Pentimento Trap

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Eamon Gable is a senior art conservator whose meticulous life is dedicated to uncovering the truth beneath layers of paint. Working the night shift alone in a subterranean, climate-controlled museum vault, he begins analyzing a newly acquired 16th-century masterpiece. But when Eamon runs an infrared scan, the hidden underpainting—a pentimento—reveals a terrifying truth: it is a modern, dynamically updating blueprint of the very vault he is locked inside.

As a thermal blip on the monitor moves closer to his impenetrable lab, Eamon discovers the canvas is a highly advanced synthetic forgery designed to hijack the room's sensors and deadbolt the doors. Framed by a corrupt museum director for the theft of the real masterpiece, Eamon realizes the approaching intruder isn't coming to fight—they are coming to trigger the vault's Halon gas fire-suppression system and suffocate him without leaving a trace.

Trapped behind blast doors as the oxygen is slowly vacuumed away, Eamon must weaponize his own restoration chemicals. In a desperate bid for survival, he ignites the forged painting with acetone and ethanol, causing a massive chemical blaze that forces the facility's emergency fail-safes to blast the exterior doors open. Armed with a respirator mask and the digital scans that prove his innocence, Eamon must escape the deadly backdraft before the vault becomes his tomb.