With effort, she swallowed her irritation and glanced into the great room with its towering two-story ceiling and its wall of windows.
She spotted Salt in a tuxedo, standing beside one of his four enormous couches, declaiming to a few older gloamists. Adeline, in an elegant black column of a dress, stood beside the limestone fireplace, in which green and blue flames burned. An enormous painting of a forest hung over the mantel. Only when you looked closely did you notice that it was full of shadows wearing deep red slashes for mouths and that gray body parts had been rendered among the ferns of the forest floor.
Two additional Cabal members were there as well. Bellamy stood in a corner, and Malik looked particularly regal. His locs had been pulled into flat twists on the sides and wrapped in gleaming gold thread, his shadow hanging across his body like a sash.
A trio of musicians in animal masks played classical music. An owl with a violin. A fox with a cello. A bear with a viola. Through the windows, an outdoor garden was lit with low lamps that showed off marble statues of shrouded figures.
What must it have been like to grow up in a place like this? Surrounded by this much wealth? Force-fed untold depravity?
Charlie finished her circuit and ate the remaining hors d’oeuvres so she had an excuse to go back to the kitchen. Setting the silver tray down on the marble island to be wiped and refilled, she took the opportunity to grab her backpack. Then she headed directly for the library.
Charlie’s memories of the house were blurry and indistinct, more nightmare than recollection. A voice close enough for her to have felt breath on her neck. Cavernous rooms linked together in a puzzling maze.
The library, with a secret door leading to a room of treasures, including a safe. With the rug she vomited on, and where she might have died.
When she glanced in, she found two men in the leather chairs, talking in an intense way, one gesturing with a snifter of cognac. An empty glass and a napkin rested beside the other. They looked extremely settled.
Charlie needed to make them move, and quickly.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said, squatting down in front of the one she thought seemed more self-important. “I’m sorry, but there was a woman asking for you in the other room. Tall, with red hair. Very pretty. She described you and told me that if I saw you, I should inform you of her interest.”
He looked smug, and rose. “I’ll just be a second,” he said to his friend, but his friend was rising too.
“Going to refresh my drink,” the man said with a little too obvious relief, and Charlie had the sudden thought that perhaps she’d saved him from being buttonholed for the entire evening.
Charlie picked up the crumpled napkin and began to sweep up imaginary crumbs until she was alone. Then she went to the light switch on the wall, throwing it so that the darkened room would seem off-limits to other guests.
She reached into her backpack and drew on gloves and glasses with tiny lights attached to both sides. Once she switched them on, they would make her face a confusing blur to cameras, as well as provide a way to work in the dark.
Finally, she went to the wall of books. Red and gold. Red and gold. Something with flames, something with a title that started with an I. She couldn’t find the lever. Two pulls of books with red spines and gold type went nowhere. Then she spotted it, a shelf lower than where she’d been looking and a foot to the left. Inferno. She lifted it and the bookshelf door swung jerkily inward, revealing the smaller library, and the painting with the safe behind.
Charlie stepped through into the secret room, its walls covered in shelves packed with older books. Nausea abruptly constricted her throat. The memory of lying on the library carpet rushing back at her as though no time had passed between then and now, as though she were still a terrified kid. The rough texture of the merino wool against her cheek, the wetness from her vomit, the voice coming from the dark.
Don’t look behind you.
The smell of beets still made her gag.
Charlie stepped through onto the onyx tiles of the smaller chamber. Shelves lined the walls there too, with older and more precious books filling them. Memoirs, notebooks, and scientific journals, a hundred at least, all worth stealing. The Mystical Discoveries of Tovilda Gare sat beside Confessions of Nigel Lucy, Magus and Diarios de Juan Pedro Maria Ugarte. There were other books, in Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Latin, and Greek, as well as a whole half wall in French. Her fingers itched to choose a few at random and stuff them into her bag.
Pushing the bookshelf door closed, she checked for any additional wiring that might indicate an unexpected surprise.
Charlie didn’t find anything that seemed worrisome, and turned toward the back of the hidden room.
A trompe l’oeil of a dead goat, entrails spilling out and mingling with split pomegranates, hung above a club chair, the only piece of furniture.
Gingerly, she felt around the edge of the hideous painting. She found hinges, with no lock on the other side.
She swung it open to reveal the wall safe she remembered.
Made by Stockinger, who were known for offering solid, bespoke models with the bells and whistles of all the custom luxury safe makers like Buben & Zorweg or Agresti. There would be winders for watches, cloth-lined wooden drawers, but none of the ridiculous golden and bejeweled neo-Victorian extravagances of Boca do Lobo pieces. Stockinger made serious safes for serious people.
A dial rested on the front, beside a gleaming handle engraved with Lionel Salt’s initials. And beside it, a keypad.
Most modern safes were digital, offering none of the romance of breaking into the old ones. None of the listening for when the spin changed, the infinitesimal slotting into place, the softer click-click as satisfying as the crack of knuckles. If she could ignore the keypad entirely, she would. Digital safes weren’t just unromantic, they were nearly impossible to open without the code.
Taking a deep breath, she reset the lock by spinning clockwise, then started going counterclockwise. She heard the first notch at five. Then she reset and spun again and again until she had five numbers: 2–4–5–63–7. She was certain of them. She was as sure as sure could be.
But what there was no way to know was the order. And five numbers meant five tumblers, five interior wheels, and one-hundred-twenty possible combinations.
All she could do then was grind through them, while sweat beaded up at her forehead and in the hollow of her throat. She was conscious of the party going on, of time slipping away, of the possibility that someone might find her.
Charlie could hear the moment the fence fell and released the locking mechanism. She let out a long, unsteady breath and turned the lever.
It only moved halfway.
Then the digital keypad lit, green and bright and blinking.
Charlie stared at it in disbelief. This safe wasn’t digital or dial; it was both. Her heart rate kicked up and her mouth tasted sour with panic. She had no way to know if there was a timer on entering the code, and she’d be limited in the number of tries. Safes like this offered three, usually, before locking up and setting off an alarm.
Fishing a UV penlight out of the bottom of her backpack, Charlie turned off the lights of her glasses, pushing them up onto her head. Then she shone the penlight onto the keypad.
Very few people wiped down their keys after use. The light revealed the grease of fingertips, limiting the number of options for the combination.
2–3–4–5–6–7.