Chapter 1
“Ivy. Who lit the match?”
Ivy drew breath.
Estelle’s fingers tightened around her clutch.
That was where I looked first.
Not at Ivy.
Not at Agnes.
At the woman I was supposed to marry in twelve days.
She had already made one mistake.
She was supposed to be out.
People do not say that about fires they know nothing about.
Ivy looked directly at me.
“Nolan Price.”
My hotel security director.
The room changed.
I did not.
“How do you know?”
“I saw him.”
Estelle immediately said:
“She’s lying.”
I turned my eyes toward her.
“Be careful.”
Her mouth closed.
Good.
Ivy continued.
She had gone to Agnes’s bakery two hours before the banquet because Agnes was supposed to attend as my personal guest.
The bakery stood one block behind the hotel, separated by an old service courtyard.
When Ivy arrived, smoke was already pushing from a rear window.
She ran inside.
Found Agnes near the cellar stairs trying to reach the front door through thick smoke.
Nolan stood outside beside a black hotel service car.
Watching.
“He saw me pull her out,” Ivy said.
“Then?”
“He drove away.”
I looked around the banquet.
Nolan was gone.
Of course.
Agnes touched my sleeve.
“Adrian.”
I crouched beside her.
She held the recipe book like it contained her heartbeat.
“What happened before the fire?”
Her eyes went to Estelle.
Then back to me.
“People have been using my cellar.”
I frowned.
“What people?”
“I don’t know all of them.”
Her fingers tightened over the scorched cover.
“But I know where they were going.”
She opened the recipe book.
Between old pages stained with flour was a folded hand-drawn map.
Not recipes.
A corridor.
A narrow service passage running from beneath Agnes’s bakery—
directly under the hotel.
I stared.
I knew the building had old foundations.
I did not know the bakery connected to them.
Agnes whispered:
“Your new hotel has a second entrance.”
Estelle went pale.
“And somebody has been using it for months.”
Now I understood the fire.
May you like
Someone did not want the bakery gone because it was old.
They wanted the doorway buried.
