Free The Lost Soul (666 Park Avenue 3) by Gabriella Pierce

away.
    ‘Hello?’ The voice on the other line was, she realized, definitely not André’s. ‘Ms. Me – um, Your Ladyship? Medeiros?’
    Silly colonials still can’t figure out titles,
she thought with a lofty smirk, happy to ignore the fact that hers was entirely fictional. ‘Yes,’ she answered in a clipped approximation of Ella’s confusing accent. Not wanting to run the risk of blowing her disguise by bumping into anyone from where she claimed to be from, Jane had given Ella a bizarrely varied background that would have taken far longer than her monthlong existence to unravel.
    ‘This is Melanie Gabriel, calling from the Lowell Hotel,’ the voice on the other line told her with renewed confidence. ‘I’m calling to follow up with you regarding the recent fire incident here. I wanted to let you know that we’ve recovered a few undamaged articles from your suite. They’re in storage at the moment, but I’d be happy to have them shipped to you absolutely anywhere that you would like. The shipping and the storage are complimentary, of course,’ she added quickly, and Jane wondered how many threatened – or actual – lawsuits Melanie had had to field in the wake of the freak disaster.
    ‘Thank you,’ Jane replied, careful to keep her tone polite even as her mind was racing.
‘Undamaged articles.’ Clothes? Shoes? Nail polish? Probably not nail polish
. Most of the items she had kept at the hotel were impersonal, trappings meant to shore up her disguise. But a few things meant a great deal more: a box that had been shipped to her all the way from her former desk mate in Paris, containing the last belongings she had of Gran’s. She tried to imagine the glass paperweights dark with soot, or the reading glasses with their familiar grey plastic frames melted into an unfamiliar shape. Or the diary, with its cover burned off and the char chasing Gran from page to page. The image was chilling, even though she understood that the grandmother contained in the woman’s journal was only a memory, not a living thing. Besides, if anything from the box had survived, something made of paper, cardboard, and fabric was unlikely to be it.
    Still, Jane realized as she gave the address to Melanie, if anything of Gran’s had made it through even semi-intact, it was one more link than she had had before.
Souvenirs would be nice, but what I could really use is Gran’s advice
. Jane clutched the phone so hard that she barely noticed the beeping of the dead line. ‘Right,’ she mumbled out loud, flipping her phone closed and pushing open the door to her bedroom.
    She closed the door behind her and stripped her worn, wrinkled clothes off again, tossing them carelessly onto the comforter. She tugged the thick terrycloth robe off the back of the door and trailed it along behind her on her way into her room’s en-suite bathroom.
    The steam and steady pressure from the shower’s many jets lulled her into a relaxed enough state to start pulling her thoughts together, and she let them come without forcing them. First there was Malcolm, and she let her mind wander over every breath, touch, and smile from the night before. Then she put those memories gently aside; as important as the experience had been to her, she couldn’t let it distract her from their goal.
    Less than two weeks to go,
she thought grimly, working bergamot-scented conditioner down to the tangled blond ends of her hair. She had notified Lynne of Annette’s existence in the early evening, back when she had blithely believed that that would be the end of her troubles with the Dorans. That left just eleven days before Hasina’s spell should be ready – eleven days to figure out how to stop her.
    Jane longed to lay the problem at Gran’s feet – even dead, she suspected, Celine Boyle would have a firm opinion. But although she had only half listened to Melanie Gabriel’s explanations and apologies, she had retained the impression that it would take some time to