Chapter 4
Miles’s office was too clean.
That told me more than a mess would have.
Empty drawers.
No personal photographs.
No spare jacket.
No coffee mug.
A man who had worked in that room every day for eight months had erased himself before tonight.
Planned departure.
Not panic.
Rafe opened a locked cabinet.
Inside were hotel floor plans.
Current.
Accurate.
The passage was there.
Highlighted.
Not as service access.
As ROUTE C.
Three entrances.
Agnes’s bakery.
Hotel wine cellar.
Private loading bay beneath the east wing.
I looked at Estelle.
“You knew all three?”
“No.”
I believed that.
Her surprise at the loading bay was real.
Interesting.
Then Ivy noticed something behind the plans.
Photographs.
Small.
Printed.
Guests entering through the cellar.
Not random guests.
Kingsley associates.
Some currently downstairs at my banquet.
One photograph showed Miles greeting my cousin Edward Kingsley.
Another:
Julian Monroe.
Another:
Nolan.
Then a man I did not expect.
Harold Vane.
My father’s former consigliere.
Retired seven years.
He had spent the last three telling anyone who listened that I turned Kingsley into a hotel company with tattoos.
Apparently he had found an audience beneath my hotel.
“Why photograph them?”
Rafe asked.
Insurance.
Obviously.
Miles trusted nobody.
Good instinct for a traitor.
Then Agnes touched one photograph.
“This man.”
Harold.
“He came through the bakery?”
“Twice.”
“When?”
She checked her notes.
Three months earlier.
Then again last week.
The fire suddenly had another purpose.
Not merely closing the passage.
Destroying the place from which Agnes had watched them.
Eliminate witness memory?
Impossible.
But burn her notes.
Her book.
Her basement.
Then claim she imagined things.
Old woman.
Smoke damage.
Confusion.
Except Ivy arrived.
Except the book survived.
Except Estelle spoke too soon.
I looked at the back of one photograph.
A handwritten phrase:
OPENING NIGHT — ROOM 12.
I knew Room 12.
Not a guest room.
One of the hotel’s private board salons.
Locked tonight.
Reserved under my authority.
Except I had reserved nothing.
I turned toward Rafe.
“Who has access?”
“Miles.”
“Nolan?”
“Yes.”
“Estelle?”
She answered herself.
“Yes.”
I looked at her.
“What is in Room 12?”
Her face went blank.
“I don’t know.”
I believed her.
That was worse.
Someone had planned something inside my hotel on opening night.
May you like
My fiancée had helped erase the passage protecting it—
without even knowing what she was protecting.
