Page 91 of Legacy Elite

"It sticks. I shove it. I've shoved it every day for eight weeks."

"So it was shut this morning."

"It's always shut."

She writes that down.

Declan comes back from checking the bathroom and the little bedroom and the wardrobe with his jaw set, and says, "Nothing," and Renzo is going round the sitting room touching nothing and looking at everything.

"Your laptop's here," Renzo says. "There's cash in the bowl by the door — is that yours?"

"Yeah."

"How much?"

"Forty? Thirty?"

"It's forty." He steps back. "So they didn't take anything."

"Why does that matter?"

"Because if they'd taken something," Renzo says, "it would be a burglary."

The door opens. Torres comes in fast, because Sophia's obviously found him, and he crosses the room to me and puts both hands on my arms and looks at my face first — checks me, the way he did in a cottage in April — and only when he's satisfied does he look past me at the bedroom door.

He goes to look.

And then Torres goes completely, absolutely still.

That's what scares me. Not shouting. He doesn't say a word for about four seconds, standing in my bedroom doorway with his back to me, and every line of him has gone quiet in a way I have never seen and don't like at all.

"Who was in here," he says.

"We don't know."

"Who has keys?"

"Security, presumably—"

"That's not what I asked." He turns around. "Who has keys, Jess. Not who's supposed to. Housekeeping? Maintenance? Does the desk have a master? Is there a spare in an office somewhere in a box with everyone's name on it?"

I don't know.

"Right," Torres says.

He goes out into the corridor. I hear him at the far end, then the stairwell door, then nothing, and he comes back three minutes later and says, "The fire door on the north stair doesn't latch. You can pull it open from outside if you know to lift it."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I checked it the day I moved in," he says.

Falken arrives with two of the academy security staff and Voss about ten minutes later.

They're good. I'll give them that. They're careful with the room, they photograph everything before anyone touches it, the card goes into a sleeve, and one of them starts on the access records on a tablet while the other walks the corridor with Torres, who has apparently appointed himself.

The findings, over the next hour, are almost entirely negative.

No forced entry to my room. The lock's fine. The frame's fine.