June 20th, 1983
Nicholas walked beside Eliza through the endless library corridors, their footsteps muffled against the floor as they moved between towering shelves.
The place felt wrong.
Not loud.
Not violent.
Just wrong in a way that sank beneath the skin and stayed there.
A researcher shuffled past them from the opposite direction.
Or at least, something that used to be a researcher.
His head was grotesquely swollen, round and taut like an overinflated rubber balloon, the skin stretched so tightly across it that it looked ready to burst. Even so, he held a book in both hands and stared down at its pages as if quietly absorbed in reading.
When he brushed past them, he paused just enough to mumble,
"Sorry… very sorry…"
Then he kept walking.
Eliza watched him go, her face twisting with disgust.
"This place gives me the creeps," she muttered. "Honestly, I think I'd be less scared if they just attacked us."
"Yeah," Nicholas said.
His voice was flat.
Distracted.
He was barely looking at the corridor ahead, his thoughts clearly stuck on Silvia's words.
Especially yours, Nicholas.
His pocket buzzed.
A small vibration.
Sharp enough to make his stomach drop.
Eliza glanced at him.
"What was that?"
Nicholas didn't miss a beat.
"Nothing," he said lightly, the old fake ease slipping back into his voice. "This place is so creepy I swear I've heard something crawling around like five times already."
Eliza frowned, but let it go.
The moment her attention shifted, Nicholas slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out a flip phone, keeping it low and angled away from her sight.
One new message.
Big Brother
Nicholas's jaw tightened.
He opened it.
"Are you still alive?"
For a moment, he just stared at the screen.
Then he typed back.
"I am. No thanks to you."
The response came almost immediately.
"Is Wren still alive?"
Nicholas's thumb hovered for only a second.
"She is."
Another message.
Faster this time.
"Fix that."
Nicholas went still.
The cheerful mask vanished completely from his face.
A cold, ugly shadow passed through his expression as he stared at the words, his grip tightening around the phone until the plastic creaked faintly in his hand.
Then, before Eliza could notice, he snapped the device shut and slipped it back into his pocket.
When he looked up again, his face was calm.
But darker than before.
Eliza stared at him for a long moment, then jabbed a finger into his shoulder.
"You're acting strange," she said. "Stranger than usual."
Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses.
"What was in your file that managed to freak you out?"
Nicholas looked at her, then away.
For once, there was no easy smile. No joke. No lazy shrug to smooth things over.
Only a brief silence.
Then he asked, quietly—
"Do you know what I used to do for A.E.G.I.S.? Before I became head of security?"
He already knew the answer.
And he also knew the only way to avoid telling her the full truth was to offer one horrifying truth in its place.
Eliza frowned.
"No," she said. "Not really." She crossed her arms. "At most, I know you were paid absurdly well… and that even Alexander seemed cautious around you."
Nicholas let out a slow breath.
"It was my job to kill people."
The words landed with a terrible simplicity.
Eliza went still.
Nicholas kept walking, his voice low and even.
"A.E.G.I.S. likes to talk about burying knowledge. Containing the supernatural. Erasing evidence." A bitter smile touched his mouth, though there was no humor in it. "But I was never assigned to kill monsters."
He glanced at her.
"Only humans."
Eliza's expression hardened.
"People who learned too much?" she asked.
Nicholas nodded once.
"Anyone who got too close. Anyone who saw something they shouldn't have. Anyone who became inconvenient."
For a moment, only their footsteps filled the space between them.
Then Eliza asked the question anyway.
"How many?"
Nicholas was quiet for half a second.
Then he answered.
"In the five years I worked for A.E.G.I.S., Alexander ordered me to assassinate a total of four hundred and fifty-six people."
The number hung in the air like something rotten.
Nicholas's eyes darkened.
"One of them," he added, "was August's son."
Eliza was silent for a moment.
Then she asked, very quietly—
"How many of them do you think actually deserved to die?"
Nicholas looked at her.
She didn't look away.
"Not because Alexander said so," she continued. "Not because of the so-called greater good. I mean by your standards. By your own morality." Her voice sharpened. "How many of them truly deserved it?"
Nicholas answered without hesitation.
"None of them."
The words came too easily.
Too flatly.
"They were unlucky people," he said. "That's all. Ordinary people who saw too much and happened to cross paths with the wrong truth." His eyes stayed fixed ahead. "They didn't deserve death."
Eliza's expression tightened.
"But for the greater good," Nicholas said, his tone turning colder, "I killed them anyway. It's too dangerous for the public to learn about the supernatural."
The silence that followed felt heavier than the library around them.
Eliza stared at him in disbelief.
"Could there have been another way?"
For the first time, Nicholas didn't answer immediately.
His expression shifted—not with guilt, exactly, but with something quieter. A brief uncertainty. The kind that only appeared when no one else was supposed to notice it.
Then it was gone.
"Who's to say?" he said.
His voice lifted again, lighter now.
Too light.
"I guess I'll never know."
There it was.
That cheerful tone.
That easy, harmless mask sliding back into place, thin and obvious and false.
Eliza stopped walking.
Nicholas took another step before realizing she wasn't beside him anymore.
When he turned, she was glaring at him.
Her fist twitched at her side as she started to swing for his stomach—then stopped herself at the last second, the library's rules flashing through her mind.
Her hand dropped instead.
"I hate you," she said.
The words came out low and vicious.
"You're the worst."
She stepped closer, eyes burning into his.
"And I hate that stupid mask even more. Every single time I think I'm finally about to get an honest answer out of you…" Her jaw tightened. "There it is again."
Then she shoved past him, bumping hard into his shoulder on purpose as she walked by.
Nicholas said nothing.
And somehow, that only made it worse.
"I hate this library too," Eliza snapped as she kept walking. "I want to hit you. I want to scream at you. I want to throw books at your stupid face." She shot him a furious look over her shoulder. "You're lucky I can't do any of that right now."
Her glare sharpened.
"Stupid jerk."
Nicholas said nothing.
He just kept following a few steps behind her, silent and watchful, unwilling to let her wander this place alone no matter how angry she was.
The shelves stretched on around them in suffocating rows.
Then they found it.
A body.
It was slumped at the base of one of the shelves, mangled almost beyond recognition, its limbs twisted at wrong angles and its throat torn open so badly that dried black-red blood stained the floor beneath it.
Embedded deep in the corpse's neck was a book.
Its spine read:
Nicholas Jones — Personal Files
Eliza froze.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then she crouched down and carefully pulled the book free.
Nicholas's expression changed instantly.
A flicker.
Small, but unmistakable.
The one thing he had been trying not to say.
The one thing Silvia had clearly already seen.
Eliza opened the file.
Inside was a photograph of Nicholas.
Younger.
Colder.
But unquestionably him.
And beneath the photo was the name.
Not the one she knew.
Not the one he had ever given her.
Her eyes twitched.
Then narrowed.
Because the surname printed there was one she recognized immediately.
Jones.
The same last name as the leader of A.E.G.I.S.
Alexander Jones.
Nicholas said nothing.
Because there was nothing he could say.
Not now.
June 20th, 1983
Numerous requests have been made to have this record removed from the archives.
I have refused each one.
— The Bookkeeper