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“Okay, what was that?” he asks. “Why are we hiding from a professor?”

“There’s blood on the ground over there.” I point at the dark spots on the asphalt. “And there was some on his door handle too. Professors have their own parking spots, right? Always the same one.”

Jayden furrows his brow, his lips pressing into a thin line. “Yeah, they do.”

I swallow hard. “What if Supreme is a professor and not a student?”

Jayden scrunches his nose. “I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“Because the leaders are juniors or seniors. Always. It’s like the main rule of the society. Professors can’t be involved. Ever.”

“Sure, but who would know? Students graduate and leave, and new ones come every year, so none of the members know who he is anyway. He could pretend to be new when he needs to, and no one would ever figure it out. All he has to do is change his voice a bit, right? No one has actually seen his face.”

Jayden runs a hand along his jaw, his forehead creasing. “Or Supreme wants it to look like he’s a professor, and the whole thing is staged.”

“Okay, but why would Supreme assume we’d be randomly checking cars in the parking lot? Who would notice those tiny drops of blood? I only saw them because I was trying to hide.”

“Right,” Jayden says. “But if he’s a professor, then he’s breaking all the rules of the society.”

“Yeah, well.” I scoff. “And he wants my grandaunt’s money or whatever. And who knows what else too, since he never really told me what’s in the archives.”

A professor would have all the time in the world to dig through the society’s history and plan everything, and no one would ever question him if he wandered around campus. He’d have keys to places students couldn’t get into too, and yeah, I could kind of see it happening.

But would he be sloppy enough to leave blood on his car? Maybe if he was distracted and didn’t even think about it. Because yeah, why would anyone be looking closely at a professor’s car in the parking lot?

My fingers curl into fists. “We need to look into that professor.”

Like, right away, because if he’s Supreme... then wow. Just wow. That would change everything.

Chapter 38

JAYDEN

CAMDEN WINTERWELLS smiles at me from the faculty page I have open on my laptop, and I want to smash my fist into the screen.

Veronica scoots closer to me, her knee brushing mine. “He looks like a regular guy.”

“Yeah, and I hate it.”

In the photo, he has short dark hair, his dark eyes are just like Supreme’s, and his suit fits him so perfectly that someone must’ve tailored it for him. But then again, a lot of guys look like him, so it’s not like I can say for sure he’s Supreme just by looking at his eyes.

As soon as I paste his name into the search bar, a bunch of results fill the page. Articles he wrote come first, and I skim the titles, but I don’t care about his research, so I scroll past them. Under those, there’s a college newsletter about some award he got and a site with his address, which is weird, but I guess everyone’s address is online somewhere these days.

“Anything out of the ordinary?” Veronica asks.

“Not yet.” I click to the next page of results. “There’s nothing personal here, just stuff about his job, which makes sense, since he’s a Blackerville professor.”

“Try his social media.”

I find his only profile, and it’s just photos from conferences and some ceremony where the dean was handing him a plaque.

Veronica frowns at the screen. “Maybe we got it wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if Supreme is setting him up? He could’ve picked some random professor and made it look like it was him, just so we’d waste our time on the wrong guy. I mean, would Supreme really leave drops of blood lying around?”