TERMS OF THE HEART
"A service override from the old renovation contract, three years old, that nobody bothered to formally revoke when the work finished. Vaughn's assistant requested it back then, for reasons that had nothing to do with tonight, and it just sat there, forgotten, until he remembered it existed."
"So it wasn't some elaborate scheme," I said. "Just an old door somebody forgot to lock."
"That's almost worse, somehow," Damien said. "I keep imagining every other forgotten door in this building, every access point nobody's bothered to audit in years, and wondering how many of them are still sitting open, waiting for someone desperate enough to remember they exist."
"Then we close them," I said. "All