Page 47 of The Queen (Masterpiece Duet 2)
Of course Damon doesn’t want me here, where I might get hurt, in defiance of every sacrifice he’s ever made, and it’s a testament to his respect for me that he’s even honoring my request to come.
“I trust you,” I say softly.
I’m the one who pushes the door open, who steps inside first. He strides in after me, immediately moving to block my body with his. This is how it will be, unless I stop him. With him throwing his body in front of mine. He can’t stop himself. I’m the one who has to stop him.
“Lovely,” he mutters.
The place is eerily empty, the front desk unmanned, security stations to the right and left unguarded. There’s a cup of coffee in the waiting area, sitting cold and full beside one of the chairs, as if someone just got up to go to the bathroom and disappeared. It feels like waking up in Avery’s room, but she’s missing. Everyone is missing.
“We should go to the security headquarters,” I say.
He glances at me, curious. “I have his room number from Gabriel.”
It was clear the second I looked at the schematics. How anyone in the outer circle, kept apart, would yearn to be in the center. It would literally make someone insane to sit at the outer edges. They wouldn’t stay there if they had the run of the place.
“He’ll be in the center.”
Damon looks like he considers arguing. And then he nods, once. And that trust takes my breath away. We move in long purposeful strides, directly back into the heart of this dark building. How many people went crazy between these walls? Some were already crazy, but others—others became that way.
Around a corner I come to a halt. There are bodies strewn along the ground, dressed in beige, covered in blood. Oh God. Are these the nurses taken hostage? The other patients he couldn’t control?
Damon steps around their bodies with casual indifference.
As I follow behind him I realize they’re local police. This is what authorities sent in to deal with the situation? More death, more suffering. And for nothing.
We come to another set of glass doors, this one completely blackened with some kind of tinting. There’s writing on the glass. Numbers and symbols scribbled in permanent marker. It’s a proof, I can see that right away. The kind I would love to mull over with a cold cup of coffee.
And the marker sits on the floor directly in front.
“One of his fucking tests,” Damon mutters.
“Then let’s pass it.” I’m not going to waste time. There’s a clock counting down our lives. I lean down to pick up the marker, but Damon grabs it first.
“Tell me what to write and I’ll do it.”
“That’s not how it works. I need to think it through while I solve it.” I reach for the marker, but he holds it up high, like a high-stakes game of monkey-in-the-middle.
“No.”
I glare at him. “Why not?”
“Because it’s probably rigged,” he shouts.
Realization sinks into my stomach, cold and heavy. This glass is probably only tinted one way. The person on the other side of the door can see us. Or maybe they’re just using cameras. Jonathan Scott is still controlling things from behind the curtain.
“I know you want to protect me,” I say softly. “But this proof? He left it for me. That means I need to solve it. This is why I had to come, even if I didn’t know it.”
A muscle ticks in Damon’s jaw. He doesn’t want to let me. He doesn’t even want me to be here, but I’m as much a part of this as he is. Maybe he does see that, because he holds out the marker.
It takes me longer to do the proof because it’s in a domain I haven’t worked in lately—trigonometry. I draw angles and equivalencies beside the door to remind myself of them. Then I solve the proof directly on the door, working line by line.
The strange thing about the proof is that, despite its complexity it’s not meaningful or even very interesting. Almost as if it’s making me think in circles for no reason.
Only when I get to the end do I realize what he’s done.
Sigma for the sum of a sequence.
Psi, the closest greek alphabet letter to W.
Epsilon, epsilon, theta.
He’s spelled out SWEET PEACH, which is what he called me when he hurt me.
Damon swears under his breath. The doors open with a muffled whoosh, and from instinct I jump back. He moves in front of me, but there’s no one on the other side. They must be mechanized. Someone controls them, a puppetmaster—so what does that make me?
My sneakers crunch on glass as we step inside. I look up to see a modern glass light, only half of it remaining in a long jagged edge. It suddenly seems silly to have such an impractical fixture in such an important place. Why are the walls in such a secure place made of glass?
