Chapter 7

The ballroom emptied.

Guests filed out in twos and threes, their faces pale, their phones clutched in trembling hands, the silence broken only by the soft sounds of expensive shoes on marble and the distant murmur of police communications. The red lights were still pulsing, the blast doors still standing open, the ruined champagne tower still glittering on the floor like a shattered crown.

Thomas stood at the center of the room and watched them go.

He'd done this before. He'd cleared rooms like this in a dozen cities, in a dozen countries, and he'd watched the same expressions cross a hundred faces: the shock, the denial, the calculation, the fear. It never got easier. But he'd learned, over the decades, that the work didn't require ease. It just required him to be there, to see it done, to make sure the right people left in handcuffs and the wrong people left with their dignity intact enough to testify.

Elena was still standing by the shattered glass.

"Are you all right?" Thomas asked.

She looked at him, and her mouth curved into a smile that was mostly exhaustion. "I'm not sure yet."

"It takes a while," Thomas said. "Sometimes it takes years."

"I've had years."