For three days, the penthouse became not a gilded cage but a fortress of multiplicative obsession. The sun rose and sank beyond the vast windows, unseen. Now the only measure of the passage of time was the stacks of printouts that became ever higher, the sprawl of empty coffee mugs, and deepening exhaustion carved into their bones. Damien had never worked like this before. He was a delegate man-the grand strategies executed by forces of underlings. Now, he was in the trenches with an unflagging journalist, pushing the limits for themselves. He gazed at her, awe constant, throbbing in his chest. She was stunning. She moved through data with the grace of a shark, mismatching and tying together disparate facts, mind like a brilliant, analytical engine. She set up their investigation while he was the brute force, unleashing all his immense resources at her command. He tasked Elias and a team of discreet data miners with scouring the global databases searching for any whisper of "Corvin" or "Lycaeum." The search verged on a digital blitzkrieg, tearing through firewalls and sealed archives. And it returned nothing.
The ghost they were hunting had never been born-t least not in this digital age. He had no credit score, no social security number, no online footprint whatsoever. It was almost as if he floated in some parallel dimension to the modern world. The palpable frustration became almost a third presence in the room. Damien was growing irritable, with incognizant response by the animal in his chest at the inactivity and feeling that he was a cornered beast. And, underneath all that, the torment would come from the words of his father's journal. Once marked, she can never again be hidden. Each time Selena leaned close to point out something on his screen, her scent would fill his senses, and the primal urge to claim her, to bite down and seal their bond, would rise up like a viper. It was a tantalizing, entrancing idea that promised to control the monster, tether his sanity onto her. But out of that, he would see the image in his mind's eye-they beacon of her essence shining within the dark, drawing every monster, every hunter, straight to her. The choice remained as silent torture. His control or her life.
"This is pointless," Selena said on the third night, throwing a pen down on the table with a sharp clatter. "We're looking for a ghost with 21st-century tools. He's not in the machine." Damien looked up, seeing the weariness in her, the frustration that mirrored his own. "My father was a paranoid recluse, Selena," he said, his voice quiet. "But he wasn't stupid. He was a man of books, of ink and paper. Maybe we're looking in the wrong place." She pounced on the new angle immediately in her mind. That was what he loved most about her; she never lingered on failure but went straight to brilliant tactical pivots. "The journals," she said, her eyes lighting up. "We've been looking for names. We should have been looking for habits, for interests. What did his father say Corvin did?" They would spend the next hour poring back over the specific entries mentioning the archivist. Damien's father had written about Corvin's disdain for the modern world and belief that true history was tactile. And then they found it: a small, almost throwaway line in the margin of a page: "Corvin covets the old maps-the lies cartographers told to hide the truth of the world."
A new energy surged through Selena. "That's it," she breathed. "He's not a historian. He's a collector. An antiquarian. He doesn't buy companies, he buys history." What a brilliant leap of logic, a connection only she could have made. Damien's fingers flew across his keyboard, his attention narrowing to a somewhat different understanding. He was no longer looking for a name. He was looking for a pattern. He instructed his team to alter their sleuthing: they would now target a pre-17th-century geography and occult-text high-value private, often anonymous, auction records from Sotheby's and Christie's and smaller, more exclusive houses for a consistent, high-value buyer. It was an elusive search, indeed, a whisper in a hurricane of data, but after an hour of tense silence, a single result pinged on his screen. One anonymous trust, the 'Oakhaven Trust,' founded in 1888, had been the winning bidder on over two hundred such items in the last fifty years. Its investments had been rather inconspicuous, always using proxies, never attracting attention. It was a ghost. Ghost specimens who had expensive tastes.
"I've got something," he said, his low voice carrying to her. An instant later, Selena was there, beside him, her body close and all her attention riveted on the shining screen. The warmth of her could be felt, the faint scent of lilac emerging through all that stale coffee aroma. Purring, the beast. He fought it down. "The Oakhaven Trust," he continued, forcing himself to concentrate. "Its registered address has been the same for over a century. A commercial building in the East Village." He pulled up the property records. It had no list of tenants. It had no mortgage. It paid its taxes on time every year through an automated bank transfer. It was a perfectly maintained, perfectly anonymous shell. "There's no public access, no listed phone number," he murmured, his heart beginning to pound with a mixture of excitement and dread, "It's a ghost on a map." Selena leaned closer, her eyes tracing the lines of the digital map on his screen. "Not a ghost, Damien," she whispered, a thrill in her voice that was equal parts fear and exhilaration. "An address." On screen glowed the address, a single point of light in the vast darkness of their search. It was no longer a theoretical lead from a dead man's journal: it was a place. A destination. A hunt was about to leave the digital and enter the real world. Their sanctuary was about to be breached, by choice.