only one key before, Headmaster Albert."

"The lock worked perfectly well until someone decided to play god with our records."

Albert turned to her, his jaw set. "Before, I had no reason to be suspicious."

"I trusted this archive... I trusted these walls." His gaze swept across the darkened corridor, sharp and paranoid. "Now? Now I am suspicious of everyone."

"I am suspicious of the wind, I am suspicious of the shadows, and I am suspicious of even the cat."

As if summoned by the accusation, the academy cat slunk out from behind a stone pillar. It padded silently across the cold floor, its claws clicking softly before it settled on the bottom step.

It curled its tail around its paws and looked up at the three of them with an expression of infuriating, perfect innocence. The creature yawned so wide that its entire face seemed to split open, revealing rows of needle-sharp teeth.

Albert glared at the animal as if expecting it to transform into a demon before his eyes. The cat merely blinked slowly, utterly unimpressed by the old man’s terror.

For a fleeting second, William felt the ghost of a smile tug at his lips.

The situation was catastrophic; they were being hunted by someone who treated Ellie like livestock, someone who could slip through their fingers like smoke, but Albert had this strange, infuriating gift.

Even when the world was unraveling, even when blood seemed inevitable, Albert managed to inject a shred of humanity into the horror. He made the apocalypse feel like something they could at least discuss over tea.

William leaned his shoulder against the damp, freezing wall, feeling the ancient stone seep through his clothes. He needed to think.

He needed to process that note until she ripened and the surgical precision of the theft. His mind kept replaying the image of the torn page, the clean, razor-sharp edge that suggested a predator who didn’t just kill but harvested.

He watched Albert tug twice on the chain, testing the tension.

The metal shrieked against the stone, a warning that the fortress was sealed, but as William looked up at the spiraling darkness above them, he couldn’t shake the feeling that locks were meaningless against something that already knew exactly what it wanted.’