The Billionaires’ Death Oracle

The ballroom smelled like money, hothouse lilies, warm candle wax, and the particular sourness of champagne left too long in a glass. Sophia Reyes kept her arms crossed tight over her borrowed black uniform and stayed close to the wall, the way she had learned to stay close to walls in every crowded room since she was seven years old. Her fingers itched inside the serving gloves. It wasn't from the fabric. But, the two hundred exposed wrists and throats and hands moving past her on a tide of laughter, close enough to touch, far enough that she almost, almost, believed she was safe. She was not supposed to be working the floor. She was supposed to be in the kitchen, refilling trays, invisible. But the head caterer had shoved a tray of champagne flutes into her hands twenty minutes ago and hissed, go, go, they're two servers short, and now she was drifting through New York's wealthiest small talk with her heart going like a trapped bird against her ribs. An elderly woman in emerald silk swayed near the marble staircase, one hand fluttering out for a railing that wasn't there. Sophia's body moved before her mind caught up, the old, deep-grooved instinct to catch, to steady, to help and her gloved palm shot out and closed, not around the woman's arm, but around a man's wrist as he stepped in from the other side to do the very same thing. Skin. Bare skin, where his cufflink had ridden up beneath her glove's frayed seam. The world dropped away. She was standing in a boardroom she had never seen, all glass and steel and cold morning light, and the man in front of her, whose wrist she was holding right now, at this party, in this second was slumping backward over a long table, his white shirt blooming red at the chest, his mouth open on a word that never finished. A second man stood in the doorway. Grey suit. Grey eyes. A gun still smoking in his hand. On the wall behind them, a digital clock read a date. Six days from tonight. Sophia came back to herself with a gasp that turned three heads. "Are you all right?" The man was still holding his wrist where she'd gripped it, frowning down at her, tall, dark-haired, expensive in a way that wasn't about the suit but about the ease underneath it, the way people who have never once worried about money hold their shoulders. Adrian Cole. She knew the face from magazine covers she'd never actually read, only glimpsed in checkout lines. "You're going to die," she said. It came out wrong. Too flat, too fast, the words tumbling out before she could stop them, before nineteen years of careful silence could clamp back down over her mouth. A woman nearby laughed, a nervous, tinkling sound. Adrian's frown deepened into something colder. "Excuse me?" "Six days." Sophia's pulse was a drum in her throat. She could still see it, printed behind her eyes like a photograph left too long in the sun, the blood, the grey suit, the gun. "A man in a grey suit. Your boardroom. He shoots you. I saw it, I felt it, I don't… I don't know how to explain it, but I need you to believe me" "Get her out of here." Adrian didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. Two men in dark suits materialized out of the crowd the way security always does at parties like this, gliding rather than walking, hands already reaching for Sophia's elbows. "Please." She twisted, tray forgotten, champagne flutes shattering somewhere behind her in a bright, ringing crash that made the whole room turn. "Please, I'm not lying, I've never once been wrong, ask anyone who's touched me, ask…" But there was no one to ask. There had never been anyone to ask. That was the whole architecture of her life, built specifically so that no one would ever be close enough to confirm what she saw. They put her out through the service entrance into an alley that smelled of rain and garbage, and one of the security men said, not unkindly, "Don't come back here, sweetheart," before the door shut and left her alone under a buzzing security light, shaking so hard her teeth clicked together. She sat down hard on an overturned milk crate and pressed the heels of her gloved hands against her eyes until colors bloomed behind them. Six days. She had never seen a death so close before, so violent, so specific. Every death she had ever witnessed, her grandmother's, decades away and gentle; a stranger's on the subway, an old man's heart giving out peacefully forty years from now, had come with a kind of distance built in, a soft-focus inevitability she could carry without it cutting her. This one had a date. This one had a face aimed at a gun. This one, she realized with a lurch that had nothing to do with the cold, was the first death she had ever seen that she might actually be able to stop. She didn't know his address. She didn't know his private number. She knew only his name, his company, and six days, ticking down already, whether he believed her or not. She knew, too, the slant of grey morning light in that boardroom, the exact angle at which he would fall, and she hated that her mind kept every terrible detail with a clarity it kept for nothing else. Sophia stood, wiped her face with the back of her gloved hand, and started walking. She didn't know yet that this was the last ordinary night of her life, the last night she would be nobody, the last night a stranger's death would stay a secret she alone carried. She only knew that somewhere across the city, a clock was already counting down toward a boardroom full of morning light, and she had six days to make a man who thought she was insane believe that he was going to die. She had never once been wrong. She prayed, walking fast through the wet dark streets with her arms wrapped around herself, that this would be the first time.