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He had been planning to pass at a distance when one of Uxbridge's staff turned.

"Montfort." Hensley's voice carried the satisfaction of a man delivering a verdict. "You appear to be the only man in the room who did not think to wear his uniform." A pause weighted with fifteen years of inference. "Perhaps you have misplaced your principles."

Rodrick looked at his champagne glass as though consulting it. "Misplaced? Certainly not. One cannot misplace what one never possessed."

Hensley's jaw moved.

"As for you, I would advise you to keep yours better hidden. They sit rather awkwardly on you."

He pressed the empty glass into Hensley's hand and walked away, glad his pulse had not changed. At least his body still obeyed him in the situations that didn't involve Louise. A victory, then.

A careless one.

He had allowed Hensley to recognize him, and Hensley would not be the only man in Brussels capable of connecting Montfort with work that had once required considerably less public acknowledgment. Still, Rodrick doubted any of them would spread the discovery. Former intelligence men tended to treat old secrets as shared graves: digging one up invited uncomfortable questions about who else had been buried there. Hensley might sneer. Uxbridge might draw conclusions. Neither man was fool enough to announce them across a ballroom.

Rodrick could live with that risk.

For tonight.

He moved through the room among the crème de la crème of three armies. They wore England's scarlet and sang of king and country. Others wrapped themselves in Brunswick black, believing Europe itself had died and they had been left to avenge it. Blue moved between them—Dutch, Prussian—colors changed, allegiances adjusted, but the habit remained. War.

"All this trouble," he murmured under his breath, "to keep the world precisely as it is. One almost regrets that they did not think to accept Bonaparte into their society instead of calling him a parvenu. Might have saved them the inconvenience of assembling to kill him now."

At the room's left edge, thirty feet from Paget's men, stood a smaller group. Darker uniforms—white cockades at their lapels, the Bourbon lily worked into the facings. They spoke in hushed French. Men who had chosen exile over allegiance and now watched others decide the fate of their country.

The Royalists.

Rodrick's gaze moved across the group and stopped.

Antoine de Montmorency stood near the wall with a glass in one hand, one shoulder resting against the paneling. He had lifted a boot just enough for the spur to brush the wood in a slow rhythm, as though the evening had offered him nothing more taxing than champagne and music.

Fate had been indecently generous. Rodrick had expected age to fatten him, bend him, mark his face with gout or drink or some visible proof that the world possessed even a rudimentary sense of justice. Instead, Antoine remained handsome. Healthy. Untouched.

Father Matthieu had been wrong after all. Providence did not mark the wicked. Sin did not seep outward and rot the flesh until decent men could recognize it from across a ballroom.

Rodrick set his glass on a side table and adjusted his sleeves. If cheap theology had failed, Rodrick would be delighted to supply the correction personally.

His pulse had slowed by the time Antoine left the wall. Fate would play no hand here. Rodrick had no intention of sharing the credit. Rodrick slipped into the alcove behind him and waited. Music swelled from the ballroom, covering footsteps, laughter, and the scrape of chairs.

When Antoine passed within arm's reach, Rodrick dragged him into the narrow passage between rooms, away from the chandeliers. The moment darkness closed around them, discipline shed its civility coat. He looped a cord around Antoine's neck and pulled.

Antoine jerked against him, and his hands flew up, clawing at the line, but Rodrick hauled him back against his chest and tightened until he could feel every frantic beat of the man's heart through coat and bone. Heat surged through Rodrick's arms and his teeth locked.

This was the man. The friend who had eaten at his table. Laughed with him. Knew Charlotte's nickname.

Rodrick had imagined this moment. In darker versions, he had taken hours. There had been knives, rope, instruments whose names respectable men pretended not to know. He had designed deaths worthy of the crime while crossing borders, lying in strange beds, waiting outside ministries and watching the level fall in that damned brandy glass.

Charlotte laughing over breakfast flashed behind his eyes. Charlotte stealing the better fig. Charlotte alive before these men had touched her.

Rodrick bent close enough that his mouth nearly touched Antoine's ear. "You called your fucking horse Pamplemousse?"

"I named the horse."

Rodrick stopped.

The voice was female. A woman stood one pace away. Rodrick stared at her mouth first. Then her eyes.

His heart struck so hard it hurt. He did not believe in ghosts. The dead remained dead—that was one of the few rules fate could not fucking break for him.