"Julian Blackwood."
The name tasted like ash in my mouth. I hadn't spoken it aloud in ten years—not since the day I went to the music room for my lesson and found only an empty piano bench and a scrubbed schedule.
Cyprian went still. His hand, still hovering near his holster, tightened into a fist.
"Blackwood?" he repeated, his voice sharp with recognition. "The crypto-anarchist? The man who leaked the Pentagon payrolls in 2014?"
"The man who taught me how to read sheet music and write Python in the same afternoon," I corrected, staring at the note. "The Thornes hired him as a prestige tutor. They thought he was teaching me Chopin. He was teaching me how to build backdoors into secure servers."
"He's been dead for a decade," Cyprian said. "Interpol closed the file. Suicide by drowning
