Kellan lifted his chin at the Rennigan family lingering in the room.

‘We do not need an audience,’ he said with raised brows.

Sunni was visibly offended. But Kai offered an odd smile.

‘Of course,’ he said, sharing an odd look with Elnora.

She smiled at them both before she walked out with her parents and closed the door behind her

chapter thirty-one

chapter thirty-one

kellan finch

‘We’re fucked,’ Kellan said, staring at the book. ‘Completely fucked.’

This was meant to be it. Their saving grace. And it was nothing. He couldn’t tell what Bethan was feeling.

‘Useless,’ she whispered.

She must have thought he wouldn’t have heard. But he did. He always did when it came to Bethan; she called to him like a siren’s song. Any word or sound she uttered, he would make sure he heard. A sentiment he knew Bethan was not used to.

‘I betted everything on this.’ She held onto a breath. ‘And I was wrong again.’

The only thing she was wrong about was the way she saw herself.

He clutched her hand.

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ he said.

She grumbled beside him.

‘This is nothing we don’t already know.’ Her voice wavered. ‘I don’t understand. How we could have gotten it so wrong?’

It had been an hour since they first arrived, and he and Bethan scanned every page of the notebook. The handwriting was sporadic and frantic, sentences short and rushed. Kellan wondered if this was a tell-all. Kurai’s last shot at getting his truth across. Kellan researched that no one knew what happened to Kurai, and Kellan would bet everything that he suffered the same fate as Lenovik and Dana.

Something switched in Bethan, and he felt it.

Whatever it was, the steady beats of her heart became rampant, her eyes zeroed in on the Antiphonus and the Antiphonus only.

She waved her palm over it, and he watched on with curiosity brimming inside him. He didn’t dare to utter a single word.

She held the ancient book to her eye line and said, ‘One time, Dana once told me when she was working with a conservationist that sometimes people used to be scared of secret police and would hide notes in the lining of books.’

He nodded.

She flipped to the back of the book; her finger pointed to the lining on the hardcover.

‘See, the texture is different to the one on the front.’

Kurai Rennigan must have been smart because Kellan only noticed it when Bethan pointed it out.

A different type of yellowed paper was used, nearly identical to the one used for the front. The leather in the back flap was slightly denser than its twin in the front.

There was something inside.

Bethan sat the book back down and gently peeled the back paper off.

Kellan tensed even more beside her.