Chapter 38
Violet
For a moment, I couldn't move. Couldn't do anything but sit there with those shocking words echoing in my head.
Another stalker.
The room tilted slightly, and I gripped the edge of the table to steady myself. All this time, all these weeks, I'd been so certain it was Julian behind everything. So focused on him as the threat that I'd never even considered...
“Violet.” Julian's deep voice cut through my spiraling thoughts. He was already on his feet, moving around the table toward me. “Look at me. Breathe.”
I let out a shaky exhale.
“Okay,” he said, crouching beside my chair so we were at eye level. His hands found mine, warm and solid. “I need you to tell me everything. Every detail you can remember.”
I nodded, trying to organize my scattered thoughts. “The messages... they came from some sort of anonymous service. It always said 'number withheld' when they came through.”
“How many were there?”
“Only a few. But they scared the shit out of me, because it was obvious that the person who sent them was the same person who painted that message on my dorm wall.” I closed my eyes, trying to remember. “They were about me needing to be taught a lesson if I kept snooping around.”
Julian's jaw tightened, but he didn't interrupt.
“Another weird thing,” I continued. “The messages didn’t stay on my phone for long. They would just vanish, maybe five or ten minutes after I read them. It was like they'd never existed.”
“Self-destructing messages,” Julian muttered, expression darkening. “There are apps for that. Anonymous, untraceable, and easy to find.”
“So it could be anyone.”
“Yes. But it’s not me,” he replied. “I messaged you once, but I used my real number, and I told you it was me. Remember?”
My brows drew together. “What? When?”
“When you were looking me up on the student portal. I texted you asking if you were thinking of me, because the keylogger on your laptop tracks everything you type.” He paused.
“But that's my point exactly. I used my real number for that text, and I told you it was me. I wanted you to know it was me.”
He was right. I'd forgotten about that message in the chaos of everything else, but now that I thought about it...
“You didn't really try to hide,” I said slowly. “You wanted me to know you were watching.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I wanted you to be aware of me. To think about me. To know I was paying attention.” His voice roughened. “I never wanted to scare you. Not like that. When I find out who did this shit…”
The difference between him and my other stalker was suddenly clear.
Julian had been obsessive, invasive, and completely inappropriate. But he'd never been anonymous. He'd never made threats.
“What can you tell me about the blood thing?” he asked, brows furrowing.
“It happened about a week after I arrived at BHU,” I said. “Basically, I woke up covered in blood, and someone had painted ‘stop asking questions’ on my wall. And then…” I trailed off, frowning. “Hang on, I thought you’d already know about that, seeing as you had a camera in my room.”
He nodded. “I knew someone poured blood on your bed, but I didn’t know all the details.
Like the message on the wall. The camera didn’t catch that, because it’s mounted in the light above your bed, so the view is limited to the space around the bed and desk,” he said.
“I assumed it was the Club behind it. Figured they’d sent someone to intimidate you into leaving BHU, as a double measure in case my surveillance didn’t turn up anything useful. ”
“Right,” I muttered.
“I was fucking pissed about it, because I saw how much it scared you.” He pulled out his phone, scrolled, then turned it toward me. “See?”
My chest tightened as I read the messages between Julian and his brother on the 9th of October.
Julian: Really don’t need any of the Club’s bullshit theatrics re. Violet. I can handle the assignment entirely on my own.
Roman: Understood.
“I took his response to mean that the Club was responsible for the blood incident,” Julian said. “But looking back at it now… he might’ve thought I was saying that stuff to him in a general sense, and his reply was just a basic acknowledgement.”
“Or maybe the Club actually did do it?”
Julian shook his head. “If it was them, they would’ve stopped after I sent that message to Roman. But whoever it was kept going with the intimidation by sending you those anonymous texts.”
“True.” My heart was thudding again. “Hold on… back to the camera. It would’ve captured the person, right? Because they had to come close to my bed to pour the blood over me while I slept.”
His lips pressed into a firm line. “It’s worth taking another look.
But from what I remember seeing at the time, I couldn’t tell much about the person, because it was dark, and it’s a top-down view of the room.
So unless they lay down on the bed at some point, or stretched an arm or leg out, it’s almost impossible to tell their height, or any other important details. ”
“It’s still worth a look, like you said, because you assumed it was a fellow Club member at the time, so you might not have looked as closely as you would have otherwise.”
“That’s right.” His fingers flew over his phone keyboard again. “I’ll get Roman to bring my laptop up here so we can look. We can also get him to confirm whether or not the Club was responsible for it. But right now, I’m leaning toward ‘no’ being the answer.”
Roman arrived a few minutes later, a laptop tucked under one arm. “Here’s your stuff,” he said as he stepped inside. He took one look at Julian, then me, and something sharpened behind his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“I need to know something,” Julian said, rising to his feet. “Did you, or anyone else in the Club, ever arrange for someone to intimidate Violet? Threatening texts, or blood poured on her while she slept? A message saying, ‘stop asking questions’ painted on her wall?”
Roman frowned. “No. You were the only one on her assignment. Why?”
“Someone did all that stuff several weeks ago. Violet assumed it was me. But it wasn’t.”
“Holy shit.” Roman’s eyes widened. “It could’ve been Calista’s killer.”
“That’s exactly what I thought,” I said, nodding. “I mean, ‘stop asking questions’ is a pretty obvious reference to my investigation into her death, right?”
“For sure. Can we track the messages?”
“No, they were from an anonymous messaging service, and they self-destructed not long after I read them.”
“Fuck.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Fuck.”
“Wait…” I slowly stood up, one hand fluttering near my chest. “I just remembered something else. They didn’t just send threats. They also messaged me the night I sneaked into the Club’s initiation ritual. They said, ‘I saw you’.”
“And you assumed it was me again,” Julian said. “Seeing as I spotted you in the ritual chamber that night.”
I nodded. “It made sense at the time.”
“But it wasn’t him, and that means someone else spotted you there too,” Roman interjected. He lifted a palm. “It wasn’t me, by the way.”
“I believe you,” I said, even though dread was beginning to settle low in my stomach. “But this means it has to be a Club member.”
Julian looked at his brother. “Go and find out the names of every single member who shared a BHU class or club with Calista at some point. If they knew her—”
“They could’ve been the one to kill her,” Roman finished in a low voice.
Julian nodded. “Exactly. Talk to them. If any of them say anything that’s even vaguely suspicious… put them on the list of suspects.”
“I’m on it.” Roman turned and headed for the door.
Julian looked back at me. “Let’s look at the footage now,” he said, his expression grim and determined. He set the laptop on the table between us and opened it. “If we don’t find anything useful, I’ll look into the blood incident. You called the police, right? And they took samples?”
“Yes, but they never got back to me about what sort of blood it was,” I said. “I figured they ‘accidentally’ lost the evidence, because the university probably assumed it was the Club behind the incident and wanted to cover it up.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me at all.” Julian rubbed his jaw. “The Blackthorne Harbor PD has a habit of ‘losing’ evidence if they think it’s even remotely connected to the Dionysus Club, thanks to our long-standing relationship with them.”
He pulled up a video player interface, scrolling through dates and timestamps. “Early October, right?”
“Yeah. The eighth, I think? It was a Friday night,” I said. Then I shook my head. “Actually, it was early Saturday morning. So the ninth.”
Julian's jaw tightened as he navigated to the right date. “Let's see what happened.”
He hit play, and suddenly I was looking at my dorm room from the light fixture above my bed. The timestamp showed 3:47 AM. Around two hours before I'd woken up that morning.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. I could see myself sleeping in the bed, completely unaware. Then a figure stepped into the frame, moving slowly and carefully. They were wearing a thick dark hooded jacket that obscured their entire body. In their hands was a bucket.
“Oh my god,” I muttered.
We watched in silence as the figure continued to creep across the room with an eerie deliberateness. They stopped beside my bed, and I felt sick watching myself sleep, completely vulnerable, while this person stood over me.
The figure tilted the bucket slowly, pouring the dark liquid across my blanket. It spread slowly, soaking into the fabric. I'd been so deep asleep that I hadn't even stirred.
The whole thing only took three minutes. Then the figure turned and walked back toward the other side of my dorm before disappearing from the frame.
Julian immediately rewound and played it again, leaning closer to the screen.
“Can you see anything?” I asked. “Anything identifying?”