CHAPTER 56 —

The blackout landed like a punctuation mark: sudden, absolute, the kind of silence that makes the polite parts of people fall away. For a second nobody moved — guests frozen mid-sip, a violin bow hanging above a string. Then phone screens blinked up like stars: faces in the dark, cameras hunting for meaning.

Nicole’s pulse slowed into work-mode. She felt it then: not fear but the clean, cold calculation that had carried her through the Pelican, the docks, and twelve ...