Page 142 of Vicious Knight

“Don’t worry about me. Drink the tea, then I want you to get some sleep. You hear me?”

She nods and picks up the cup again to drink the tea.

An hour later, I get her to sleep, and I talk with Lucian. He and the men found evidence that someone had been in the secret tunnels and the cameras were tampered with, but the trail has run cold.

No surprise there. That’s okay. I won’t stop looking for him.

Now that the scar-faced man has presented himself, vengeance is rippling through me.

I just have to backtrack my activities over the past week to who I spoke to. One of them alerted the scar-faced man about me.

When I get off the phone with Lucian I fire off a message to Kai.

Although I have him watching Aleksander, I talked to him about the scar-faced man, too. He was helpful in giving me intel about the mercenary group, as were Lucian’s people. It was them who found the reports of the other incidents.

Kai messages back confirming he’ll look into this on his side, then another message comes through from an unknown number.

Thinking it’s campus security, I open it and my blood heats when I read the words:

If you don’t stop searching for the scar-faced man death will follow.

My entire body goes rigid. I stare at the message for a few seconds until it disappears from the screen.

The fucking message is gone. I search the phone’s inbox and deleted files, but it’s not there. It’s vanished.

“The fucking message was sent in vanish mode,” I explain to Lucian as we walk across the docks.

We’re heading to Kai’s. He might have some information for us. The sort we needed to meet in person to get. He called me a few hours after the cryptic message came through.

“Did they just send it as a text to your number, or was it in an app?”

“It was a text. Whoever sent it has some elaborate encryption wrapped around the source code so I can’t track the number. Every time I unlock the encryption it recreates another code that’s harder to unlock.”

Lucian frowns and bites the inside of his lip. “Let me have a go at it. It sounds like you need to find a way to isolate the encryption with a virus or something.”

“I fucking tried that. It didn’t work. Their code also has some sophisticated antivirus code protecting it.”

“I might still be able to find a way around it. My viruses are a little more whacked up than yours. Also, you’re not yourself.”

I don’t argue because I’m not myself at all and I’m thinking straight at all. Right now, I feel like shit run over by a speeding rocket. Of course I’m not thinking straight. Everything is all over the place in a colossal mess, so I’m taking longer than I usually would to accomplish things.

“Okay, see what you can do.” I nod.

“Did you tell Ivy about the message?”

“No. She was still asleep when I left.” My guards are with her. I have men inside and outside the apartment. “I’m not telling her.”

“That’s perhaps for the best.”

“I want to see if I can wrap this up without involving her. Today was too much, and now that I have whoever this person is warning me, I feel like I need to find that fucker even faster.”

Lucian casts me a wary glance. “This has gotten crazy, Thorne. Obviously I’ll help you with whatever you need, but are you sure you shouldn’t tell Caspian? And maybe take precautions because of the warning?”

I’m already shaking my head before he can finish the sentence. “Not yet. Not until I absolutely have to. Caspian mustn’t know Ivy’s secret. And as for the warning…” My voice trails off as I think about it. “I might be a fool for not heeding it, but I need the truth.”

“Okay, I just wanted to check.”

“Finding this guy means retribution for me. He’ll lead me to whoever hired him to kill my family, and I’ll be able to free Ivy’s dad, too. But I can’t just involve Caspian right now because things are too complicated.”

---