Chapter 6
"You flatter yourself," you growl, though your knuckles are turning white against the edge of the table.
"Do I?" Nathan smiles, and the sheer audacity of it takes your breath away. "Then why are you leaning so close, Detective? Are you going to hit me? Or are you going to arrest me all over again?"
The tension snaps like a dry branch.
You reach out, your left hand fisting into the collar of his tailored shirt, wrenching him upward. The iron chain pulls taut with a sharp, violent *clang* that echoes off the concrete walls. You drag him toward you until his breath falls warm and uneven against your lips.
He doesn't resist. In fact, his eyes widen with a dark, glittering hunger that mirrors your own sick fascination.
"Don't confuse my obsession with affection, Sterling," you whisper savagely, your thumb pressing hard against the hollow of his throat, feeling the rapid, erratic jump of his carotid pulse. He lied. His pulse isn't seventy-four. It’s pounding. "I tore my life apart to catch you because men like you need to be broken. You think you're a god above the law? I’m going to watch the jury take your freedom, piece by piece, until you have nothing left but a concrete cell and the memory of my voice."
Nathan doesn't flinch. His lips part slightly, his breath hitching as your grip tightens on his collar.
"God, Christian," he murmurs, his voice thick with a raw, undeniable ache that makes your stomach plummet into freefall. "You look so beautiful when you stop pretending to be a saint."
A strange sound tears through the air.
It isn't a voice. It’s a pitch—a low, oscillating hum that vibrates through your molars.
A sharp, needle-like pain pierces the base of your skull. You flinch, your hand involuntarily loosening on his shirt. You blink rapidly as the room seems to lose its saturation for a fraction of a second, the gray paint of the walls bleaching out into a flat, sterile white before snapping back to dull beige.
You stumble back a step, letting go of him. Nathan settles back into his chair with a soft rustle of fabric, his chest heaving, his collar wrinkled from your fist.
"What was that?" you demand, pressing a palm to the back of your neck. The skin feels hot, feverish.
Nathan adjusts his lapel calmly, his chains rattling. "What was what?"
"That noise. The ventilation."
Nathan listens for a moment, tilting his ear toward the ceiling. The heavy iron vent in the upper corner produces nothing more than the standard, wheezing rattle of stale air. "I don't hear anything, Christian. Perhaps your blood pressure is catching up to mine."
You turn toward the two-way mirror.
Above the glass, the round digital wall clock glows in bright red LED segments: `04:12`.
You stare at it.
The colon between the hours and minutes blinks. Once. Twice. Then the seconds indicator freezes, stutters, and the display glitches into an illegible scatter of red dashes before snapping back to `04:12`.
You shake your head violently, trying to clear the fog gathering behind your eyes. *Dehydration,* you tell yourself. *Severe sensory deprivation. You haven't had a proper meal since Tuesday. Your optic nerve is misfiring from looking at black-and-white documents under fluorescent light.*
"You're shaking, Detective," Nathan points out. His tone has shifted—the mocking edge is gone, replaced by something dangerously soft, almost gentle. "Sit down. Have some water."
"I don't need your advice," you snap, pulling your chair out with an aggressive screech across the linoleum and dropping heavily into it. "We aren't finished."
"No," Nathan agrees softly, his eyes never leaving yours. "We certainly aren't."
You pull your notebook toward you, forcing your trembling fingers to grip the black rollerball pen. You need facts. You need mechanics. You need the rigid, unyielding structure of reality to anchor you against this creeping, inexplicable vertigo.
"The window rig," you say, forcing your voice into a monotone. "Let's talk about how you planned to breach the penthouse glass."
Nathan rests his chin on his linked hands, watching you like a hawk observing a wounded rabbit. "Thorne uses twelve-millimeter laminated polycarbonate with a PVB interlayer. Ballistic-rated to withstand a .50 caliber round at point-blank range. You can't shoot through it, and you can't cut it with a diamond wheel without triggering the acoustic shock sensors embedded in the frame."
"A diamond wheel is an amateur's tool," you say, flipping a page in your notebook. "You didn't cut the glass. You compromised the structural seals."
Nathan raises an eyebrow. "Go on."
"Cryogenic spray," you say, looking up to meet his gaze. "A targeted blast of liquid nitrogen along the perimeter gasket to freeze the polymer seal past its glass-transition temperature, followed immediately by a localized thermal shock using a micro-thermite strip. The rapid contraction and expansion creates micro-fractures in the mounting frame, allowing the entire pane to be lifted inward without shattering the acoustic resonance envelope."
Nathan stares at you for a long, silent moment.
The silence stretches, heavy and electric, until the only sound in the room is the wet, rhythmic ticking of the wall clock.
"Fascinating," Nathan says slowly. "Ingenious, really. But there's a fatal flaw in that calculation, Christian."
Your brow furrows. You feel a prickle of irritation at the base of your spine. "There is no flaw. I ran the thermal dynamic models myself with the forensics lab yesterday."
"Did you factor in the positive-pressure ventilation system?" Nathan asks, his voice dropping into that cool, analytical cadence that makes you feel like an apprentice being questioned by a master. "Thorne's penthouse maintains a positive interior air pressure of thirty pascals to prevent airborne contaminants. The instant the structural seal fails, three hundred cubic meters of air escape through the perimeter seam at high velocity. The thermite combustion products—the smoke, the magnesium flare—would be blown back out into the cradle, right into the operator’s face, triggering the exterior thermal cameras on the adjacent spire."
You freeze.
Your mind races, frantically recalculating the airflow variables. The pressure differential. The thirty pascals.
God dammit. He’s right.
A cold drop of sweat traces a slow path down your spine. In your reconstruction, you had assumed neutral pressure. You hadn't accounted for Thorne's paranoia extending to chemical filtration.
"You'd blind yourself," you murmur, your pen hovering over the paper. "The backdraft would illuminate the cradle against the dark sky like a beacon."
"Exactly," Nathan says softly, leaning forward, his gray eyes shining with an unnerving, predatory warmth. "So how would an artist solve that, Christian? If you were me... how would you neutralize the pressure before blowing the seal?"
You stare at the blueprint. The ink lines seem to vibrate slightly against the white paper.
"The HVAC damper," you whisper, the answer assembling itself in your mind with the terrifying fluidity of a falling row of dominoes. "The mechanical room on the sixty-third floor. You don't blow the seal until you cycle the secondary exhaust fan into reverse. You create an artificial vacuum in the bedroom corridor for forty seconds."
Nathan’s breath hitches.
He smiles. It is a slow, radiant thing that sends an icy chill straight through your chest.
