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“Increase the monitoring on all Aurora-adjacent directories. Quietly.”

“Understood.”

“Marcus, have there been any updates about the login attempts? Were they done remotely or did someone have access to Emilia’s office?”

“We just received confirmation. It was done remotely, but from within the Hall’s network. It was through a route that shouldn’t still exist. I can’t say who used it, only that it is a remnant from our previous network.”

I thanked Marcus and sat down, looking at the fire burning low. Whoever entered Blackwood Hall’s systems knew exactly where to look.

I looked at the mask resting on the piano, white and still. Protection was the best gift I could give Emilia.

Chapter 9

Emilia

When I woke up Monday morning, the gala felt like it had happened years ago.

Had I dreamt it? I almost believed I had. The opera house. The masquerade. The music. The man in the white mask. It felt like something that belonged in a fairy tale. Too lovely and too romantic to be real.

Then I looked down at the inside of my wrist and moved my fingertips over my pulse. I had not imagined that kiss. There was something so intimate, so admiring, so reverent in the way he removed my glove and gently pressed his lips to my skin. Even now, the memory of that kiss sent a small rush of heat through me. I had spent the hours since the gala telling myself that this was mere curiosity, a mystery to be solved. I knew curiosity was only part of it.

In my body, I already knew who he was. It was Alexander who held me close, who whispered about rain beneath glass, who had given me every opportunity to move away. In my mind, though, I needed something definitive. I could wait for that.

I stood, crossed to the window, and made myself focus on the gardens below. The roses were holding on to the last color of the season. In a few weeks, the beds would be cleared and the garden would become all bare stone and winter snow. I wanted to experience it through all the seasons.

After coffee and a review of the day’s notes, I was in the laboratory by seven-fifteen. Fortunately, the work required focus and left very little room for mysterious men in white masks.

The early hours had become my favorite part of the day.

The team arrived gradually. Priya first, then the postdocs, and, finally, Mateo. His arrival usually marked the point when the laboratory was fully awake. By nine o’clock, we had found our familiar rhythm. The equipment cycled steadily while researchers moved between benches, checked results, and debated what the latest data meant.

The previous week, we had received results for two parallel trials that needed careful examination. Priya and I spent the morning debating the appropriate statistical model, Mateo listened and offered his opinion, while one of the postdocs filled an entire whiteboard with a pathway diagram that was either very good or completely wrong, depending on what time of day you consulted it.

“If we see the same thing in the next patient samples, then the results are not random. They’re dependent on the tumor environment,” Priya said, in the measured tone she used when she believed she was right and was giving me the opportunity to reach the same conclusion independently.

I looked at the numbers. She was probably right.

“Let’s run the assay one more time while we wait for the new samples,” I said.

Priya’s expression confirmed that she had already prepared for this and was simply waiting on confirmation. She pointed to the numbers again, doing a remarkably poor job of hiding her satisfaction. If the pattern held, we were beginning to understand the conditions that determined the response.

“This is exciting. Good work, everyone.”

Even the ordinary problems seemed easier here. A supply request that would ordinarily disappear into weeks of approvals was processed before eleven, and a calibration issue with one of the imaging units was corrected almost as quickly. I was still getting used to working somewhere that refused to let logistics become an obstacle.

Dr. Julian Mercer from the oncology lab on the seventh floor stopped by with what he described as a quick question about one of the sample-processing methods we had developed specifically for Aurora. Nearly an hour later, the question had expanded into a possible collaboration between our teams.

“I worked on something similar to Project Aurora during my postdoc,” Julian said. “A program called Helix.”

“Helix?” I asked.

“Yes, it was a research program here at Blackwood about six years ago. The focus was different, but some of the same pathways were involved.”

“What happened to it?”

Something in his expression changed, though only briefly. “The program was shut down.”

“Why?”