Li Min made another of her disapproving noises, pushing him back down. “This was used as a place to amass treasure and documents until it was forgotten. Someone sold me its secrets for a price.”

“Seems a rather inconvenient hiding place for you,” he noted, rubbing the back of his neck. To have to go through the hassle of Carthage to arrive here…

“It’s abandoned in every era, up until the twentieth century. And there are many, many passages in the Papal City, as you know. Three in this year alone.”

He didn’t, but Nicholas nodded nonetheless. “What is your plan, if not to bring us back to Ironwood?”

“She’s unconscious, and you’re as weak as a lamb,” Li Min reminded him. “You’ve trusted me thus far. I do wish to receive recompense for the gold that was stolen from me, but I am curious about this mission of yours. How it ties to the many threads that are reverberating throughout time.”

“We’ve already spent it. Your gold. There’s nothing left, and we’ve nothing else to trade you.”

“You’ve that gold.” She pointed to the leather string tied around his neck—Etta’s earring. “That is not nothing.”

His hand closed over the earring and the glass pendant. “If you think about touching this, you will lose more than a hand.”

Li Min looked doubtful at that, her dark brows lifting in pity.

“You can have this,” he said hopefully, holding up the hand with the ring. Sensation had fully returned to it; his arm felt unusually stiff, but cooperated as he tested its range of movement. Perhaps he had simply torn a muscle, as he’d originally believed.

“I’d have to cut it off, which would only kill you faster,” she informed him.

Hell and damnation. That confirmed the Belladonna’s warning.

“Where did you come by that amulet?” she asked after a moment, pointing to the large bead he’d been given.

“A boy gave it to me,” he said.

“A stranger?”

“Yes, what of it?”

She shrugged. “Nothing. Everything. He wished you protection and good fortune. It has value. Do not part with it for anything less than your life.”

“If it’s so valuable, then why don’t you take it to cancel our debt?”

“It is not the object that holds power, but the intention behind it. The wish made when it changed hands. I could no more steal that than I could take the light from the stars.”

Something in her words rattled him to his core. I shouldn’t have accepted it. Who needed protection more than that child?

“I suppose you see yourself as ‘protection and good fortune,’” he said, wiping the sweat from his face.

“How you wish to see me is your choice,” she said. “For now, you should know that I am your only chance of survival.”

Neither friend nor foe, it seemed. More a temporary ally, the way Sophia had ultimately come to fit into his life. Nicholas looked around again, drawing his knees to his chest. “As long as we don’t run out of air, this will be a suitable hiding place.”

“It is convenient, too,” she said idly. “If you die, I can leave you down here.”

“If Sophia dies, you mean,” he said, surprised at the tightening in his throat.

Li Min shook her head. “She will not die. Too stubborn. Too much left unfinished. It’s you I fear for. Huffing and puffing like a locomotive over a minor flesh wound.”

“A minor—” Nicholas fought his wince. To knot the tattered remains of his pride, he added, “I’ve seen myself through far worse than this.”

Li Min made a disbelieving sound at the back of her throat. “Running from Ironwoods?”

“Ship boardings,” he said. “My—” Nicholas paused, then continued. “My adoptive…father, he is a captain.”

How strange that he’d never referred to Hall that way aloud. It was always “the captain” or “the man who raised me.” But for all his hesitance to put that label to it in his own era, Nicholas had always known the truth in his heart. As a grown man and an officer on Hall’s ship, he hadn’t wanted the others to feel he was receiving preferential treatment, or that he hadn’t earned his position there. As a child, some part of him had feared that Hall might face judgment if Nicholas went around telling that to other, less…forward-thinking people of their century.

What a poisonous thing it was, to distance himself from a man he loved, a man who had cared for him, for fear of what others might think.

He craned his neck back to find Li Min’s dark eyes studying him. When she didn’t break her gaze, he realized he hadn’t finished his thought. “Fought off pirates for years on voyages, and then became a legal one at the outbreak of the war. Sorry, the American War for Independence. There’s been quite a number of them, hasn’t there?”

“Pirate?” Li Min said with disbelief. “No chance.”

“And what do you know of it?” Nicholas said, trying to straighten his shoulders.

He felt her shrug. “It’s not an insult. I only mean to say you’d hesitate before cutting off a man’s head to steal his gold teeth. It’s not a qualm you’re allowed in that line of work.”

Fair point. “Spent a lot of time with pirates, have you?”

To his surprise, she said, “Yes. I served under Ching Shih for ten years, from…the time I was a child.”