Chapter 11

  The café was aggressively charming. Brick walls, industrial light fixtures, a blackboard menu that tried way too hard to be clever. I chose a corner booth with a view of the door and two exits. Just in case.

  Richard arrived six minutes late, which for him might as well have been a coded message. He was usually early. Always poised, always ten steps ahead.

  But today, he looked… almost normal. Tailored wool coat. Crisp shirt. Muscular thighs for days.

  And kind of off – some stubble, a hair out of place and a vague air of distraction. And a tie. A very specific tie.

  Dark navy, patterned with tiny gold crowns. Not cartoonish. Regal. The kind of detail that seemed harmless until it wasn’t.

  Exactly like the tie Corwin Thorne wore at the museum. I blinked. I think I almost gagged.

  He noticed. “Something wrong?”

  I gestured to his tie. “That’s… new.”

  He glanced down like he’d forgotten he was wearing it. “Oh. Yes. Picked it up this week. Why, you like it?”

  “It’s just… museumy.”

  He smiled faintly. “Do you not approve of my fashion evolution?”

  “Only when it syncs up with guys who talk to paintings and quote ghosts.” The smile tightened. “Ah. Him again. Why don’t you like Corwin? He’s helping us.”

  “Corwin Thorne,” I said. “He cornered me yesterday. Said some weird stuff. About the Queen. About the journal.”

  Richard sat across from me and folded his hands like he was preparing for a deposition. “Sadie. You’ve been through a lot. It’s normal for things to feel… disjointed. To feel paranoid”

  “You think I imagined his threat? It was pretty clear, even to a dummy like me!?”

  “I think the Gardner has a long history of theatrical docents and underpaid eccentrics. You want me to talk to someone about him, I will. But—”

  “But?”

  He sighed. “You’ve been reading too much into everything. A mirror glitch, a dramatic line in the journal, and suddenly we’re rewriting Tudor history with blood ink and phoenixes.”

  I stared at him. “You were the one who gave me the Vatican dossier, who set me on this path. What the fuck, guy!”

  “I gave you context. You’re the one who’s trying to connect it to cursed glass and haunted interns.”

  “That man knew about the book. He tried to touch it.” “And did he succeed?”

  “No. Tudor got between us.”

  Richard tilted his head. “You’re saying the cat intervened.” “I’m saying I’m not crazy.”

  He leaned forward slightly. “Sadie. I’m not accusing you of anything. But I need you to hold your ground. Don’t let grief or fear spiral into fiction.”

  My hands curled around my coffee cup. “You sound like someone who’s never seen what I’ve seen.”

  “I’ve seen worse.”

  “Then why don’t you believe me?” That stopped him. Just for a moment.

  “I believe something is happening,” he said quietly. “But I don’t believe Corwin Thorne is part of it. He. Is. Our.Friend”

  He paused, then added, “I’ve known him nearly a decade. He’s loyal. Detail-obsessed, yes, and maybe a little too proud of his seniority badge—but he’s steady. He keeps getting passed over for advancement, and he still shows up, still does the work. Not the type to lash out. Not like that.”

  I looked down at his tie.

  Gold crowns. Just like the docent’s.

  He followed my gaze, but didn’t flinch. I sat back. “Right.”

  “Sadie—”

  “No. It’s fine.” I grabbed my bag and slid out of the booth. “Thanks for breakfast.” “I didn’t buy you anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  And I left before I could ask the real question burning in my throat: Whose side are you really on?

  After a not breakfast with Richard, I needed someone who didn’t look like he stepped out of a haunted Renaissance painting and made trust feel like a coin toss.

  So I called Nina.

  She answered on the second ring with, “Please tell me you’re standing in front of something cursed.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But it’s only 9:45.”

  We met at a hole-in-the-wall café near the Commons with thrifted chairs and cold brew in flasks. Nina ordered shakshuka. I got something gluten-free and green and immediately regretted it.

  The conversation was effortless. A little sharp, a little weird, all warm edges.

  She told me about her thesis again—this time with more swearing—and how her advisor once called her “excessively speculative” in a margin note. I confessed that I was adopted, hated group projects, and once tried to catalog every spell reference in Shakespeare for a paper I never turned in.

  She didn’t blink at any of it.

  By the time we left, I’d laughed more in two hours than I had in a month.

  “Thanks,” I said, pulling my coat tighter as we walked back toward Tremont. “For… not making me feel insane.”

  Nina bumped my arm with hers. “You’re not insane. You’re just paying attention.” I reached the museum just as the doors opened.

  The Gardner Museum always feels like something remembering itself.

  The air was colder than it had been all day. The courtyard looked dimmer. Like the light

  didn’t want to touch it.

  I didn’t ask for permission.

  The badge Richard gave me still worked. I scanned it at the staff entrance behind the courtyard, bypassed the gift shop and the G Café (note to self, get some wine) , and slipped down a narrow corridor marked ARCHIVES – STAFF ONLY. The kind of hallway where old secrets go to ferment.

  My shoes were too loud. The walls were lined with old photographs and donor plaques. I passed a print of a nun holding a gilded book and thought: Same, girl. She looked nervous. Like even the holy knew when something was wrong.

  At the far end, I waited. One of the younger interns exited the archive room carrying a box of faded gallery guides. I offered him a smile and a shrug like I was definitely supposed to be here. He didn’t even glance at my badge.

  When the door clicked shut behind me, I was alone. And it was perfect.

  The archive room was a time capsule.

  Dim yellow sconces. Long, narrow shelves stuffed with aged folios, dusty file boxes, and brittle envelopes tied shut with string. The air smelled like ink, dried roses, and something metallic underneath—like old keys or dried blood.

  In one corner, a black dehumidifier hummed quietly. Another corner held a battered leather chair next to a wheeled cart of books marked DO NOT RESHELVE. The silence was devotional.

  And in the center of it all, a small reading table under a single hanging bulb, like an interrogation lamp for ghosts.

  Tudor was already inside.

  Don’t ask me how. He must’ve slipped through a side door or materialized through sheer force of feline will. He hopped onto the table and curled around my bag like he was guarding it.

  “I wish you could talk to me,” I whispered, scratching behind his ears. “Preferably in

  Latin. Or just tell me who the hell to trust.” Because I didn’t know anymore.

  I was a Library Sciences major. I should’ve been back in my apartment right now, hunched over finals with a mug of stale chai and a half-dead plant named Ophelia. Instead I was wandering cursed archives with a possibly psychic cat, dodging a museum docent who made my skin crawl, and falling into weird emotional gravity with a man who looked like a Viking and talked like a Vatican ghostbuster.

  But sure. Everything was fine.

  I pulled a few archive indexes. One on museum acquisitions (1890–1925). One labeled INTERNAL CORRESPONDENCE – RESTORATION FILES.

  Hours passed.

  The more I dug, the more the files stopped sounding like museum business and started sounding like campfire stories no one wanted to admit believing.

  One slip of paper—barely more than a margin note—described the Ash Banquet of 1604. Some masque at James I’s court where three nobles dropped dead days later. The note just said: Her hair was flame, her breath was smoke. I pictured Elizabeth—or whatever she’d become—walking among powdered wigs like a spark in dry grass.

  Another file mentioned a ship’s log from the 1620s. Cargo returned from the Americas, all of it scorched, though the ship itself never caught fire. The sailors called her “the Phoenix Lady.” Of course they did.

  There was also a half-burned letter out of Denmark, 1642, a diplomat’s wife writing about a “Lady of Ashes” who demanded a midnight audience. A week later the wife drowned. Only she didn’t look drowned—her body showed burns. The letter cut off mid-sentence, like the paper itself had been afraid to finish.

  Then a Florentine account tied her to the Great Fire of London, of all things. Something about a Medici mirror shattered in 1666, the year half the city went up. Coincidence? Maybe. But the archivist who scribbled it in the file didn’t sound convinced.

  A sketchbook fragment from the Restoration showed a crowned woman with no shadow. The note said, “portrait destroyed by order of Charles.”

  By the eighteenth century, she’d turned into folklore—the Glass Nun of Bavaria, a Tudor-dressed woman staring back only from windows, never in person. The nuns wrote it down like they were keeping score against the devil.

  And the creepiest one? A clipping about the Boston Fire of 1872. Witnesses swore a red-haired woman in white walked calmly down Summer Street while the city burned. The annotation in the Gardner’s file just said: She feeds on the embers.

  I sat back, goosebumps racing over my skin. Myths, scandals, urban legends—take your pick. But all of them pointed to the same impossible thing: Elizabeth hadn’t gone quietly.

  I was about to put the manual away when Tudor hissed.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  A sharp, alert sound—not scared, but warning. He jumped down, fur bristling, and stared at the wall to my left.

  Nothing moved.

  But one of the cabinets I was sure had been shut… now stood ajar. I swallowed. Hard.

  Inside: a folder. Mislabeled. Or maybe not labeled at all. I pulled it open, slow. Tucked inside was a crude sketch. Pencil. Sloppy, but familiar.

  The mirror.

  The one I’d seen ripple in the Dutch Room.

  Above it, drawn faintly in gold ink, was a small mark. A phoenix.

  And just beneath that, in handwriting I didn’t recognize:

  “She burns, but she remembers.”

  I barely had time to tuck the letter fragment and the sketch into my bag when I heard it: Footsteps.

  Measured. Slow. Approaching from the hallway.

  Tudor leapt up onto my shoulder like a shoulder demon with claws.

  I stepped away from the table and waited behind the door, barely breathing. Through the narrow glass, I saw him:

  Corwin Thorne.

  Walking the hallway with deliberate calm, like he took strolls past archives for fun.

  He passed the door, then paused. Turned. We locked eyes.

  He didn’t speak.

  He just smiled.

  Like he already knew what I’d found.

  I didn’t breathe until Corwin Thorne walked away.

  Even then, I waited another sixty seconds, hand still on the edge of the reading table, just in case he doubled back.

  He didn’t.

  I slipped out the side hallway and found the back stairwell down to the first floor. Tudor stayed pressed to my shoulder, tense and vibrating.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “Me too.”

  The air felt colder now. I told myself it was just late. That the museum heating cycled down at dusk. That it wasn’t because I’d just stared into the eyes of a man who might’ve trapped something—someone—inside a marble crypt.

  I was halfway to the staff exit when the alarm went off.

  A high, whining sound—too loud for a space that dignified. Visitors flinched. A security guard shouted something unintelligible. Somewhere in the distance, a phone started ringing.

  I froze.

  Tudor hissed again, low this time, as if whatever it was had just crossed into range. Then I heard it: a scream.

  Not dramatic. Not staged. Real. Wet. Human.

  I moved toward it.

  ---

  The courtyard had been cleared by the time I got there.

  Security cordoned it off with velvet rope—like that would stop anything that actually wanted in. EMTs crouched beside the reflecting pool, which was now full of red.

  There was a body.

  Covered in a museum tarp. Half-draped. Just enough to keep the tourists from vomiting, but not enough to hide the unmistakable shape of a throat slashed open.

  Blood had stained the tile and leaked into the shallow water, darkening it like ink in bathwater.

  One of the EMTs was shaking his head. Another was pressing a soaked cloth to his face, gagging.

  I stood behind the rope. No one stopped me. I probably looked like part of the exhibit— frozen, wide-eyed, staring like something had snapped inside me.

  Because it had.

  Not just from the body.

  But because I saw Corwin again.

  He was standing across the courtyard, maybe ten feet from the EMTs, completely relaxed.

  Talking to a couple of museum guests. Smiling. As if nothing had happened. He didn’t look shaken. Or concerned. Or even curious.

  He looked… relieved.

  And for the briefest second, as the stretcher passed him, he turned his head. Not to the body.

  He looked directly at me and nodded.

  I backed away from the rope, my mouth dry, heart hammering too hard against my ribs. None of this was an accident.

  The mirrors. The blood. The journal. The woman in the glass. Something ancient was waking up.

  Or maybe she already had.

  I glanced down at my coat where the journal still rested against my side like a second pulse.

  Then I looked up—and locked eyes with Richard.

  He stood just outside the courtyard doors, silhouetted in the frame. His face unreadable. He didn’t move.

  Neither did I.

  Because suddenly, I didn’t know which of us was watching the other.

  They herded us to the class room on the first floor—the education space with the paint-spattered sinks and long butcher-block tables on rolling legs. The room smelled like gouache and lemon cleaner and the faint, clean rot of old paper. Someone had dragged in a portable heater that ticked like a troubled metronome. The courtyard was a green-black square through the windows, palms ghosting the glass as if the plants were trying to listen.

  Museum staff and visitors crowded together in clumps: a couple in matching pea coats whispering into each other’s scarves; two students with sketchbooks clutched like shields; a guard with his hands clasped so hard his knuckles went bone-white. Corwin stood near the supply cabinets, immaculate as ever, a polite crease between his eyebrows, the kind that says I am concerned without committing to an emotion.

  Tape went up. Radios crackled. Then the suits arrived.

  Two of them. The taller one with silver in his beard and a winter-coat weight that didn’t quite come off his shoulders even after he shrugged out of it. The other—compact, wired-tight, eyes that scanned like barcodes. They flipped badges so fast the room only caught the flash of letters and a seal.

  “Special Agent Halvorsen,” said the tall one, voice steady. He gestured to the open tables. “We’ll get you out as quickly as we can. Please have identification ready.”

  The compact one didn’t smile. “Agent Ruiz.” No extra syllables.

  They ran it like they’d done it a thousand times. Photos taken of IDs, names read into a recorder, two quiet questions each—“Where were you when you heard the alarm? Anyone with you?”—and people were thanked and released with the gentle promise that their cooperation was appreciated and the sharper reminder that they might be contacted again. Most of the crowd dissolved in relieved murmurs, shoes squeaking on the studio floor, the energy in the room settling into an awkward hush.

  We weren’t released.

  It ended up with three of us still there: me, Richard, and Corwin.

  Halvorsen looked at Corwin like a teacher picking the first volunteer. “Mr. Thorne? You’re staff.”

  “Docent,” Corwin said, lightly. “Though ‘witness’ seems the role of the day.”

  Halvorsen’s eyes didn’t flicker. “Let’s talk somewhere quieter. The greenhouse.”

  Corwin’s mouth twitched at the corner like he approved of the setting choice. “Of course.”

  They left together, Halvorsen’s hand close to but not quite on Corwin’s elbow. Corwin glanced back once. I couldn’t read the look. It wasn’t gratitude.

  Which left Agent Ruiz in the studio with me and Richard, and the heater that kept ticking like a bomb that had decided to be polite.

  “Ms. Warren,” Ruiz said, checking a tablet. “And… ‘Richard.’ No last name.” Her mouth almost curved. “That’s cute.”

  I felt Richard’s posture change beside me—stillness that wasn’t calm.

  Ruiz stood across from us, feet braced, hands in her blazer pockets like she was at ease and ready to strike. She didn’t offer chairs.

  “Let’s make this simple,” she said. “Who are you to each other?”

  “I’m me,” I said, because sometimes my mouth is a reflex. “He’s himself.”

  Ruiz looked at me like she’d opened a drawer labeled ‘Sarcasm’ and found it appropriately stocked. “Why are you here tonight, Ms. Warren?”

  “Research,” I said, then immediately wished I’d chosen a less honest word.

  “At a private museum, after hours, with a homicide scene taped off downstairs.”

  “Coincidence,” I said, too fast.

  She let the silence expand until I could hear the heater tick and the staccato whisper of someone’s radio down the hall. “Did you know the victim?”

  I swallowed. “No.”

  “He was a frequently arrested male prostitute,” Ruiz said, clinical as a lab report. “Picked up along the Fens. You didn’t recognize him?”

  I felt heat rise under my collar, not from guilt but from the way she said it, like the label ate the person and left only the record. “I didn’t know him,” I said. “But that description is… reductive.”

  “Reductive is useful,” Ruiz said. “Who brought you here tonight?”

  “No one ‘brought’ me.”

  “Did you plan to meet anyone?”

  I flicked a glance at Richard. He gave me nothing but blue eyes and a sense of steady gravity.

  Ruiz tracked the glance. “Mr. Richard—with no last name—are you her chaperone? Handler? Date?”

  “Bodyguard,” Richard said, mild. “Tonight, at least.”

  Ruiz’s eyebrows went up a precise millimeter. “Funny. Because if you were private security, you’d have offered your credentials when we walked in. If you were off-duty law enforcement, you wouldn’t be standing on my crime scene without an introduction, and if you were nobody, you’d be outside with the rest of the nobodies.”

  Richard didn’t bite. “And yet here we are.”

  Her gaze swung back to me. “Ms. Warren, why this museum?”

  “Because I like art,” I said, which was somehow both true and the least true thing I’d ever said.

  “Because you like art,” she repeated, deadpan. “And because your search history says you also like archives. And missing paintings. And the word ‘Regina.’” She tapped the tablet. “We have warrants, Ms. Warren. The internet isn’t a diary.”

  I felt the floor tilt, just a little. My palms went slick. The heater ticked again and I wanted to punch it.

  Ruiz took a half-step closer. Not looming—just entering my radius. “So let me reframe. A young man is dead. Your timing is strange. Your company is stranger. You show up after hours, you have a habit of standing near fires, and your phone suggests you’ve been looking for a crowned ghost.” Her voice dropped into something conversational and razor-thin. “Did you know the victim Ms. Warren? Did he approach you? Did he approach your friend?”

  It took me a second to understand she meant Richard. “No,” I said, too loud, too brittle. “And if he had, we wouldn’t—” I bit down on the rest. Shame flushed up my throat even though I had nothing to be ashamed of. It was the way she was asking, the practiced insinuation that made my bones feel borrowed.

  Ruiz clocked the reaction. “People who don’t answer direct questions always have reasons.”

  “Agent,” Richard said, quiet as a held door, “you’re done speaking to her like that.”

  Her head turned, the way a hawk turns—a single, precise motion. “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve asked your questions. She’s answered. You’re now picking at her to see what bleeds.”

  Ruiz’s smile this time was real and not nice. “You must be fun in depositions.”

  “I’m not leaving her,” he said, preempting a command she hadn’t voiced yet.

  “I didn’t ask you to.” She stared him down. “But I am asking who you are. Last name included.”

  Richard exhaled, a controlled thing. Then he reached inside his coat and took out a slim black wallet. He didn’t flourish it; he opened it like a book in a library—respectful, exact—and held it so the light caught the raised seal.

  Ruiz leaned in without stepping closer. Her eyes moved once, left to right, as if scanning, then again, slower. Whatever she read was not the usual. The set of her mouth changed by a quarter-inch.

  “Who issued that?” she asked softly.

  “You can call the number,” Richard said. “They won’t tell you anything helpful. But they will confirm what you need confirmed.”

  She didn’t take the bait. “Department of Justice liaison, international coordination,” she read, not quite reading aloud. “Clearance codes. Hm.”

  “Now,” Richard said, voice still velvet, “you can continue this line of questioning with both of us present, or you can request a formal interview with counsel. But you will not isolate her, and you will not attempt to intimidate her with a dead boy’s record.”

  For a heartbeat, I thought Ruiz might actually laugh—not because anything was funny, but because being challenged seemed to amuse her. Instead she tucked her tablet under one arm and smoothed an invisible wrinkle from her blazer.

  “Stay reachable,” she said to me. Then to Richard: “You too, liaison.” The word was the opposite of a compliment.

  “Always,” Richard said.

  Ruiz tilted her head, birdlike again. “Don’t leave Boston without telling us.”

  “We hadn’t planned to,” he said.

  “Plans change,” she said, and for the first time let a little of the steel show. “Here’s what won’t: we’re not on the same team. Don’t get in my way again.”

  Footsteps in the hall. Halvorsen returned alone, the greenhouse damp still clinging to his coat. He looked between us, at Ruiz’s unreadable face, at the way I was standing with my hands inside my sleeves like I was trying to keep all my heat in one place.

  “Mr. Thorne is assisting us further,” he said, which was a sentence that meant nothing and everything. “You’re free to go. For now.”

  Ruiz didn’t glance at him. “I told them to stay reachable.”

  “Good,” Halvorsen said, and then to us, with the politeness of a door closing, “Good evening.”

  They left together, and it was strange—Halvorsen’s bulk, Ruiz’s blade—two halves of a machine built for extracting compliance. The studio felt bigger without them and somehow colder.

  I realized I was shaking only when Richard’s hand hovered near my elbow and didn’t touch. He never touched without asking.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “No,” I said, truth ringing in my teeth. “But also yes. But mostly no.”

  He nodded. “We should go.”

  “Are they going to make it miserable if we do?”

  “It’s going to be miserable either way,” he said, and there was a thread of apology in it that almost undid me.

  We stepped into the hallway. Somewhere below us, a radio crackled, and the building seemed to exhale, long and tired.

  At the turn toward the stairs, I glanced back into the studio. The heater ticked one last time and went silent.

  Halvorsen and Ruiz had given us the kind of freedom that comes with a leash. Enemies, then. Not the dramatic, cape-swishing kind. Worse. The patient kind. The kind who write things down.

  Richard fell into step beside me, not touching, exactly there. I told myself it was only the draft from the courtyard that made my skin feel suddenly cold.

  I didn’t go straight to bed when I got back to the hotel.

  I turned on every light first. Closet, bathroom, hallway. Even the tiny one over the microwave.

  Tudor did a perimeter check and then took up position on the window sill like a gargoyle. He hadn’t made a sound since we left the museum, but his tail still twitched every few seconds.

  I dropped my coat, kicked off my boots, and stared at the mirror. Not into it—at it.

  It was one of those generic hotel room mirrors, full-length, bolted to the wall in a frame meant to look expensive. But tonight, it felt like it was watching me back.

  I edged closer.

  There was no ripple this time. No flicker. But the reflection looked just a little too still. Like the version of me in the glass was holding her breath.

  I forced myself to reach out and wipe the surface. The glass fogged instantly.

  Even though I hadn’t touched water. Even though there was no steam. And then, in the middle of the fog, a message appeared:

  “Did you see it too?”

  I jerked my hand back. The words began to vanish—but not before I noticed that the handwriting looked exactly like the journal’s.

  I crossed the room, dug the journal out of my bag, and opened it.

  Blank.

  I flipped through every page, palms damp. Nothing. Then I closed the cover.

  The “E” on the front shimmered. Just for a moment.

  ---

  At that moment… My phone buzzed. Nina.

  You alive? Want a drink? There’s a rooftop bar at your hotel. I’m craving something bad and purple.

  I didn’t even hesitate.

  Be there in 10, I texted back. You’re paying if it’s terrible.

  Obviously, she replied.

  ---

  The rooftop

  It was surprisingly classy for an old brownstone hotel—tiny fairy lights, tall stools, not a single plastic menu in sight. The bartender had a handlebar mustache and knew how to make a custom lavender negroni without needing to Google it.

  Nina looked fantastic. High-waisted pants, velvet jacket, that look like she knew a personal tailor.

  She didn’t ask what happened. I could see in her eyes that she knew. What a fucking day.

  Just raised her glass. “To not dying weirdly today.”

  We clinked.

  We talked for a while. About books. Thesis work. Dead queens and tarot decks. She told me she used to want to be a classical vocalist before she got obsessed with legends and literature. I told her about my DNA test and how it had made everything weirder, not clearer.

  There was an ease between us.

  And for the first time since the journal entered my life, I felt a little more human again. Until the elevator dinged behind us.

  Richard.

  He stepped out like a storm cloud in a tailored coat. His eyes landed on Nina first.

  Then me.

  And they narrowed.

  “Sadie,” he said. Calm. Too calm. “Can we talk?

  ” Nina leaned back slightly. “You’re the Vatican’s henchman?.”

  “Depends who’s asking.”

  She smirked. “Me. I’m asking, asshat.” Richard’s jaw twitched.

  “We don’t need a fucking siren turning this thing on its head.” He snapped.

  The wind caught the corner of my napkin. I didn’t move.

  Because for the first time in hours, I realized I was sitting between two people who both knew way more than they were saying.

  How are you like Richard?