Chapter 6
“I’m not terrified of you,” she lied, her breath brushing against his collarbone.
“Yes, you are.” He leaned in, his other hand coming to rest on the brick on her other side, trapping her entirely within his heat. His eyes were dark, intense, and filled with a fierce, conflicted hunger. “And the worst part is... I don't think you want to be.”
Talia swallowed hard. The air between them was electric, thick with an attraction that had been building since the moment he snapped his chalk line across her stage. She could feel every inch of him—the broadness of his shoulders blocking out the room, the scent of cedar and cold rain, the sheer, undeniable reality of a man who saw right through every wall she had ever built.
“Parker,” she breathed, her hands coming up to rest against his chest, ostensibly to push him away, but her fingers curled into the soft cotton of his shirt instead, gripping him.
He looked down at her lips, his jaw tightening as if fighting a war with himself.
“You shouldn't look at me like that, Talia,” he warned softly, his voice rough with restraint. “I’m an inspector. I have a job to do.”
“Then why haven't you called the city council?” she whispered, tilting her chin up, her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs. “Why are you still here with me at midnight?”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Because I wanted to believe you.”
He leaned down, closing the remaining distance between their faces. His lips hovered a fraction of an inch above hers, so close she could feel the heat radiating from them, so close that a single breath would seal them together. Talia closed her eyes, her resistance crumbling into dust, waiting for the impact of his mouth against hers, wanting it with an intensity that terrified her more than any building code in the world.
His thumb found the soft skin of her jaw again, tilting her face up, his touch burning like fire against the winter draft.
“I wanted to believe your father was just an eccentric old man who loved this theatre,” Parker whispered against her lips.
Then, with agonizing slowness, he pulled back.
Talia’s eyes fluttered open, feeling abruptly, violently bereft.
Parker hadn't moved away entirely, but the spell was broken. His face had hardened, the engineer reasserting control over the man. He reached down to his belt, unhooking a digital depth gauge and a slim steel ruler.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice shaking.
Without answering, Parker knelt down on the dusty cedar boards right at her feet. He slid the thin steel ruler beneath the gap in the padlocked door, sliding it along the bottom edge where the hydraulic cement had degraded into white chalk.
“Parker, stop—”
“This isn't a limestone collapse,” Parker said, his voice flat, completely devoid of emotion now. He pulled the ruler back out and checked the digital gauge. “There’s no air exchange. The ambient temperature behind this door is fifty-eight degrees. That’s earth temperature, Talia. Deep earth.”
He stood up, towering over her again, but the heat between them had turned to ice. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket—the load calculation sheet he had been working on in the green room.
“I ran the deflection ratios on the main auditorium while you were making coffee,” Parker said, holding the paper out between them. “Do you know what the numbers say?”
Talia stared at the paper, unable to speak.
“The load doesn't match the building,” he said, every word hitting her like a hammer blow. “A building this size, with this timber footprint, should have a total foundation mass of roughly one hundred and forty tons. The seismic resonance I clocked this morning shows two hundred and ten tons concentrated entirely beneath the stage.”
He stepped back from the brick wall, finally giving her room to breathe, though the air felt poisoned in her lungs.
“Someone added seventy tons of dense, solid mass beneath that floor in November of ninety-four,” Parker said, his voice dropping into a register of terrifying precision. “Not to reinforce the proscenium. Not to fix a dry rot issue. You don't add seventy tons of marine-grade aggregate unless you are trying to entomb something so deep that no one will ever dig it up.”
He looked down at the padlocked door, then slowly turned his gray, uncompromising eyes back to Talia.
“Your father didn't just falsify a maintenance log, Talia,” Parker said softly, his voice cutting through the silent room like a razor. “He forged the entire structural history of this building. And you’ve been standing on top of his lie for three years.”
The blood drained completely from Talia’s face. She stood pinned against the rough brick wall of the costume shop, surrounded by dead men’s clothes, watching the only man who had ever made her heart race look at her not as a woman he wanted to kiss, but as an accomplice to an unforgivable crime.
“Parker...” she whispered, but the word died in her throat.
Parker pocketed his tools, his face set in stone.
“Get some sleep, Miss Vance,” he said, turning his back on her and walking toward the aisle of shadows. “Monday morning is coming. And when that drill hits the stone, we’re both going to see what Arthur Vance was so desperate to hide.”
By Saturday evening, the Starlight felt less like a theatre and more like a decompression chamber before a blast.
A wet November sleet battered the stained-glass transom above the foyer, rattling the old lead came in steady, nervous pulses. Talia had spent six hours scrubbing grease from the brass stage tracks, scrubbing until her palms were raw and her fingernails bled, doing anything to avoid looking toward the open green room door.
Parker hadn’t left. He had unrolled a cot in the corner of his makeshift office, living on black coffee, cold apples, and the relentless scratch of his mechanical pencil against grid paper. Every time she passed the hallway, she felt the sheer, magnetic weight of his presence like a change in barometric pressure.
At eight o’clock, the building shuddered.
It was a deep, resonant *groan*, echoing from eighty feet above the proscenium arch. A single rusted counterweight cable slipped on its iron sheave, ringing out into the dark house like a cracked church bell.
Talia dropped her rag, her heart leaping into her throat.
Before she reached the stage wings, Parker was already there. He had thrown on his work harness, heavy steel carabiners clinking against his thighs, a headlamp strapped over his unruly dark hair.
“The gridiron,” he said without turning around. He was already at the foot of the vertical iron ladder that disappeared into the shadows of the fly loft. “The settling foundation is pulling the secondary arbor off its track. If that counterweight slips its cradle, three hundred pounds of cast iron is coming straight through the floorboards.”
“I’m coming with you,” Talia said, stepping onto the first iron rung.
Parker paused, looking down over his shoulder. The beam of his headlamp caught the fierce, unyielding set of her jaw. In the shadows, his eyes were storm-dark and intensely guarded, still carrying the bruised heat of the near-miss in the costume shop the night before.
