Page 50 of Take Me Darkly

I gave a single nod, tucking the journal under my arm as I headed inside.

When I entered the apartment, I found Serena curled on the velvet sofa, her legs tucked beneath her, a cup of coffee sitting on the side table. She looked up as the door locked shut, her deep blue eyes brightening instantly.

“You have the journal?”

I held up the wrapped package. “Right where I left it.”

She uncurled herself, reaching for the leather-bound book with an eagerness that made my chest tighten. This was her father’s work. His final obsession. And if our suspicions were correct, it was the thing he’d died protecting.

I sat beside her as she removed the protective cloth and opened the journal with reverence, her fingers trembling slightly as she turned the pages I’d only briefly examined before. The leather binding creaked softly, releasing the faint scent of old paper and ink.

I watched her face as she took in her father’s handwriting. The familiar loops and slants that must have brought back a flood of memories. Her eyes glistened, but she blinked rapidly, refusing to let the tears fall. She was so strong, my Serena. Stronger than she knew.

As she flipped through the pages, a folded sheet fell out. She caught it mid-air, unfolding it to reveal a dark rubbing of an ancient stone tablet. She spread it out over the coffee table. The rubbing was dense with Latin and Greek script, the impression rendered with painstaking precision.

“Look at this,” she murmured, tracing the lines with her finger. “I don’t remember this being in the files Zeke showed us. It’s remarkable. The script, the preservation... my father must have been so excited when he found this.”

I caught the catch in her throat, the pride warring with intense grief.

A familiar, dark rage flared in my chest.

God help the people responsible when I finally get my hands on them…

I forced my jaw to relax, shoving the impulse for violence aside. Serena needed my focus, not my fury.

“You’re right. This wasn’t included in the files pulled from the library archives,” I murmured. Leaning closer, I studied the impression more closely. “Can you read it?”

Serena’s brow furrowed in concentration, that little line appearing between her eyebrows that I found unreasonably attractive.

“Parts of it. The dialect is early imperial—contemporary to Mark Antony’s reign.” She bit her lower lip, her eyes scanning the script. “Here... he’s highlighted specific sections. The children are named directly. Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene, Ptolemy Philadelphus.”

Her finger moved to the facing journal page, where Carlo had jotted cramped notes in the margins.

“He was tracing a lineage,” she said, her voice dropping to an awe-filled whisper. “Using tablet markers across central Italy. Look at the repetition of the names—he was tracking descendants.”

She turned several more pages. Carlo’s research sprawled across the paper in a dense web of Italian, English, and Latin, interspersed with sketches of pottery shards, tomb inscriptions, and genealogical charts.

“Your father was meticulous,” I noted, catching a subtle detail. Carlo had circled specific characters throughout his transcriptions, placing minute dots beside certain letters and subtle underlines beneath others. To a casual reader, it looked like standard emphasis.

But something about it nagged at me. The pattern felt intentional—like Carlo was leaving breadcrumbs for someone who knew how to look.

“He was a perfectionist,” Serena said softly, running her hand over the page as if she could feel his presence through the ink. “He used to tell me that archaeology wasn’t about unearthing gold—it was about reading the unspoken stories left behind.”

A single tear escaped, tracking down her cheek. She swiped it away with a frustration that made my heart ache.

“I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I thought I was past this⁠—”

“Don’t.” I caught her hand, bringing her knuckles to my lips, holding her gaze. “Never apologize for missing him, Serena.”

She nodded, swallowing hard. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier. “I’d made the choice to give it all up—to stop chasing his ghosts. But I know he wanted me to finish his work. To understand what he discovered.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do.” I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, my thumb lingering on her cheek. “Together.”

She took a shaky breath and turned the page. The next spread contained Italian script, line after line of Carlo’s neat handwriting filling both pages.

“More lineage tracking,” she mused. Frustration colored her voice as she began to read aloud, translating a summary for me as she went. “He was trying to document where the bloodline vanished. Cleopatra Selene married into North African royalty, and her descendants dissolved into Roman nobility, but the official imperial records go dark after a few generations. I know he knew this already, and I can’t understand why he chose to chase this path.”

My eyes scanned the page, over the foreign text until settling on a familiar sketch of a snake. The symbol used by the Serpent’s Disciples was everywhere in this book.