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Chapter 372: I Know Who You Are
"Why are you smiling?" Zara asked later that night.They were lying on Alexander's narrow bed in the attic, in the dark, with the radiator clanking and hissing under the window. Theo had gone to the library again with a very loud announcement about essays. Zara was curled against his side in one of his old T-shirts, which came down to the middle of her thighs, her bare legs tangled with his and her curls spread across his chest, and she was tracing the faint white line of the knife scar on his forearm with one fingertip."Who says I'm smiling?""I can feel it." She tilted her head up to look at him. "You've been smiling ever since dinner. Ever since Damien made his speech about owning the school. Everyone else was furious. Theo nearly threw a bread roll at him. And you just sat there smiling like you'd heard a joke nobody else understood."Alexander looked up at the slope of the ceiling in the darkness. He felt the weight of her body against him, soft and warm and trusting, and he tho
Chapter 371: The Black Envelopes
Damien Ashcroft was not expelled.Conrad Ashcroft flew in from London the next morning in a private helicopter, landed it on the lawn in front of the East Tower without asking anyone's permission, and spent four hours behind closed doors with the board of governors. When he came out, his face was gray and his son had been suspended for two weeks instead of expelled. The police, after a long conversation with a very expensive Swiss lawyer, had decided that a necklace that was returned unharmed to its owner within a few hours did not amount to grand theft after all. Hugo Lisle was sent home to Edinburgh for the rest of the term."Two weeks," Theo said in disgust, reading the board's notice in the corridor outside the Great Hall. "He frames you for a four-million-euro robbery and gets a two-week holiday. If I'd done that, I'd be in a Swiss prison breaking rocks.""Money doesn't buy innocence," Alexander said. "It just buys time.""That's very wise. Did you get that from a fortune cookie?
Chapter 370: Reverse
The footage was grainy and shot from a strange angle, high up near the ceiling, looking down at the attic room through a tiny lens hidden in the old smoke detector. But it was perfectly clear.At 6:04 a.m. that morning, the door of the attic opened and Alexander walked out, pulling on his jacket. That was when he'd gone down to the kitchen looking for Zara. Theo was still a shapeless lump under his blanket, fast asleep.At 6:11 a.m., the door opened again.A thin figure slipped into the room. He was wearing a dark hoodie with the hood pulled up, but when he turned toward the wardrobe, the light from the small window fell across his face, and every person crowded into Chief Keller's office recognized him at once.Thin face. Pale freckles. Red hair under the edge of the hood."Hugo Lisle," Keller said heavily. "Ashcroft's shadow."On the screen, Hugo crept to the wardrobe, opened it, and slid something small and green and gleaming out of his pocket into the inside of Alexander's winter
Chapter 369: The Search
Chief Keller's office was a cramped stone room on the ground floor of the gatehouse, with a scarred wooden desk, a wall of security monitors flickering in black and white, and a single small window looking out at the iron gates where Alexander had stood bleeding on his first night.Keller sat him in a hard chair in front of the desk and laid the emerald necklace on the blotter between them, coiled in a gleaming green heap. Then he sat down heavily on the other side, folded his thick arms, and looked at Alexander for a long time without saying anything."I've worked at this school for twenty-two years," he said finally. "I've caught Gold kids selling cocaine out of the chapel. I've caught Silver kids blackmailing professors with photographs. I caught a Bronze girl once who'd stolen six Rolex watches from the boys in the East Tower and was selling them to a fence in Milan." He paused. "In twenty-two years, I've never caught an Iron kid stealing anything. Do you know why?""Because we do
Chapter 368: The Necklace
The next morning began, as most mornings at Aldermoor did, with breakfast in the Great Hall, and for the first twenty minutes, nothing happened at all.Alexander sat at the Iron table with Theo and ate his eggs and watched the room. He'd barely slept. He'd lain awake in the attic until four, staring at the three messages from the blocked number, trying to work out who had sent them and what they wanted, and getting nowhere. Whoever it was knew about the waiter, knew about Damien, and knew his phone number, which had been in his possession for less than a week.Damien himself was at the Gold table, laughing loudly with his friends as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn't skied away from Isabella while the mountain fell on her. Isabella was sitting at the far end of the same table with her council, pale but composed in a high-necked black blouse, and she hadn't looked at Damien once.Then she looked at Alexander.It was only for a second, across the length of the hall, but it was a r
Chapter 367: Paid From Inside
The Swiss police came up the valley in three cars and a helicopter, and by noon, the Founders' Weekend was over.They sealed off the ridge above the lake with yellow tape and covered the dead waiter with a gray sheet. They took statements from everyone in the lodge, one by one, in a small office off the main hall, and when they got to Alexander, they kept him there for two hours.He told them the truth, or most of it. He told them he'd recognized the waiter as one of the men who'd attacked his bus above Chur. He told them he'd followed the man up the path, and that the man had confessed to being paid to trigger the avalanche, and that the man had been shot in the head before he could say who'd paid him. He did not tell them about the stone whale in his boot, or about the Founders, or about the computer in the East Tower library. He did not tell them his real name.The detective who interviewed him was a tired, gray-haired woman named Inspector Haller, and she listened to the whole sto
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