The first time I saw Noah Reyes, he was standing beside a newspaper cart outside the Halston Hotel, wearing a jacket too thin for a Chicago winter.

The visiting room of the Cook County detention center smelled of wet wool, cheap disinfectant, and stale coffee. I sat across the reinforced glass partition, my fingers curled around the plastic telephone handset.

The door on the opposite side opened, and two guards escorted a thin, pale boy into the booth.

Noah Reyes looked smaller in an orange jumpsuit than he had on the snowy street. The bruises on his cheekbone had darkened to a deep purple where the security guard had forced him to the pavement. He sat down slowly, picking up his receiver with trembling hands.

He stared at me through the thick glass for a long moment.

“You’re the lady from the hotel,” he whispered, his voice tinny and distorted through the speaker. “Are you okay? Your heart... I heard it stop when that guy picked up the chain.”

“I’m alive, Noah,” I said, my voice steady despite the tremor in my hands. “And I know you weren’t trying to steal my necklace.”

Noah let out a bitter, shaky laugh, looking down at his shackled wrists. “Tell that to the judge. They’re charging me with grand larceny, assault, and resisting arrest. Bail is set at fifty thousand dollars. Like I’ve got fifty thousand cents.”

“Why did you do it, Noah?” I asked, leaning closer to the glass. “How did you know what that pendant would do?”

Noah looked around nervously, as if the guards behind him were listening to every word.

“I build things,” he said quietly. “Old radios, signal scanners, shortwave receivers. I live in the basement of the old printing press on Wabash. My equipment picks up stray frequencies—police bands, taxi dispatchers, private relays. A week ago, I was scanning near the Halston Hotel when I picked up a weird signal. A high-yield digital pulse looping on a closed-circuit frequency.”

He looked up, meeting my eyes with an intensity that defied his eighteen years.

“It was keyed to a specific biological telemetry frequency. A pacemaker identification code. Every time that necklace came within ten feet of you, the pulse spiked. It wasn't just interfering with your device, ma'am. It was overriding it. Someone was sending a kill switch disguised as platinum.”

The words hit me like physical blows. My suspicions were confirmed, spoken aloud by a homeless teenager living in a basement.

“Who gave you the money for your defense?” I asked suddenly.

Noah blinked. “Nobody. A public defender came by yesterday, but he told me to take a plea deal because the evidence is stacked against me.”

“Not anymore,” I said, sliding a business card against the glass slot at the bottom of the partition. It was the card of my family’s most trusted personal attorney, Victor Vance—no relation to the jeweler, thankfully. “Call him. Tell him Eleanor Ashford sent you. He’s going to get you out of here today.”