Crystal chandeliers cast spiderweb shadows in the rotating gallery, where twelve paintings of irises are bleeding.
Evelyn's diamond stud grazed Daniel's Adam's apple for the third time, and this time she smelled blood. Not from her cut skin, but from rust paint that she had personally applied to the tip of the stud three hours earlier - blended with oxidized blood from her father's work ID card.
"What a coincidence, Mr Rothschild." She tilted the champagne glass 45 degrees, and the 1997 Bordeaux climbed down Daniel's silver-gray tie. "The day your father's chemical plant was convicted was my birthday."
The gallery dome burst with spotlights and everyone raised their hands to cover it. Only Daniel could see the fleeting green glow in Evelyn's pupils, much like the phosphorescence he'd seen in a Pennsylvania chemical lab. His thumb pressed into the hollow of her lower back, where a raised scar was burning.
"What do I wish for my 23rd birthday?" He licked the red wine off his lips, the scratching of his metal dentures drowned in the sudden sound of Chopin's nocturnocturia, "Let me guess... Put the Rothschilds in an incinerator?"
Seven high-heel taps from the spiral staircase. By the time Evelyn counted three, Lucas's badge was wedged in the lace of her corset. The FBI agent is wearing tortoiseshell glasses today, posing as an art critic for The New Yorker, but the gun cocoon in her right hand is scratching red marks on her collarbone.
"Do I need to remind you how many times this has been a breach of municipal surveillance? "Miss Archer." His breath sprayed the newly tattooed bar code behind her ear, the number corresponding to the file number sealed in the Philadelphia court, "Or should I call you... Subject E-09?"
A sudden explosion of fireworks from the second-floor terrace saved the conversation. Evelyn took a half step back in the bright light, the hem of her silk dress sweeping the folds of Daniel's trousers. The shadows of three men overlap to form the outline of a gallows on the iris painting, and the gradient of blood red in the frame suddenly begins to fade - the ricin she injected into the paint this morning has taken effect.
"Be careful!" The moment Lucas wrapped his arms around her waist, Evelyn pressed the serpentine ring containing the tiny bug into his palm. The computer in the monitoring room should be playing a video of her breaking into the Rothschild estate last week: Daniel kneeling in front of the safe, filling a bottle of antidepressants with cyanide with his fingers as gracefully as he played Chopin.
Daniel's sneer was drowned out by a sudden burst of applause from the crowd. As Evelyn turns around, the 10cm heel runs over his shiny Oxfords with precision, and the pain will cause the obsessive to wash his hands 27 times tonight - the number circled in red on page 39 of the psychiatric hospital archives.
"Your swan neck is sweating." Lucas fanned open the back of her neck with the auction catalog, where a pinhole was oozing a pale blue liquid. Sure enough, the nanotracker stolen from the Columbia lab last night began to evaporate, and the receiver he hid in his cuff began to heat up.
Evelyn stops by the third painting. "Red Iris Etch," which uses her special phosphorescent paint, now shows the outline of a burning chemical plant under ultraviolet light. Three figures in gas masks stood in the air vent, and the short man in the middle held a Zippo lighter with Daniel's initials engraved on it.
"I hear your father's oxygen mask has been leaking lately?" She pressed her lips to the hearing aid in Daniel's ear, and the sonic vibrations activated the tiny detonators hidden inside. "It was as if on June 12, 1997, at two o 'clock in the afternoon, the ventilation system in the lab in Section B suddenly... "Bang."
The crackle of glass from the second floor. Evelyn knew it was time -- her waitress had just knocked over the champagne tower. In the confusion, she slipped an aphrodisiacs into Daniel's pocket, jasmine laced with amphetamine that would give him hallucinations about a gun four hours later.
Evelyn was swiping a red wine stain away from her lip with the tip of her tongue when Lucas' sidearm suddenly lodged itself against her inner thigh. This Angle won't capture the handcuffs he hides behind his pocketable album, but it will clearly record his fingers poking into her hemline - she has a headline in mind for tomorrow morning: "FBI Star Cheats with Snake Artist Gallery."
"The burn scar on your right shoulder looks even more beautiful than it did three years ago." His canine teeth dig into her protruding scar tissue, where a GPS chip the size of a grain of rice is buried. "Need I remind you of undercover rule 7? An agent who sleeps with a mission target takes three bullets..."
Evelyn crushed his finale with the heel of her high heel. The mirror of the spiral staircase reflected the crisscrossing whiplash marks on her back, and Daniel's father used a steel ruler every day to measure how fast the wounds were festering during his days as a live experiment at Columbia Medical School.
Evelyn was dropping a Zippo lighter into a champagne bucket when sirens pierced the gallery's floor-to-ceiling Windows. The flames engulfs the hem of Daniel's suit, and he flaps wildly like the twitching workers at the chemical plant fire. Lucas fired three shots at the fire sprinkler switch, and in the torrential water, she saw the words she had carved on the wall of the mental hospital when she was fifteen years old glowing:
All things that eat men will eventually drown in their own blood.