Read Chapter 18: The Betrayal Unmasked

The Bodleian’s reading room felt like a tomb. Eliza sat in the far corner, the torn page from the Codex burning in her coat pocket like a live coal. She hadn’t looked at it since the crypt. The words were branded into her memory anyway: *made by her father out of love for her.*

Love. What kind of love crafted an untraceable poison?

Viv’s coded message had led her to the crypt. Whitmore’s confession had led her to the Codex. Wren’s blackmail had led her to the donor. And Julian—Julian had stood beside her in the dark, watching masked figures steal the only physical proof that could save her. He’d hung back when they fled. She’d noticed it at the time, filed it away, but now it surfaced with the cold clarity of revelation.

She waited for him in the Radcliffe Camera’s basement stairwell, where the musty air muffled footsteps. When Julian appeared at the bottom of the steps, his face half-lit by a flickering emergency bulb, she didn’t give him the chance to speak.

“You called him.” Her voice echoed off the stone. “You told Wren where we’d be.”

Julian stopped two steps down. His expression didn’t crack—it simply went still, like a pond in winter. “Eliza.”

“Don’t.” She stepped closer, holding up her phone. The screen showed a log she’d pulled from his laptop while he showered that morning. Three calls, all to an unlisted number. All placed in the hours before the crypt. “You’ve been feeding him everything. Whitmore. The Librarian. The location of the records.”

“You went through my laptop.”

“I went through your lies.”

Julian exhaled slowly, running a hand through his hair. He looked tired, she realized. Not guilty—tired. As if he’d been waiting for this conversation for weeks. “I was trying to protect you.”

“Protect me?” The laugh that escaped her was sharp enough to cut. “You handed me to the man who’s blackmailing me. You let his people take the Codex while I was on my knees in the dirt, trusting you to have my back.”

“They were going to take it whether I helped or not.” Julian’s voice dropped lower. “The Archai knew you’d found the crypt before you did. Do you think Whitmore’s confession was an accident? Do you think Wren just happened to have that letter from your mother?”

Eliza’s stomach clenched. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you’re not the only one with secrets.” He climbed the final step, stopping close enough that she could see the faint scar threading through his left eyebrow—a detail she’d never noticed before. Or had never let herself see. “I’ve been working with Wren since before I met you. Not for him. Against him. Someone had to know what he was planning if we were going to have any chance of stopping it.”

“We?” The word tasted foreign in her mouth.

“The Crypt Keeper’s circle. Wren’s rivals inside the Archai. There’s a faction that believes the society has lost its way—that the rituals and the secrecy have become ends in themselves. They wanted the Codex destroyed. Wren wants it found so he can control the poison’s legacy. I was the one watching from the inside.”

Eliza’s hand tightened on her phone. Every instinct screamed at her to walk away, but his words worked their way under her skin like burrs. “If that’s true, why not tell me?”

“Because the circle’s first rule is absolute isolation.” Julian’s jaw tightened. “If I’d told you, you’d have become a target. The masked figures weren’t Wren’s men—they were his rival faction, the ones who believe the Codex should be destroyed. They found us because someone in Whitmore’s office leaked the crypt’s location. Not because of me.”

“Convenient.”

“It’s the truth.”

“You’ve fed Wren information about my father. About my mother. About points of leverage he’s used against me.” Her voice cracked, and she hated that it did. “Tell me that part was for my protection too.”

Julian’s silence stretched like a wound.

“Julian.”

“Wren came to me with your mother’s letters two weeks before he approached you.” He spoke quietly, each word measured. “He wanted to know if you’d be a liability or an asset. I told him you were the most brilliant classicist to come through Oxford in a decade. I told him you’d find the Codex faster than anyone alive. I told him to keep his distance or I’d burn the society to the ground.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I couldn’t. Not yet.” He reached into his jacket, and for a moment Eliza’s body tensed, ready to bolt. But he pulled out a folded photograph, creased and faded at the edges. He handed it to her.

She almost didn’t take it. But curiosity, that old and treacherous companion, won.

The photograph showed two men in rumpled suits, standing in front of a pub she didn’t recognize. One was her father—younger, smiling, a pint in his hand. The other was a man with sharp cheekbones and hollow eyes she’d never met. And pinned to the pub’s wooden sign behind them, barely visible in the grainy print, was the distinctive owl emblem of the Archai.

“That’s Wren’s predecessor,” Julian said. “The Librarian before Marcus. He disappeared in 1994, six months before your parents met.”

Eliza’s gaze snapped up from the photograph. “Before my parents met?”

“Your mother was part of the Archai long before your father. She had ties to the Librarian—deep ties.” Julian paused. The weight of what he was about to say hung in the air between them. “Marcus was close to proving it. That’s why he died. He found records showing your mother married another man before she met your father. An Archai initiate who worked on the same poison research your father later became entangled with.”

“That’s impossible.” But even as she said it, something cold slithered through her chest. Her mother had always been cagey about her family history. She’d deflect questions with a joke, change the subject with a careful hand.

“The records are in the crypt,” Julian continued. “The ones the masked figures didn’t find. Marcus encoded them before he died—he knew this day might come. Wren doesn’t know about them. The faction that took the Codex doesn’t either. But the next time you go looking for what’s buried beneath the Bodleian, you’ll find more than Marcus’s notes. You’ll find what really happened to your father.”

Eliza’s fist closed around the photograph, crumpling its edges. “You used Wren to get close to me. You used my mother to get to my father’s research. You’ve lied to me every step of the way.”

“Yes.” Julian didn’t flinch. “But I never betrayed you. Wren doesn’t know about the deeper crypt records, and he never will. I made sure of that.” His voice softened, almost tender. “Whatever else you believe about me, believe this: between your mother and me, I’m the only one trying to keep you alive.”

The stairwell fell silent. Somewhere above them, footsteps echoed across the reading room floor, and Eliza realized she was standing in the dark, holding the ghost of a man she’d never known, across from a man she no longer knew at all.

Her father’s face in the photograph smiled up at her, frozen in a moment before everything went wrong. Before her mother. Before the poison. Before the Archai swallowed his life whole.

“Get me the rest of the Codex,” she said finally, her voice barely above a whisper. “Or you and I are done.”

Julian held her gaze for a long, aching moment. Then he nodded and turned, disappearing up the stairs without another word.

Eliza stood alone in the dark, the photograph crumpled in her fist, and for the first time since her father died, she felt the shape of a truth too large to face.

She wasn’t chasing her father’s killer anymore.

She was chasing her mother.