She wiped tables, collected empty tankards, and delivered fresh ones. Men shouted orders without looking at her face. Coins clinked into Mr. Grey’s palm. Someone slapped her elbow as she passed, and she shifted away without reacting, as any barmaid would. Her mind remained alert, eyes moving constantly, taking in every corner.
Then she saw Blake.
He sat near the shadowed edge of the room, half-hidden behind a post. His cap was low, his shoulders hunched. He looked, to any casual glance, like any worn sailor keeping to himself, but Elise knew the set of him, the tension beneath the stillness.
He was waiting.
She did not approach him. She could not; not yet.
Instead she moved around the room, watching men’s faces, listening for a name. Holt.
There were men she did not recognize—new faces among familiar ones. A duo at the far table, sitting close together, heads bent, were unknown to her. One man laughed too loudly, as if practising being harmless. Another watched the door more than his drink, as if expecting someone to enter—or leave.
Elise’s hands remained steady as she poured ale, but her pulse had begun to beat in her throat.
Then the tavern door opened again. A gust of cold air swept in, and with it came Mr. Leigh.
Elise nearly spilled the tankard.
He stepped inside with that composed ease she had come to associate with him—neither swaggering nor timid, as if he were perfectly entitled to take up space but had no wish to make a spectacle of it. He wore a plain coat and at once removed his hat. His gaze swept the room, quick and controlled, taking stock in a way no true idler ever did.
She bristled as intensely as if she had been touched.
“Why is he here?” she muttered.
For a moment, a spiteful thought flashed through her mind: Perhaps he came every night. Perhaps he was no better than other men—seeking warmth, seeking company, seeking women.
Then, with the same speed, she reprimanded herself. “Why do you care?”
It was no matter what he did. He owed her nothing. He was not her husband, not her friend, not even—she told herself firmly—particularly significant.
Yet… he mattered. Not because she wished him to, but he had somehow insinuated himself into her world and she had not yet resolved where he fit. Now he was here, on the same night she had chosen for secrecy.
He did not greet anyone or go to the bar with cheerful familiarity. He moved instead toward a corner—near enough to see the room, far enough to be overlooked—and sat down as if hemeant to remain there for hours. He had placed himself in much the same way as Blake had done.
Elise’s breath fluttered. Was he on the same hunt?
She forced herself to continue moving, to continue wiping and pouring, as if she were no more than a tired girl earning coin. But her attention caught repeatedly on Mr. Leigh—on the way he kept his hands still, on the way he listened without appearing to do so, on the way his gaze occasionally lifted to the door. He was not here for women.
He was here to watch. Her skin prickled with unease—and, beneath it, something she refused to name.
It was perhaps half an hour later when the door opened again and the atmosphere in the room shifted. Some entrances meant nothing. Men came and went constantly, carrying the smell of sea and mud, stamping their boots, laughing, swearing, ordering ale. This man’s entrance altered the air in a way Elise felt at once.
He was tall, broad through the shoulders and wearing a coat that pretended to be common but sat upon him too well. His long hair was dark, his jaw heavy, his mouth set in a line that did not soften even when he smiled. And there was, as Blake had said, a scar along his cheek—pale against weathered skin, cutting from the edge of his mouth toward his ear as if someone had once tried to silence him and failed. He looked dangerous. He scanned the room, and Elise’s stomach fell.
Then he smiled at someone—a quick, false curve of his lips—and crossed toward the far table where the others sat waiting.
They greeted him with the ease of men who knew each other, yet kept their voices low. One clapped him on the shoulder. Another slid a tankard toward him without asking.
It had to be Holt.
Elise’s fingers gripped her cloth so hard her knuckles whitened. She forced herself to move nearer, not directly, but in the slow drift of service—collecting tankards from a table twofeet away, wiping a spill that did not require wiping, leaning just close enough to catch fragments of speech.
“… took the bait,” Holt was saying, his voice rough and amused.
One of the others—a thin-faced individual with eyes too quick—laughed softly. “Ain’t no bait like London bait. Men smell money and forget their scruples.”
“Not London,” Holt corrected. “Here. ’Tis easier here. Men talk when the sea’s too rough and the ale’s cheap.”
