Chapter 13: The Second Key

Elara did not reach for the bottle.

She lifted it instead, high, and held it over the stone floor between two fingers.

"Tell your man to take his hand off the tube," she said, "or I let go."

The cellar went still.

Conrad Hart tilted his head, the way a teacher might when a student surprises him. "That glass holds twenty years of work, my dear. If it breaks, you lose your answer."

"I already have my answer." Her voice did not shake. She was astonished by that. "You've smelled like that fire since I walked in. It's in your coat, your hair, your skin. A man doesn't carry a smell for decades unless he can't stop returning to it."

Something flickered behind the professor's smile. It was small and quick. She knew it at once, because she had smelled it on Detective Brandt not three hours ago.

Fear.

He was afraid of the bottle. Not of what was in it, but of what it would prove.

Conrad lifted two fingers.

On the phone's bright screen, the man in the gray suit stiffened, then slowly drew his hand away from the oxygen tube. He stepped back from the bed.

Elara did not lower the bottle.

"Good," Rhys said quietly, behind her. "Now look at your screen, Mr. Hart."

Conrad glanced down.

The door of the hospital room had flown open. Two security guards and a woman in a charcoal coat rushed in. The man in the gray suit turned, too late. One guard caught his arm. The other pinned him to the wall. Priya Nair walked straight toward the camera and looked into it with an expression Elara had never seen on her face.

"Mr. Hart," she said calmly, "you are on a live Calloway security feed. Three officers from the eighth arrondissement are watching. I'd smile, if I were you."

The line went dead.

For a heartbeat nobody breathed.

Then Conrad Hart laughed. It was soft, delighted, and entirely unashamed.

"Clever," he murmured. "Your mother was clever, too." He tucked the phone into his coat. "It did not save her."

Rhys took a step forward. Elara caught his sleeve.

"No," she whispered. "Not here."

Conrad turned, leaning lightly on his silver cane. "Julian. We are leaving."

"Father, she has the—"

"Now."

Julian's jaw clenched. He shot Elara a look of such naked hatred that she almost took a step back. Then he followed his father up the stairs. The men in dark coats melted after them. Theo hesitated at the threshold, glanced at Rhys, and hurried away without a word.

The iron door stood open on an empty corridor.

Marguerite sank into a chair beside the copper still, her hand pressed to her mouth. Her shoulders shook. No sound came out.

Elara lowered the bottle and found she could barely feel her fingers. She wrapped it in her scarf and tucked it into her coat.

"Thank you," she said to Rhys. "For the feed. Priya must have—"

"I didn't tell her."

She turned.

Rhys was staring at the door. The color had not come back to his face. He looked like a man who had just stepped off the edge of a stair that was not there.

"What did Conrad mean?" Elara asked. "About what you did the night of the fire. About what you took from this room."

He did not answer.

"Rhys."

Slowly, as if every movement hurt, he reached into the inside pocket of his coat. He drew out a small object and held it in his open palm.

It was a brass key. Old. Tarnished. Worn smooth at the bow by decades of handling.

It was identical to the key in her pocket.

Elara's breath left her.

"I told you I did not know about this room," Rhys said. His voice was very low. "That was not entirely true."

She stared at the key. At the man holding it. At the one person in the world she had been fool enough to start trusting.

"I have carried this since I was twelve years old," he said. "I never knew what it opened. I swear it."

His gray eyes lifted to hers, and for the first time, they were afraid.

"But I remember being in this room the night it burned."