Adrenaline. The word was a lie, a flimsy piece of paper thrown over a chasm, and they both knew it. Evie’s hands were shaking so badly she had to grip the ladder’s rails to steady herself as she climbed down. She didn’t take her eyes off him. The adrenaline was hers, a frantic, chemical scream in her veins. What he possessed was something else entirely—a quiet, terrifying stillness that had held back death with one hand. She walked back to the table on unsteady legs and sat down, her own explanation dying on her lips. Thank you. Are you okay? The questions were absurd.

He didn't return to his manuscript. Instead, he pulled up a chair across from her, the scrape of its legs against the stone floor unnaturally loud. The space between them felt different now, charged with her fear and his impossible secret.

The nights that followed fell into a new rhythm. The academic silence was broken, replaced by a low current of conversation that felt more dangerous than any falling bookshelf. He began to question her, his curiosity a strange and intense thing. It wasn’t the idle chatter of a colleague. It was the probing of a man utterly alien to her world. He’d watch, his head tilted, as she scrolled through her phone.

“All of that information,” he murmured one night, gesturing toward the small, glowing screen. “Flowing through the very air. Do you not find it… deafening?”

“You get used to it,” she’d said, feeling strangely defensive. “It’s just how things are.”

“How things are,” he repeated, as if tasting the words. “A temporary state, Miss Rowe. It always is.”

He was fascinated by the mundane details of her life: her taste in music, which he called “structured noise”; her ambition to work in a museum, which he found quaint; the casual way she spoke of flying in a plane to visit family in another state. “To simply sever your ties with the earth and trust a machine of metal and fire,” he’d mused, staring into the middle distance. “Your generation possesses a unique form of faith.”

His fascination emboldened her. The fear she’d felt had not vanished, but it had sharpened into a fierce, consuming need to know. If he could probe her life, she could probe his.

“You talk about history as if you’ve seen it all,” she said one evening, looking up from a brittle map of 17th-century trade routes. “Where did you complete your studies?”

A slow smile touched his lips, a fleeting expression that never reached his eyes. “My studies have been… extensive. And conducted in many classrooms. Some of them were libraries. Some were battlefields.”

“You’ve never married? No children?” The question was outrageously personal, and it slipped out before she could stop it.

The smile vanished. He looked at her, his gaze so direct it felt like a physical touch. “To bind another to your own fate is the greatest of cruelties, Miss Rowe. I am not a cruel man.” The statement hung in the air, a confession disguised as a philosophy. He was lonely, she realized with a sudden, aching certainty. Profoundly and eternally lonely. And he had chosen it. The thought made him more terrifying, and more magnetic, than ever before.

The moment stretched, thick and heavy with unspoken things. It was nearly 3 a.m., and the air in the archive had grown stale. Evie’s eyes burned with fatigue. They were examining a folio bound in what Morgan had dryly called “human leather,” its pages made of a stiff, unforgiving vellum. The edges were sharp as razors. She was tired, her movements becoming clumsy. As she tried to separate two pages that had become fused by time and humidity, her finger slipped.

A sharp, slicing pain shot up her hand. "Fuck," she hissed, pulling her hand back instinctively. A deep, clean cut ran across the fleshy pad of her index finger. It was surprisingly severe. A bead of dark crimson welled up, then another, before a single, perfect drop fell, landing with a silent splash on the yellowed page. The red was shockingly vibrant against the ancient text, a stark stain of life on a surface of death.

The change in Morgan was instantaneous and terrifying.

He had been leaning over her shoulder, pointing to a line of script. The scent of her blood hit the air, and he recoiled as if struck. His head snapped up, his posture going ramrod straight. His eyes, which had been filled with a kind of detached academic interest, went black. The pupils blew wide, consuming the dark iris entirely, turning his gaze into two empty, bottomless pits. A muscle jumped in his jaw, and his nostrils flared, just once. He looked not at her wound, but at the drop of blood on the vellum, his focus absolute and predatory. It was the most visceral reaction she had ever seen in him—more primal than when he’d stopped the bookshelf. This wasn't about strength; this was about hunger.

"Morgan?" she whispered, her own pain forgotten.

He didn’t answer. He made a low sound in his throat, a choked, guttural noise of pure restraint. Without another word, he shoved himself away from the table, his chair screeching against the stone floor. He turned his back to her completely, stalking to the far side of the room where he stood facing a wall of unlit shelves, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at his sides. His whole body was rigid, a statue of violent control.

"Are you alright?" Evie asked, her voice trembling. She fumbled in her bag for a tissue, pressing it hard against the cut. The blood quickly soaked through.

"Cover it," he ordered, his voice strained and harsh, utterly devoid of the cultured cadence she was used to. It was the voice of a stranger. "Get the scent out of the air."

Stunned into silence, she did as she was told, wrapping her finger tightly and finding a band-aid in a forgotten corner of her wallet. The atmosphere was ruined. The easy intimacy they had been building over the past week had not just evaporated; it had been murdered. For the remaining hour, he did not turn around. He issued commands from across the room, his voice clipped and cold. "Item 4B. Check the colophon. Compare it to the ledger."

When their time was up, he didn't walk her to the gate. He simply said, "You are dismissed," his back still to her.

Evie packed her things in the ringing silence, her heart pounding a confused, frightened rhythm. The secret he was hiding was no longer a romantic mystery. As she walked out of the library into the pre-dawn chill, she felt a certainty settle deep in her gut. Whatever Morgan was, it was something that starved. And it had just smelled a meal.

The coldness persisted for three nights. It was a sterile, brittle silence that coated every interaction. Morgan was a machine of research, his voice a monotone instrument for delivering citations and archival codes. He never met her eye. He never stood closer than ten feet. The warmth, the probing questions, the shared intimacy of their late-night world—all of it was gone, replaced by a chasm of arctic distance. Evie’s confusion curdled into a quiet, simmering anger. He had made her feel seen, and then punished her for bleeding.

On the fourth night, he broke the silence. "Our work on the monastic ledgers is complete," he stated, his back to her as he replaced a book on a high shelf. "The provenance of the collection points to a single private acquisition in 1888. The records are sealed, but the acquisition ledger references a sub-archival collection. Folio Gamma." He turned, and for the first time in days, his eyes met hers. They were flat, unreadable. "It is in the restricted stacks."

He didn't wait for a reply. He walked toward the rear of the archive, to a section she had only seen locked behind a heavy iron grate. He produced a key from his pocket—not a modern university key, but a long, skeletal piece of black iron that looked as old as the stones around them. The lock groaned in protest, the sound echoing in the dead air. He pushed the gate open and gestured for her to enter.

The air was different here. Colder, heavier, thick with the smell of undisturbed decay and brittle paper. He led her down a narrow aisle to a plain wooden chest secured with a tarnished brass lock. He opened it with a second, smaller key. Inside, nestled on a bed of faded velvet, was a single, small book. It was no bigger than her hand, bound in dark leather so cracked and ancient it looked like parched earth.

"A private diary," Morgan said, his voice low. "Fifteenth century. From a convent near the Voivodeship of Wallachia." He placed it on the small reading desk under the aisle’s single bare bulb. "Check for any mention of book trading or scholars matching the collector's profile."

Evie sat, her fingers trembling slightly as she opened the fragile cover. The pages were vellum, the script a tight, spidery hand in faded brown ink. The Latin was archaic, but she could parse it. She began to read, her voice a soft murmur in the enclosed space. The first few pages were prayers, complaints about chores, fear of God. Then, the entries changed.

"A visitor comes to the cloister wall at night," she read aloud, her voice gaining strength as she translated. "He does not seek entry. He speaks to Sister Anna through the grille. He calls himself a scholar, a student of the eternal dark… he asks her of the old ways, of the superstitions we were told to forget."

Morgan was standing behind her, utterly still. She could feel his presence like a drop in pressure.

She turned the page. "Sister Anna says his face is carved from alabaster, beautiful but without life. His eyes… his eyes hold the darkness of the grave, yet burn with a cold fire when she speaks of her life within these walls. He never eats. He never drinks. He only listens, with a stillness that frightens the birds from the trees."

The air crackled. Evie’s heart hammered against her ribs. This was no coincidence. She was giving voice to his secret, reading the lines of his existence from a five-hundred-year-old book. She could feel his gaze on her, not on the book, but on her lips as they formed the words.

She swallowed, her throat dry, and read the next line. "Anna is pale. She says he speaks of a thirst… a thirst that knowledge cannot slake…"

Her voice broke on the last word. Before she could draw another breath, he moved. His speed was absolute. One moment he was behind her, the next his body was pressed against her back, his chest a wall of cold, hard muscle. His left hand shot forward, covering hers on the page, his fingers like ice against her skin. The book, her hand, his hand—all pinned to the desk. He leaned down, his mouth so close to her ear she could feel the absence of breath. His voice was a raw, frayed whisper, a sound that scraped directly against her nerves.

"Some things," he breathed, the words a vibration against her skin, "are better left unread."