She stops at the edge of the table. She’s standing close enough that I can smell her—antiseptic cream and the dark roast of the coffee. She glances at the papers spread out in front of me.
“You’re staring at them again.”
“The puzzle pieces don’t fit,” I mutter, grateful for the change of subject.
“What puzzle pieces?”
“Elias,” I say. “The man I killed.”
She flinches at the bluntness of it, but she doesn’t look away. She eyes the red marks on the paper.
“Why are you staring at the HVAC blueprints for the VIP Study?” she asks.
My eyes dart to her face. “What?”
“That.” She points a slender finger at the top sheet. “That’s the mechanical layout. Third floor. I went over these with the facilities engineer because the vents carry sound in that room.”
I frown. “These are bomb targets. Structural weak points. The dossier said he marked the intake valves to flood the room with gas.” I point to the Red X over the vent on the north wall. “And the pillars. To bring the roof down.”
She shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “You’re wrong.”
Setting her coffee mug down, she leans over the table, bracing her hands on the wood. She drops her chin, exposing the nape of her neck—the spot where I bruised her.
“I organized the venue setup,” she says, her voice gaining a sudden, professional confidence. “I know this room better than my own apartment. I spent three months staring at these walls.”
She taps the paper.
“This X on the HVAC intake... that isn’t a gas line. That’s the acoustic vent.”
“Acoustic vent?”
“It’s an architectural quirk,” she explains. “The Waldorf was built in the 1920s. The original owner was paranoid. The ductwork is shaped to funnel sound directly from the VIP Study down into the Waldorf Archives in the basement. It’s a whisperline. If you put a receiver in that vent, you could hear a whisper from across the table.”
My blood runs cold.
Sound.
“And this X...” She moves her finger to the pillar. “That’s not a support beam. That’s a hollow column. It’s decorative plaster, not stone. It hides the wall safe behind the portrait of Cornelius Waldorf. My father showed it to me once—a party trick for his high-donor friends.”
Her eyes flick to me, clear as day. Confident.
“If you wanted to blow up the room, you’d target the load-bearing wall on the north side,” she says. “Or the floor joists. You wouldn’t waste explosives on a plaster column or an air vent. These marks? These aren’t targets for destruction.”
“What are they?” I ask, though the answer is already forming in the back of my mind.
“They’re hiding spots,” she says.
I freeze. The room shifts, the gray light seeming to sharpen and become razor-edged. The logic snaps into place like a gunshot.
I mentally replay the scene from the museum: the VIP Study, the cloying smell of lilies, the sweat on Elias’s face. I see the table and the device—a crude, ugly black block wrapped in electrical tape with copper wires and a blinking red light.
I was told he was a bomber. I was told the threat was imminent. Mass casualty. So when I saw a block of electronics, my brain saidDetonator.
But if he was targeting the acoustic vent... if he was targeting the hollow column...
The final piece locks into place.
