Chapter 45: The Glowing Fortress
The silence of the upper gallery was broken only by the dry scraping of Genevieve Sterling’s boots as she moved through the darkness. The grand corridor, once lined with gilded sconces and oil portraits of industrial forebears, had surrendered to the polar draft that poured from the broken windows below. Every exhale left her lips in thick gray vapor, drifting past the ceiling moldings where the chill had frozen the moisture in the plaster into jagged needles.
She pulled three decorative silk throws tighter around her neck, knotting the fringed corners over the lapels of her mink coat in a futile effort to halt the violent spasms in her shoulders. The fabrics were thin and porous, designed for summer evenings on the terrace rather than fifty below gales,
