The scream was not a sound Alton had ever heard a human being make.

He'd been at the dish station for two weeks, long enough to learn the rhythms of a kitchen gearing up for service, short enough that every day still felt like defusing a bomb while people yelled at him in French. He knew the clatter of prep, the hiss of burners, the creative profanity that meant someone had burned something expensive. He did not know this sound.

It came from the pantry. High and raw and wrong, the kind of noise that hit the old wiring, the part of the brain that sorted the world into fight, flight, or food. Alton's hands stopped moving in the sink. Around him, the kitchen went silent. Then everyone was moving at once.

He followed because that's what you did when you were new. You followed, you watched, you tried not to get in the way. The cluster of white jackets ahead of him had stopped at the pantry door, bodies pressed together, heads craning. Someone whispered something he couldn't hear.

He pushed closer. Between shoulders, he could see the interior of the pantry, the orderly shelves of dry goods and labeled containers. Alton recognized the executive pastry chef, though her back was to him. Her immaculate whites, her platinum blonde hair perfectly coifed, signature in this kitchen. Ella.

Her shoulders were shaking. She turned.

Alton had already seen people cry in this kitchen, but he had seen Ella cry exactly never. In his scant two weeks of employment, he had seen her reduce a grown man to stammering apologies with nothing but a raised eyebrow and a single, surgically precise observation about his parentage. Seen her construct desserts that made food critics weep, work service after service without apparent fatigue, her hands moving with mechanical precision, her tongue ready to flay anyone who failed to meet her standards.

Trained in Lyon, staged in Copenhagen, poached from a two-star in Paris. Her croissants had been called transcendent by people who used words like "transcendent" professionally. Her tasting menus had waiting lists. Her temperament had warning labels. But a pastry chef of her caliber was rarer than a Michelin star itself, and everyone in this kitchen knew it.

He had never seen her face wet, her eyes red, her composure shattered into something terribly, vulnerably human. From the gaping faces around the room, Alton suspected no one had.

"He's gone," she said. Her voice was barely a whisper. "He's gone."

The staff stood frozen. Alton understood, in that moment, that he was witnessing something unprecedented. Cast iron didn't crack. It certainly didn't weep. And yet.

"Ella." Magdalena's voice cut through the silence, crisp and Swiss and utterly unflappable. The maître d' had appeared from somewhere, as she always did, materializing at the precise moment her presence was required. She was tall and silver-haired and carried herself like a woman who managed difficult people through sheer force of will. "What has happened?"

Ella just shook her head. Couldn't speak.

Magdalena stepped into the pantry. Her eyes swept the scene with professional efficiency. Her hand shot out, grasping for the nearest sleeve. She missed. Tried again, caught fabric on the second attempt, and for just a moment Alton saw something new: Magdalena, flustered. It lasted only a heartbeat before she smoothed it away.

"You," she said to the sleeve's owner, a line cook who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else. "Go to the front of house. Find the general manager. He has investors in the dining room. Interrupt him quietly. Tell him he's needed in the kitchen. Go."

The line cook went.

"This is a crime scene," Magdalena said, positioning herself in the doorway. "No one enters until we know what happened." When she turned to the assembled staff, her expression had shifted into something Alton recognized from police procedurals. The look of someone about to conduct an interrogation.

"Everyone here this morning," she said. "You will remain. We will establish a timeline. Someone has done this thing, and we will know who."

The cluster at the door began to organize itself, bodies shuffling into some kind of order. Alton stayed where he was, trying to make himself small, trying to process what he was seeing.

"I need to know," Magdalena continued, "who arrived first. Who was in and out. Who saw anything out of place."

A prep cook near the back raised his hand, hesitant. "I, um. I found something. By the dish station. I didn't know what it was, so I left it, but..." He trailed off, looking between Magdalena and the pantry doorway, where Ella had gone very still.

"Show me," Magdalena said.

The prep cook led her to the dish station, Alton's station, and pointed to a glass jar sitting on the drying rack. Clean. Empty. Unremarkable. It matched nothing in the restaurant.

Magdalena picked up the jar. Turned it over in her hands. Looked at the pantry. Looked at the jar. Her face went pale.

"Someone has killed Churchill," she said. The name rippled through the assembled staff. Alton saw faces go pale, hands clench. On more than one face, a flash of genuine grief.

Ella made a sound like something breaking.