Graham would check there if he came for her. Or if he had also been taken and freed himself. She did not believe they had him, however, she’d seen no sign of additional captives.
Eleanor pressed her palm to the catalogue, its battered spine a brutal comfort.
Then she was out the door again, into the street, into the night.
Somewhere out there, me pursued her, but Eleanor had already slipped between the lines.
And if Graham read her warning in time, so would he.
Chapter 13
Graham found her note at the first place any sensible man would look—the incoming dispatch slot of the office she’d escaped. It was folded so the message faced outward, written in a hand he recognized now as both blade and compass.
Look at C2. Don’t fill the blank—follow it.
He did not waste time cursing her for being brave. He did not waste time thanking God she was alive.
He followed her directions, and before dawn, he reached the rendezvous she had implied without naming. A chandlery off the river road, one of those narrow shops that smelled of tallow and rope and minded its own business. Eleanor waited in the shadows between barrels, cloak drawn close, hair half-pinned, eyes bright with the ferocious calm of a woman who had slipped out of a cage and returned with the key.
When he saw her, something in Graham’s chest went dangerously soft, and he crossed to her in three strides then caught her by the arms—not to restrain, but to confirm that she was there. That she was unharmed. Warm. Breathing. Real.
“You should not have taken the risk,” he said.
“I should not have been taken at all,” she replied, then lifted her chin. “I left you what mattered.”
His jaw flexed. “You left me a trail. I followed it. And I nearly tore London apart doing so.”
Eleanor’s mouth curved, tired and fierce. “D3 is tonight’s erasure.”
His gaze sharpened.
Wapping. Before six.
He nodded, releasing her.
They moved as the fog still clung to the streets, two shadows with the same purpose and no patience for hesitation.
They did not sleep, did not stop to rest.
By half past five, the river fog had swallowed the city.
Wapping hid beneath damp brick and the hush of the tide, the Thames breathing cold against the pilings. Lanterns along the quay were only halos, faint circles of light that dissolved the moment one tried to trust them.
Graham led Eleanor down a narrow cut between warehouses where mud clung to their boots and the air tasted of brine, coal smoke, and wet rope.
Eleanor kept pace, cloak pulled close, the torn catalogue pressed flat against her ribs. In her reticule, the small metal token from Mayfair warmed against her palm like a coal.
She could feel Graham’s attention as keenly as the fog, a steady pressure at her side, watchful and grim. When they reached the wharf, they crouched behind stacked timber slick with dew.
Graham’s posture was that of a man accustomed to lurking in shadows. Knees bent, back flat to the crate, breath shallow. His gaze swept the docks.
“Two men on the far end,” he murmured. “Not dockhands. Too neat.”
Eleanor risked a glance around the edge. Two figures stood with the stillness of sentries, their boots polished, and shoulders too straight for labor.
“They are waiting for someone,” she whispered.
“They are waiting for us,” Graham corrected.
