Chapter 9: The Service Elevator
"Excuse me, sir. I'm going to have to ask you to step away from Mrs. Sterling."
The voice belonged to a man in a charcoal-grey suit with a discreet gold hotel pin on his lapel—head of security, judging by the way the two doormen behind him immediately flanked our sides, their hands hovering near their belts not with violence, but with the quiet, practiced efficiency of men who threw people out of the Grand Royal every single night of the week.
Jax didn't flinch. He didn't swing his arm around or raise his voice. He simply turned his head enough to look at the security chief's hand resting on his shoulder, then looked back up at Evelyn.
"You've always been good at hiding behind other people's uniforms, Evelyn," Jax said, his voice level and entirely devoid of heat. "Doesn't change what's waiting in the archives on the fifth floor."
Evelyn didn't blink, but a tiny twitch in her left eyelid gave her away. "Take them out through the service corridor," she told the security chief without looking at him. "Make sure they don't come back through the lobby."
"Right away, ma'am," the chief said. His grip on Jax's shoulder tightened, not painfully, but with immovable professional weight. "Let's go, gentlemen. Quietly."
They didn't drag us. That was the luxury of high-society security—they didn't need to make a scene because the velvet ropes and the polished floors did the intimidating for them. They steered us toward the bronze-paneled service doors near the back of the lobby, away from the glittering chandeliers and the murmuring guests who had already gone back to their champagne flutes as if nothing had happened at all.
The transition from the grand lobby into the back hallways was like stepping behind the canvas of a theatrical stage. The thick carpeting vanished, replaced by gray commercial linoleum scuffed black by decades of maintenance carts. The sound of the string quartet died instantly, replaced by the deep, rhythmic thrum of the hotel's industrial ventilation units and the smell of bleach and laundry detergent.
We were pushed through a heavy metal door into a small, windowless vestibule containing a service elevator with exposed steel cables and a sliding iron gate.
"Hold on," Jax muttered, his shoulder brushing against mine as the security chief punched a key into the brass panel beside the elevator door.
"Don't even think about the stairs on the way down," the chief said, his voice flat and bored. He wasn't angry; he was just doing a job he'd done a thousand times before. "Mrs. Sterling doesn't want you making another loop through the main floor. The side exit leads straight out to the alley. If I see either of you back on this property before midnight, I won't use the service elevator. Understood?"
Jax didn't answer. He kept his eyes on the floor indicator above the door as the heavy iron gate rattled open with a metallic screech.
"We're not going down," Jax said quietly as the elevator car settled with a metallic thud.
Before the security chief could react, Jax didn't throw a punch—he simply stepped sideways, his heavy frame blocking the doorway, and let his boot slip into the groove of the elevator door track so the spring-loaded mechanism couldn't close. At the same time, his hand shot out with surprising speed, grabbing the brass key still sitting in the control panel outside the car.
"Hey—!" the chief started, lunging forward.
Jax twisted the key twice to the left, overriding the security lock, and slammed his elbow against the button marked P - Penthouse / Records. The elevator shuddered violently beneath our feet, the cables groaning as the car began to rise before the doors had even fully latched.
"Jax!" I yelled, grabbing the hem of his leather vest as the floor seemed to drop away.
"Hold on to the rail, Toby!" Jax shouted over the grinding roar of the motor. "We're going to the top!"
The elevator didn't stop at the third-floor ballroom, nor the fourth-floor executive suites. It kept climbing, past the floors where the lights were bright and the guests were drinking, straight up into the dark, humming infrastructure of the building where the Grand Royal kept its old paper records—the dusty ledgers, the board meeting minutes from the nineteen-eighties, and the private legal files that weren't meant to be seen by anyone outside the family trust.
The car groaned to a halt with a sickening jolt that rattled my teeth. The iron gate grated open against a narrow, dimly lit hallway lined with gray metal filing cabinets and closed office doors marked with faded brass plaques. There were no chandeliers here. No music. Just the hum of fluorescent lights overhead and the cold draft leaking down from the roof access stairs.
Jax stepped out first, his shoulders broad and steady, his boots clicking hard against the concrete floor. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out the small folded paper the waitress had given us back in the diner, and unfolded it under the flickering yellow glow of the overhead light.
May you like
"Fifth floor archive," Jax whispered, reading the faded handwriting scrawled across the bottom of the old legal receipt. "Room 504. Where Evelyn's father kept the books before he died."
We started walking down the narrow hallway, the air growing colder with every step, heading toward a heavy oak door at the very end of the corridor where a single strip of yellow light leaked out from underneath the frame.
