Rain slapped their faces.
“Left,” Eleanor breathed, catching Graham’s arm. “Two men at the corner.”
Graham saw them, waiting where waiting looked like loitering.
He pulled Eleanor and Mercer hard right instead, into a narrow lane that stank of damp brick and refuse.
Behind them, boots struck puddles in pursuit.
Eleanor kept pace, breath controlled despite the drag of wet skirts. Graham’s hand stayed at her back—not steering, not restraining—simply there, a steady pressure that said I will not lose you.
They ducked under an archway into a churchyard so small it barely qualified as a yard at all. Iron railings enclosed a patch of stone and leaning markers. The place smelled of wet earth and stone.
Graham pressed them into the shadow of a mausoleum.
Footsteps approached, then slowed. A man’s voice murmured something sharp and annoyed before the sounds moved into the distance, then faded away.
Mercer sagged against the stone, white-faced. “They—” he began.
“Quiet,” Graham said.
Eleanor watched the lane through the bars of the railing, counting heartbeats the way she counted lines on a page. When she judged the moment safe enough to breathe, she turned to Mercer.
“You were the protected name,” she said.
Mercer’s eyes widened. “I do not know what you mean.”
Eleanor pulled the torn catalogue from her reticule. The paper was damp at the edges but still legible.
Mercer stared.
Then his shoulders dropped, the fight leaving him like air from a punctured bellows.
“Mr. Hargrove said if this ever fell into the wrong hands,” Mercer whispered, “I should run.”
“And instead you came to a coffeehouse,” Eleanor said, unable to keep the edge from her voice.
“I was told to meet a man who could get me out,” Mercer said. “A gentleman with a folio. He was supposed to be an ally.”
Graham’s gaze hardened. “He is not.”
Mercer’s hands shook as he reached into his coat and produced a folded sheet of paper. Nothing official, nothing fancy. A printed broadsheet, still smelling faintly of ink.
“The message was hidden here,” he said. “In the margin. Mr. Hargrove taught me where to look.”
Eleanor unfolded it carefully.
In the corner of the sheet, almost invisible unless one knew to search, a tiny forget-me-not had been pricked into the paper with a pin.
Beside it, in neat, compressed numbers and a single letter:
E2 19-16
The next step. Eleanor’s pulse steadied even as dread tightened around it. “Covent Garden,” she whispered.
Graham’s eyes narrowed. “Seven on the sixteenth.”
Eleanor looked up. “Yes.”
