Hailey nodded. He waited for more, but she was back to playing lookout, making sure the sidewalk was still clear. Nick looked from the flask in his hands to the object wrapped in the towel beneath Hailey’s arm. He had no idea how these things were connected—but he’d gone this far already.

When things go sideways…

Nick headed toward the car.

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

Five minutes later, Nick was again two steps behind Hailey, and the vague discomfort he’d felt on the street outside had shifted into something truly palpable as they crossed the cavernous lobby of 77 Massachusetts Avenue, a grand space that was mostly vertical, with pillars rising a hundred feet from the polished marble floor to that glowing, hollow dome. There were two balconies ringing the atrium and a glass skylight directly overhead. From the inside, the obscenely tall windows overlooking Mass Ave. behind Nick had an almost church-like feel to them, and even the air in the vast room felt crisp and serious.

“They call this Building Seven,” Hailey said, as she led him forward. “It was actually built twenty years after most of the rest of the campus, because they wanted to add an entrance on Mass Ave. It’s not quite as domineering as Building Ten, which is the one behind this one, with the bigger dome. People sometimes call that one ‘the center of the universe.’”

“Sounds charming.”

It wasn’t just the scale of the place that made Nick want to turn and head back toward the comforting alleys of South Boston; the air itself was heavy on his skin, and he half expected someone to come running out from behind one of the pillars, pointing and screaming at him that he didn’t belong.

Hailey must have noticed the way he was lagging behind, because she gave him a quick look over her shoulder, an expression he hadn’t seen from her before. Sympathy.

“Everyone feels like that the first time they walk in here. Especially the new students. They call it impostor syndrome. The sense that you’ve fooled someone, that any minute you’re going to be found out and asked to leave.”

Nick was surprised she’d read him that well. He was usually better at hiding what was going on inside. At Shirley, it had been a survival mechanism. Cons would use anything they could against one another, and insecurities were like fault lines. Apply the right amount of pressure on an insecurity, and the hardest criminal would shatter like cheap glass.

“You’re a student here?”

“After a fashion. I’m in the graduate school. Applied mathematics.”

Nick wasn’t sure what that meant, other than that she was probably damn good with numbers. Then again, the bar for him was pretty low. He’d dropped out of school somewhere between the first and second week of ninth grade.

“A lot of MIT grad students spend their nights at the casinos?”