“It is my pleasure, dearest,” Ogden breathes.
But instead of holding the door open for her, he shuts it. Blocks it with his body.
“How else could I engineer a moment of celebration for just the two of us?”
Blood rushes cold through Alice’s body. He can’t mean to try again. Midmorning, in an embassy... with the door shut and, as all others have already departed in their carriages, no witnesses.No one to hear me scream.No defenses.
Except one.
As he draws closer, like a leopard stalking prey, her hand fumbles for the gun in her pocket. It cannot come to that,surely. This has all been so clean, and nearly completed. How could she not have guarded against this?
She’d been thinking mainly of Peyton, she realizes. That putrefying old man, as bad as she remembers. But she got it wrong, didn’t she?
Peyton is the greediest of them. But he isn’t the worst.
Ogden lurches for her. She reels back and slaps him, hard, across the face.
There’s a moment of astonishment as Ogden processes the rejection. Alice uses it to dart backward, behind the table, as Ogden recalibrates, snarling, “Drop the pretense, Marietta. I know you want this as much as I do. And European aristocrats are not exactly known for their virtue.”
He snatches for her across the table, coming up empty as she flies to the side. His arm, desperately grabbing, sideswipes the ticker on the mantle, which falls to the floor.
They both stare. Alice swears her heart stops beating completely for a good three seconds as she takes in what Ogden is seeing.
That ever-unspooling line of ticker tape, showcasing not what should be the current values of emeralds on the commodities market downtown but blank paper instead.
Because no one is typing false values. Because Béa is gone.
“You’re right,” Alice says quickly. “I want you desperately, but not here. Perhaps a hotel...”
His eyes rise to hers, hot with understanding—not of what she’s just said, but rather, of what she’s just pulled off.
She extends her arms in entreaty, but he rushes heedless past her to the door of the ambassador’s office. One arm joggles with the false safe built into the wall, the other with the knob.
“Brett, please!” Alice cries. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you!”
With a roar of frustration, he steps backward, then charges at the door to the office with a fierce kick that splinters the edges of the doorknob. And then another, until the door is flung wide, revealing... very little.
An empty room. A telegraph machine. And an open window through which Alice’s co-conspirators have already escaped.
“Youbitch,” Ogden growls. “You sharper, you swindling trollop!”
He whirls around, ready to attack.
But Alice has already crossed the room toward the window... and pulled out her gun. “I’d take care how you speak to me, Mr. Ogden.”
Eyes trained ahead on Arabella, Cora follows the elated, boisterous crowd into the vestibule and then finally, blessedly, out into the shocking bright white of Tuesday morning. Her team’s intended ride to this supposed luncheon, Ward’s carriage, is parked down the road, near the corner of Fifty-Seventh and Fifth, and also houses a patiently waiting Cal Archer. Béa, Dagmar, and the short-lived ambassador Konrad have no doubt already climbed inside their own hansom cab, having left via the back room’s window to the street. The marks’ carriages, meanwhile, are still parked in the style of a front-and-center parade directly outside the embassy.
Vandemeer’s coach pulls away from the curb, already off for Sherry’s, Mrs. Witt’s cab on his heels. Ahead, Harry and his driver attempt to lift the blustering Peyton Senior into theirs.
Now it’s time for one more magic trick.
“Arabella,” Cora calls as the girl climbs the carriage stairs to join her parents.
Arabella turns, looking curious, and doubles backward.
“Oh, Cora, I really must thank you,” the girl says, eyes shining as she approaches. “You were right. I am so very glad I was here today—”
“As was I.”Not much time, Cora, best be quick.
