Chapter 1102
The waiter turned. He wasn’t looking at her — he was looking through her. Beneath the silver tray, she caught the dull glint of a suppressor attached to a handgun.
Skye’s breath froze in her throat.
Before she could scream, a heavy mechanical grinding noise echoed from the ceiling. She looked up. Massive steel fire shutters were descending over the main doors and the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Clang.
The room was sealed.
“Security lockdown initiated,” a synthetic voice announced over the PA. “All exits secured.”
The waiter dropped the tray. The glass shattered, the sound sharp and violent in the silence. He raised the gun.
Around the room, five other staff members stopped what they were doing and reached inside their jackets. They pulled out earpieces that had never belonged to the event planners.
These were not police. They were not her security.
“The Master sends his regards,” the first man said, stepping over the broken glass. He wore a silver lapel pin shaped like a serpent devouring its own tail. Ouroboros.
Skye didn’t think. She reacted.
She seized a heavy crystal decanter from the nearest table and hurled it at him. He ducked, and the bottle exploded against the pillar behind him.
In that fraction of a second, Skye kicked off her heels and ran.
“Get her!”
A suppressed shot cut through the air. A flower vase to her left detonated, drenching her in water and petals.
She sprinted toward the service corridor. The main exits were sealed, the windows shuttered. The only way out was through the back of house.
Her bare feet slapped against the cold marble, slipping on spilled champagne. Heavy boots pounded behind her.
Skye burst through the swinging double doors into the kitchen. It was a maze of stainless steel islands and hanging pots.
“Check the exits!” a voice barked from the ballroom.
She swept the room. There was a loading dock door at the far end, but the red light above it signaled a magnetic lock engaged by the lockdown system.
She was trapped.
Skye wrenched a rolling rack of baking sheets across the doorway she had just entered and jammed it in place. It wouldn’t hold for long, but it bought her seconds.
She ran to the industrial gas range and turned every knob she could reach, one by one.
Hiss.
The smell of rotten eggs began flooding the air immediately.
She didn’t ignite it. Not yet.
Skye scanned the room for a weapon — a knife, a cleaver, anything. The kitchen had been cleaned for the event; the knives were locked away.
The doors behind the barricade shuddered violently.
“Open it or we blow it!”
Skye scrambled to the walk-in freezer, hauled open the heavy insulated door, threw herself inside, and pulled it shut, engaging the internal safety latch.
Pitch black. The cold hit her like a wall, biting straight through her thin silk dress.
She pressed herself into the corner behind a stack of frozen beef crates and pulled a silver Zippo lighter from her clutch — a habit she had picked up from Alistair, keeping fire close.