IT WAS SEVERAL OUTRAGED MOMENTS before Nicholas was able to collect himself enough to speak. “What is your name, sir? And what business do you have with us?”

The man cocked his head to the side, studying him. After a moment he answered, his voice higher than Nicholas might have expected, speaking a language he’d never heard before. The grating laughter, however, did not need translation.

Sophia answered, barking out a string of words in that same language, wiping the gleaming humor from the thief’s face. Nicholas released the grip he’d maintained on her coat, and watched as Sophia lunged toward the small man. He rolled back off the fallen palm tree he’d been perched on, dancing away from her reach again and again.

After everything she’d imbibed last night, he suspected Sophia had a headache pounding like the drums of hell, so frankly, he didn’t blame her for reaching into her coat for her pistol and taking aim.

The small man froze. Nicholas caught a hint of gold tucked into his belt—a knife, perhaps? The ceasefire, at least, gave him a moment to assess the risk: the man wore the attire of an Englishman, but the loose fabric of his shirtsleeves and breeches had been rolled and tucked at the ends to account for his diminutive stature.

“Put the flintlock down, n shén,” the man said.

Sophia lunged toward him, snarling. In two fluid moves, the man had Sophia disarmed and on her knees on the ground, looking stunned.

She growled and, undeterred, rose just enough to try to knock the man’s feet out from under him. He simply leaped back out of the way.

Something in the man’s face shifted, a feminine softening that arrived with a flurry of delighted, girlish laughter. Sophia seemed to realize their mistake the precise moment Nicholas did, and cut off her next attack, stiffening.

Not a man.

A woman.

Nicholas cocked his head to the side, studying the thief again. He could see it now, of course; how blind and presumptuous he’d been, but the Three Crowns had been dark and his glimpse fleeting. The binding of linen wrapped around her chest peeked out from beneath the loose collar of her shirt.

Her focus shifted off Sophia’s face to meet his. “Remove your gaze, gŏu, or I will remove your eyes.”

“I know better than that,” he said, holding his own pistol steady. “I want the letter you stole.”

“Neither of your weapons are loaded,” the young woman said, flicking her fingers in their direction. “They are too light in your hands. Neither of you carry a powder flask. And…” She spared a glance around their pitiful campsite. “Could you afford such?”

“More than one way to use a gun,” Nicholas noted. “Would you like to discover how many?”

At that, a small smile curled her rosebud lips. “I suspect I know far more than you, bèn dàn.”

He tried to quell the tightening in his guts at the knifelike edge to her words.

“Who. Are. You,” Sophia managed to get out from between her gritted teeth.

The young woman removed her hat, dropping it to the sand with a look of disgust. She lifted her long black braid from where she had tucked it under her cloak, and then a heavy jade pendant, the length of one of Nicholas’s fingers. The image of the tree carved into it looked like an evergreen; it stood tall, arrow-like in shape. Its branches were not as full as several of the other family sigils, but still robust and proud.

Damn it all, he thought, feeling a weariness creep into him. And here he’d been hoping, however in vain, that the culprit would be a random thief, one without ties to their hidden world. Nicholas supposed he would never be so lucky.

“Hemlock…” he began.

“Did my grandfather send you?” Sophia interrupted.

The girl scowled. “I will never work for him. Not even if he were to offer a fair price for my services.”

A mercenary, then. He’d heard stories about them from Hall—members of the Jacaranda and Hemlock families who had refused to bow to Ironwood once he seized control of their travelers and guardians and absorbed them into his own clan. They offered their services to any traveler or guardian who could pay them. He’d always wondered about the kinds of jobs they took, assuming they were mostly occupied with tracking down wayward family members or lost possessions, or maybe even quietly making small changes to history that wouldn’t result in the timeline shifting.

“Call me Li Min,” she said.

“I’ll call you Jackass if it suits me,” Sophia snapped. “Tell me what the hell you’re doing here before I take this knife and slice you from gullet to gut.”

Nicholas wondered briefly if it was his destiny to be surrounded by women possessing varying degrees of murderous intent.

The girl smiled. “This is no way to speak to one with whom you wish to do business.”

Sophia sucked in a sharp breath, filling the bellows of her chest to explode, but Nicholas was quicker on the draw. “We have no business with you beyond retrieving our letter. I don’t suppose you’ll be so kind as to offer any sort of explanation for why you took it? Who hired you to steal it?”

And why you are here, dangling it in front of us, if someone paid you to take it? Unless, of course, she was angling to dip into two different pots of profit, hoping he and Sophia would bribe her for a look.

“I never said I was hired,” Li Min said. “It is in my interest to know the business of the travelers I come across. Work is hard to find, you see, and occasionally I must look for it, rather than wait for it to come to me. Many Ironwoods have traveled here in recent months. But imagine my surprise to see a Linden guardian scuttling around the beaches like a little crab. And then you appeared to conduct your business….”

Unsure of whether or not he’d live to regret it, Nicholas lowered his pistol and returned it to its place at his side. Feeling steadier, he began to consider their situation in this new light.

“If you stole it to ransom it back to us, then you already know we have nothing with which to pay you,” he said, sweeping his arms out to indicate their sorry state of affairs.

“I wish to know what the letter says,” the girl said. “It is written in a peculiar way. I will give it back to you on two conditions.”

“I’ll take it from your dead body!” Sophia swung an arm out, her fist barreling through the air. Nicholas saw it happening, felt that wrench of dismay, as Sophia misjudged the distance between her and the other girl by nearly a foot. Li Min easily dodged, her face passive, as Sophia lost her balance and slammed into the sand, sending up a spray of it.

Sophia raised a hand to her eye patch, nearly howling in frustration. It wasn’t the first time Nicholas had seen her struggle with her altered vision, and it wasn’t the first time his heart had given an unwelcome, involuntary clench at the sight, either.

Li Min forced her dark gaze up from the girl, back to him. “I will give you this letter, and you will show me how to read it.”

Nicholas shook his head. “Unacceptable.”

If the writing was “peculiar,” he had a feeling it was written in the way Rose had coded the other letters to Etta—a calculated risk on Rose’s part, because what if Etta hadn’t shown Nicholas how to decode them?—and he was loath to reveal that secret to anyone outside the family.

The envelope emerged from inside of Li Min’s shirt, stained brown by the ale, rumpled and worn, but in one piece. That is, until the girl ripped it in half. Nicholas and Sophia both lurched toward her, crying out.

“If I do not read it, you will not read it,” Li Min warned, her voice shifting from its airy tone to flint. And to make her point, she turned the halves to the side and began to rip them into quarters.

Sophia turned to look up at Nicholas. “It’s not worth it. Let her have the damn letter. We already have our plan.”

But it would save us time…tracking Etta would be a simpler thing if we could have the last common year now, without delay, Nicholas thought.

“Don’t do it, Carter,” Sophia warned, voice low.

“I will not show you how to read it—” Nicholas held up his hand, stilling Li Min. “But I will read to you what it says.”

“Unacceptable,” Li Min said, mimicking his tone. “You might deceive me.”

“You accuse me of being dishonorable?” Nicholas said.

“What does an Ironwood know of honor?” Li Min wondered aloud, waving the pieces of the letter at him.

“My name is Nicholas Carter,” he said. “I am an Ironwood by only half my blood, and never in character. If nothing else, I am honor-bound to the Linden family not to show a stranger the sole way they have of communicating with each other without Ironwood being able to discover their secrets. You can understand that, I think, given your line of work.”

“The Linden family is dead,” Li Min said, eyes lighting up with obvious curiosity. “Only a few guardians remain.”

“Their methods work, then,” Nicholas said, “if you have not discovered that some of their travelers are still very much alive.”

Li Min inclined her head toward him, giving him that much, at least. “I will accept this condition, then. But I have one other.”

The girl was smiling again, and within the span of less than an hour, he’d already learned to fear the implications of that expression. His mind began to take tally of what little they had, and he braced himself for the loss of any of it. “Go on, then.”

“As my payment, I would like a kiss,” she said, glancing between the two of them. “A proper one.”

Nicholas paused.

Of all of the things he’d suspected she would ask for—flintlock pistols, shoes, a favor, a signed confirmation of debt—a kiss? He stared at her a good long while, waiting for her to give the true price, but she simply gazed back, her dark eyes unwavering.

Nicholas had kissed a number of women in his twenty years of life; not as many as Chase, but then, even Lothario could not top that tally. He was far—far—from being a saint, but at some point over the past few weeks, his heart had resolved that it only wanted to kiss one girl ever again, and his whole spirit seemed to retreat at the thought of kissing another.

I could kiss her forehead, her cheek, he thought quickly. She hadn’t specified where, or how.

Do it, Carter. He pressed his hands to his thighs, trying to steady the rioting dismay. Get the matter over with, read the letter, and go. That was all that mattered now. He would not think of Etta, the way she’d tasted of rain when she’d kissed him in the jungle. How he could have sworn there were stars in her hair that night in Damascus. The way she made him feel solid, and terribly brave.

Well, his mind was unhelpful.

“All right,” he said, resigned. “Let’s have it, then.”

Li Min took a step back, dark brows rising over her forehead in both amusement and disdain. “I was speaking to her.”

It was physically painful to exist inside the long stretch of silence that followed. Oh. The wheels of his mind began to turn again. Her.

“Oh. Well, that’s…it’s certainly…”

Sophia had begun to collect their scattered belongings, grumbling every curse and oath known to mankind none too quietly. At Li Min’s words, she slowly began to straighten.

“Ma’am, I apologize,” Nicholas said sincerely, inclining his head. “Forgive my presumption.”

Li Min flicked her fingers dismissively in his direction. “It can be hard for men to believe they are not all gods walking the earth, as so many women are forced to fall at their feet.”

He lifted a shoulder in a faint shrug. Where was the lie in that?

“And you expect me to fall at your feet now?” Sophia asked, her expression surprisingly even.

“No one expects that,” Nicholas said. “It’s your choice. As you said before, we have other avenues of inquiry to pursue. She can take the letter and be damned.”

“Oh? I have your permission to refuse, then?” Sophia rolled her eye.

“I only meant to make it clear—” He closed his mouth, knowing he’d botched this moment beyond repair.

“Fine,” Sophia said, cutting him off. She squared her shoulders, glancing back at him as she stepped toward the other girl. “We could go on without the bloody letter, but if it helps us find the men who—I just want this to be over with.”

Nicholas didn’t miss the catch in her voice when she said “the men.”

“Have at it,” Sophia said, removing her hat. She stood straight in front of Li Min, who mirrored her stoic expression. Nicholas had the peculiar sense that he was watching a duel, with neither of the aggrieved parties willing to fire into the air.

He kept a hand on the unloaded pistol at his side, and was startled to find that Sophia was not doing the same. Rather, she was holding her ground, waiting for the other young woman to approach.

Sophia’s throat worked as she swallowed with some difficulty. Li Min brought a hand to her face and curled a loose strand of dark hair behind the other girl’s ear. With a tenderness that made Nicholas want to avert his gaze, Li Min leaned forward.

“I’ll wait,” she said, her lips a breath from Sophia’s. “One day you may be willing to pay, and I will delight in collecting.”

Sophia’s face, already flushed from the sun, deepened to crimson as Li Min offered the halves of Rose’s letter to her. She snatched the parchment away and thrust it in Nicholas’s direction, never once taking her eyes off the mercenary. “Read it.”

Nicholas felt the knots around his lungs ease, and briny air filled them, tempered with the scent of the rotting green flesh of the jungle. He moved a short distance away from the young women and sat down on the bowed body of a fallen palm tree. With great care, he lined up the raw, torn edges.

Dear Little Heart, the center of my being…It went on to discuss the weather, King George III, and so on, like tiny riots of nonsense across the page.

Nicholas felt his brows rise as he reached up and swiped the sweat from his forehead. The endearment would read as a bit much to the casual reader, but Etta had explained to him that, in the absence of a key to read it, the way to decode the letter was embedded within the salutation. She’d used “star” before, and “heart” was easy enough—though, what to make of “little,” and the curious inclusion of “the center of my being”?

Unless…

He curled his index fingers and thumbs together, forming a heart, and positioned it at the center of the parchment. The message it revealed was still padded with gibberish, and he couldn’t make sense of it until he imagined the shape of a small heart laid over the words at the center of the letter.

Cannot meet you. Will lead the shadows away from you as long as I can. For year, seek belladonna.

Another blasted riddle. The paper wrinkled under the force of his grip as he read the message aloud to the young women. Bloody Rose Linden.

“Iiiinteresting,” Sophia said, something sparking in her eyes. “Dare I say it, but the woman might have actually come through for us. I hadn’t considered it as an option, but she’s onto something.”

“Foolish,” Li Min shot back. “And you were right not to consider it.”

“I would prefer to know what it is the two of you are referring to, rather than watch you argue the point,” Nicholas said with a patience he did not know he still possessed.

Sophia ignored Li Min’s look of disbelief, saying, “There are two people in all of time that know the workings of our world—who make it a point to know everything everyone is doing. One of them is Grand—is Ironwood himself, and the other is the Belladonna.”

“Belladonna is a she, not a thing?” he confirmed, trying to extinguish the eagerness in his voice.

“Julian never spoke of her?” Sophia asked him, at his look of confusion. “She’s…I’m not quite sure how to put this. She seeks out treasures lost to time and holds auctions for them; only, instead of paying in gold, you pay for them in favors and secrets. Ironwood has allowed it because, generally speaking, these treasures must stay ‘lost’ to preserve his timeline.”

“What is it that you hope to accomplish with this visit?” Li Min asked. The sunlight gleamed off her coal-black hair as she cocked her head to the side. “Perhaps you might purchase the information from me, instead?”

“What business is it of yours?” Nicholas asked. In truth, he was mildly concerned about what she might ask for next, and whether or not he could trust her answer.

“I told you, it’s my business to know others’ business.”

“We are attempting to uncover the last common year with this most recent major shift in the timeline,” Nicholas said. “Is that information you possess?”

There was a single beat in which his hopes shot into the air like a firework, only to crash back down a moment later. Li Min glanced off toward the turquoise water. “No. I could…I might seek the answer for you, however.”

“For a handsome fee,” Sophia burst in. “Trying to poach some business from the Belladonna, are you? No, thank you. We’ll go to someone who will actually know, not a second-rate mercenary who can’t even decode a message.” Sophia ignored Li Min’s light laugh and turned back to Nicholas. “The Belladonna knows everything. Julian told me that on his last visit accompanying the old man, she rattled off the full scale of all of Ironwood’s comings and goings, and the supposedly secret changes he’d enacted.”

“And your quarrel with her is…?” Nicholas asked, turning back to Li Min. He did not entirely like the sound of this, aside from potentially having a more direct, guaranteed route to Etta.

Li Min lifted a shoulder, but her gaze darted over to Sophia, just for a moment, as she pressed her lips into a tight line.

“She’s bought into the rumors that the woman is a witch,” Sophia said with obvious ridicule. “That she’ll ensnare your soul. Ridiculous!”

Nicholas did balk at that. Witch was a strong accusation in his native time, and flung around far too quickly when it came to ladies with unusual interests or predispositions.

Li Min’s lips parted, but after a moment, she only smiled. Tossing her long braid over her shoulder again, she bent to retrieve her cape and hat. “You seem to have your path charted, then. Be well.”

She was several feet away and retreating into the palms before Nicholas’s mind took note that she was leaving.

“That’s it?” Sophia called after her. “After all that, that’s it?”

Li Min didn’t miss a stride as she called back, “For now. Until we meet again.”

When it looked as though she might try to follow the other girl, to haul her back for further interrogation, Nicholas caught Sophia’s shoulder with one hand and used the other to tuck Rose’s correspondence back in his jacket pocket.

“Can you believe the nerve of that girl—”

“Sophia,” he interrupted, “a witch? Is there anything else I should know?”

“Oh, we’ll be fine,” Sophia said, turning from the trail of broken underbrush Li Min had left behind.

“Are you personally acquainted with her?” he pressed.

“Well, no; but she is a legend, and between Julian’s stories and the old man’s absolute loathing of her, I feel as though I’ve a handle on her,” Sophia said quickly. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this. The only thing we have to worry about now is finding a passage to Prague. She operates in the fifteenth century—I think there should be a passage to Spain if we can reach Florida, and from there—”

“Not to interrupt your planning, but how do you propose we buy passage off this island?”

Sophia cocked her head to the side, her lips curling up at the edges as she lifted a fist-size leather bag from inside of her jacket and tossed it to him. “Some thief she is. Didn’t even notice when I cut this from her belt.”

Nicholas actually laughed, unknotting the laces to reveal enough gold coins to momentarily stop his heart. “She’ll be back for this.”

Sophia glanced back at the path Li Min had taken. “Good.”