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There had been a safe, judging from the square-shaped space at the back.

Adam searched the desk and found nothing.

Whatever files or papers Wilcox might have kept here were long gone.

“I do not believe it is here,” Dautre announced.

Adam let out a long breath.

“He said I’d know which room. I was hoping it wasn’t that one.”

He stared at the floor.

“We can go without you,” Vic offered.

“No. Like you said, we shouldn’t split up. I’ll be all right.”

They returned to the stairs. Despite his words, his feet had a harder time moving the lower they went.

Still, he wasn’t alone. Vic was there. Maybe seeing it again would be good for him. Maybe it would help him heal what that day had broken.

He tried to practice Cahill’s trick and hold something good in his memory. He chose a moment from their trip to Cozumel, from the night they’d walked along the beach.

The lingering taste of the fire grew stronger as they reached the basement, chasing away the pleasant memory.

“Pile of kittens,” he muttered. “Pile of kittens.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The sight of the blackened walls, lit by the flashlight’s beam, should have filled him with dark joy, but it didn’t.

He led them to where it would be: that room.

The gurney remained, but nothing else.

The elves had cleared the evidence, perhaps a little too well.

The body was gone. It no longer lay folded on the floor. He couldn’t even tell where it had been.

Adam’s blood, too, had been scrubbed from the steel table and the restraints that had held him down. Magic was more thorough than bleach, and he could sense just a little trace of Argent’s power in the room. She’d seen it. She’d walked here—he could imagine her expression at the sight—then she’d done her job and him a favor, scrubbing any hint of his presence from this place. He had no doubt they’d never find so much as a strand of his hair or a drop of his blood.

A brown paper bag lay where he had.

He didn’t sense any magic on it. He didn’t see a trap. Still, he shook as he reached for it.

“Let me.” Vic stepped forward and cautiously prodded the bag with his flashlight.

Nothing happened and he opened it with the light.

“It looks like it’s just the book.”

Adam didn’t move. He couldn’t.

It wasn’t the memory, the scalpel whispering over his skin. It wasn’t even White, or the surprised, almost comical, look on his face when the sword pierced his body.

It was the sick feeling, the heavy thing in Adam’s chest. He’d felt hatred before, but never like this, never at such a deep, visceral level, and never so thoroughly. If he could he’d toss it like a grenade at Wilcox, incinerate him. He could see how he might bind the man’s heart, stop its beating.