She angles away from me. “No way,” she says, narrowing her eyes at my arm. A red stain is already seeping through my smock. “You’re not perfectly disguised, either.”

I grab an apron off the shelf and sling it over my arm.

She rolls her eyes, grumbling to herself as she strips off her bow and tucks it behind a stack of brooms.

We slip out of the closet and head toward the kitchen. The hall is quiet. Too quiet. No clatter of steam trays. No buzzing timers. No hum of exhaust fans sucking up the food smells wafting from the serving stations. A line of abandoned meal carts is parked against one wall, piled high with sandwiches and fruit cups. “Where the hell is everyone?”

“I don’t know,” she says warily.

The kitchen is dark. Kai tucks herself close behind me, as if she senses it, too—the wrongness of it.

“Boreas?” I call out. His name echoes off the stainless-steel ovens.

The door of the walk-in freezer hangs slightly ajar. A sliver of light spills out of it, stretching toward our feet. I turn toward the high-pitched whine of a camera on the wall. It rotates slowly toward us. Before it catches up to us, I sling the freezer door farther open and usher Kai inside. She sucks in a sharp breath.

“Relax,” I say, ducking into the freezer behind her, “it’s not that cold in . . .”

Kai’s rigid, a hand clamped over her mouth.

“Shit. No!” I rush past her and kneel in the swirling fog around Boreas’s feet. He’s propped upright on a vegetable crate, his chin resting against his motionless chest. The bald crown of his head is a strange shade of gray, and the chilled air reeks of blood. I press two fingers to the soft, cold flesh at his throat. Boreas’s eyes are open, wide and unblinking. A slow trickle of blood leaks from a gash in his throat, trailing into a drain in the floor.

A note is pinned to the front of his shirt.

WELCOME HOME, JACK. I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU.

My hands clench into fists. Boreas and I weren’t exactly close, but this . . . this death is on me. Doug literally pinned my name to it, killing the one person—the only person—left here who could help me and leaving his body in a freezer to taunt me, just to make a point. That even in the coldest room, I’m powerless. Completely vulnerable without my magic. And Doug knows it.

Boreas’s head lolls as I tear the note from its safety pin. A lock of bloodred hair falls from the creased page to the floor. The ends are pink.

“No,” I whisper. My hands shake as I stoop to touch it. “Fleur?”

Kai drags me back by the elbows. “We have to go, Jack. We have to go now!”