My Ex's Uncle, My Trap novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sixty Minutes
Pierson books Rhi's escape room for a private hour and tells her he knows the vault his nephew stole is hers; she turns down his rescue and tells him about her hidden lock, and then the email comes: Winston says she's the thief.
"This is completely inappropriate, Mr. Wardell."
The clock over the door said 51:14, and it was counting down.
He had booked The Locksmith's Daughter for eleven at night, party of one.
Then he'd asked the front desk if the game master would play with him.
Dakota had pushed me inside and locked the door behind me, grinning.
Now he was leaning on my father's old workbench, the one I'd built this whole room around.
"Inappropriate?" he said.
"I dated your nephew for two years. Until four o'clock this afternoon."
I held up the hint card I'd been pretending to read.
"And you're his uncle."
"Half-uncle," he said. "If that helps."
"It doesn't."
"Then I'll say it again, plainer. Have dinner with me. And let me put your name back on that vault."
Seven hours earlier, I had been standing in the glass atrium of the engineering hall.
The Showcase preview. Faculty, donors, half the senior class, and a jazz trio nobody asked for.
The Nautilus stood on a white plinth under the lights.
Four feet of brass and walnut. Seven stages. Eight months of my nights.
The placard on the plinth said WINSTON WARDELL & PEYTON SEWALL.
I read it three times. It didn't change.
Winston stood beside it in his good gray quarter-zip, holding Peyton's hand.
"Rhi, you came," he said, loud enough for the whole department. "Rhi helped out with some of the soldering."
A few people laughed, the polite kind.
"I built it," I said. "You made the slides."
The laughing stopped.
His father walked over with a glass of white wine.
Dean Clifford Wardell. Silver hair, rimless glasses, a smile.
"Miss Keating," he said. "Scholarship students should be very careful about accusations. Those scholarships are reviewed every term."
Winston squeezed Peyton's fingers.
"We're done, by the way," he told me. "I think that's pretty obvious."
Two hundred people watched me hear it.
I didn't cry. I picked up my backpack and walked out through the middle of them.
At the back of the crowd, one tall man in rolled shirtsleeves hadn't laughed at all.
I hadn't known who he was then.
His name had been on page two of the program, crushed in my backpack.
Pierson Wardell. Founder of Deadbolt. Outside judge.
Now he was in my room, and the clock said 48:30.
"How do you know it's mine?" I asked.
He nodded at the brass lock bolted to the bench.
It was a pin tumbler with thirteen pins, where any normal lock has five or six.
"Your rooms have a habit," he said. "Every last lock has one pin too many. It does nothing until it does everything."
"You've been in here before."
"Three times. Alone. Eleven at night."
I knew who he was then. I'd watched him on the monitors.
"You're the guy who got out in forty-one minutes."
"Thirty-eight, the third time."
"Dakota thought you were a serial killer."
"Dakota tipped me to pick the blue key," he said. "She's a terrible game master."
I almost laughed. I didn't let myself.
"Today I looked inside stage seven of the Nautilus," he said. "Same habit. Same extra pin."
My father put a thirteenth pin in every lock he loved.
He taught me at our kitchen table when I was nine.
"I'm the outside judge on Friday," Pierson said. "My company pays for the fellowship. One word from me and it's your name on that plinth."
"No."
He waited. He was good at waiting. I'd seen that on the monitors too.
"If you fix it, I'm the poor girl the rich uncle felt sorry for," I said. "They'll say you liked my face. Then they'll say worse."
"Then what do you want?"
I walked to the bench so he could see my hands weren't shaking.
They were a little. I put them flat on the wood.
"Stage seven has a maker's lock in it. My dad's sequence. Nobody knows it's there. Not Winston. Not anybody."
His eyebrows went up.
"On Friday he'll open six stages in front of the whole city," I said. "And the seventh won't open for him."
"And inside the seventh?"
"A brass plate with my name on it. I engraved it in September."
He laughed, low and surprised.
"So I don't need you to fix anything, Mr. Wardell," I said. "I need you to watch."
The clock hit zero.
The lights went red. The speakers played a vault door slamming, which I had recorded myself in a bank basement.
He was closer than I'd thought.
He'd come around the bench while I was talking, and he hadn't touched me.
"Time's up," he said quietly.
"You lost. I still have the last key."
"For the record," he said, "dinner was never about the vault."
My back met the edge of the bench.
"The third time I played this room, I wasn't here for the puzzles," he said. "I came to see who'd built it. Today I found out."
"That's worse," I said. "That's so much more inappropriate."
"I know."
His eyes went to my mouth and stayed there.
He smelled like cedar and cold air and machine oil, which was unfair.
My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my wrists.
"Say no and I'll go," he said.
I didn't say no.
I said, "Dakota's watching on the camera."
He looked up at the little black dome in the ceiling.
Then back at me.
"Then I'll ask you again when she isn't."
The door buzzed and swung open.
Dakota stood there with her headset around her neck and her phone held out.
She wasn't grinning anymore.
"Rhi," she said. "Your email. You need to see it right now."
It was from the Office of Academic Integrity.
Dear Rhiannon Keating, it began.
A complaint had been filed against me by Winston Wardell.
He said I had stolen his capstone design.
My Pinwheel Scholarship was suspended pending review. My build shop access was revoked.
I read the last line twice.
The Nautilus had been moved to the Office of the Dean tonight, for safekeeping.
Tonight. While I was locked in a room with his uncle.
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