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Chapter 412: The Offer
Dame Sterling stood at the end of the aisle in her long dark coat with her hand still on the light switch, and she didn't look angry. She looked tired, and old, and very sad."Put the folder down, Miss Moreau," she said gently. "You're not in trouble. None of you are. Sit."There were three old wooden chairs around the reading table. Alexander, Lena and Isabella sat. Dame Sterling walked down the aisle toward them, past the tall metal cabinets, and stopped at the end of the table under the bare bulb and looked down at the open folder with the two names on the last page."I've known about Lukas Daal for eleven years," she said.The archive was very still."When I became headmistress, I read every document in this room. It's what I do. And I found that deed, the same as you." She touched the faded signature with one finger. "Matthias Daal was the last trustee of the old Aldermoor Trust. In 1987, the school was bankrupt. The roofs were falling in. He found twelve families who would buy i
Chapter 411: The Archive
"Teaching," Alexander repeated.It was one o'clock in the morning, and they were in the back corner of the library where nobody ever sat, the same table where they'd found the Meridian fraud in September and the Polish spectrum in November. Lena sat across from him with her coat still on and snow melting in her hair. She'd come straight up the mountain from the church. Her eyes were red and swollen, but her voice was even and very cold."Twenty-three years," she said. "That's what she said. The Steward has been teaching at Aldermoor for twenty-three years.""There are thirty-one professors at this school.""And how many of them have been here for twenty-three years?"Alexander thought about it. Then he pulled Felix's laptop toward him, opened the school directory, and started scrolling. Felix himself was asleep with his head on a stack of books at the end of the table, his bow tie askew."Eight," he said after a few minutes. "Eight professors have been here more than twenty years. Fou
Chapter 410: Grandmother
Lena had imagined this meeting a thousand times.For eight years, she'd imagined it. In the cheap apartments in Lausanne and Lyon and Turin where she'd hidden, under false names, moving every six months. In the long nights when she couldn't sleep because she was listening for footsteps on the stairs. On the mornings when a letter arrived from a federal prison in Connecticut, written in an old woman's shaky hand, always beginning the same way.My dearest Lena.She had imagined walking into a room and seeing her grandmother for the first time, and feeling... what? She'd never known. Anger, maybe. Pity. Something cold and polite. She'd prepared herself for all of them.She had not prepared herself for this.---The village church was small and plain, with whitewashed walls and dark wooden pews and a single stained-glass window above the altar. At noon, it had been full of light. Now, at nine o'clock at night, it was lit only by the candles in the side chapel, and it smelled of cold stone
Chapter 409: Vance
They trained in the boathouse every morning for four days, at five o'clock, before the castle woke up.It was nothing like the basement gym on Central Park West. There were no mats, no heavy bags, no mirrors. There was a cold wooden floor and the long shapes of the racing shells hanging from the rafters and a single lantern, and outside the window, the gray lake and the dark island and the gradual coming of the light over the peaks.Vance didn't care."You fight where you are," he said, on the first morning, circling Alexander in the lantern light with his huge hands loose at his sides. "Not where you want to be. On that island, you're going to be in a tuxedo, in a crowd, in the dark, in a building full of stone stairs and narrow corridors and drunk rich kids. You won't have room to move. You won't have time to think. So we train for that."He pushed a rowing boat across the floor until it blocked half the room, and stacked oars against the walls, and hung a coat over the lantern so t
Chapter 408: Masks
"A white mask," Inspector Haller repeated, staring at the screen of Damien's phone. "At a masquerade ball. Where every single guest will be wearing a mask. On an island in the middle of a frozen lake that can only be reached by boat.""Yes," said Dame Sterling."Wonderful." Haller put the phone down on the desk and rubbed her eyes. "This gets better every week."They were sitting in the headmistress's round white study at the top of the East Tower, on the evening of the tenth of March, four days before the Gala. Haller, Chief Keller, Dame Sterling, Alexander, and Lena, who sat in the window seat with her long legs drawn up and hadn't said a word since she arrived."The island," Haller said. "Tell me about it again.""The Island of Saint Brennan," said Dame Sterling, "is about eight hundred meters from the shore below the castle. There was a monastery there in the twelfth century. The Founders restored it two hundred years ago and use it only once a year, for the Gala. There's a great
Chapter 407: Damien Stands
Damien Ashcroft came back to Aldermoor on a Tuesday evening, three weeks after the glacier, with his left arm in a black sling and his face thinner than it had been in the autumn.He'd spent two weeks in a hospital in Zurich and one at his family's house in Belgravia, where, according to Theo's sources in the East Tower, his father had barely spoken to him. The Greek prosecutor had filed charges against Conrad Ashcroft for the death of the dock worker at Piraeus in the last week of February. The story had been in every newspaper in Europe. Ashcroft Maritime's restructuring, overseen by a quiet Luxembourg fund called Harrow Partners, was still going through, but Conrad himself had been forced off his own board, and there were photographs of him leaving a court in Athens with his hand over his face.Nobody at Aldermoor knew what Damien would do when he came back.He walked into the Great Hall at dinner on Tuesday night, and every head turned.He didn't go to the Gold platform. He didn't
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