Read Chapter 3: A Stolen Glimpse

The second bell for dinner had yet to ring when Jack stepped out onto the A-deck promenade, collar turned up against the bite of the North Atlantic wind. He moved with the unhurried stride of a gentleman taking the air, but his eyes worked the crowd like a pickpocket’s fingers—quick, restless, cataloguing.

Vance stood forty feet ahead, leaning against the rail with his back to the sea, a cigarette burning between two fingers. He was speaking to someone half-hidden behind the curve of a lifeboat. A woman. Black veil draped low over her face, gloves to the elbow, her posture rigid as a wire.

Jack slowed, drifting toward a deckchair, pretending to fuss with his cuffs.

He caught Vance’s voice, low and clipped, cut apart by the wind. “—can’t be patient forever. He’ll be on that list, and the key will matter. You know what it opens.”

The veiled woman said something Jack couldn’t hear. She pressed a folded slip of paper into Vance’s palm, and as she did, a glint of silver swung from the chain at her throat. A locket, egg-sized, catching the pale afternoon light.

Vance pocketed the note without reading it. “Tomorrow. Dining saloon. I’ll have an answer by then.”

The woman turned to go. Jack made a decision in the space of a heartbeat—the kind of decision that had kept him alive in Belfast alleys and Liverpool docks. He stepped into her path, pulling out his pocket watch with theatrical clumsiness.

“Pardon me, madam,” he said, letting the watch slip from his fingers. It clattered to the deck between them, and he bent to retrieve it, angling his body to shield the movement.

She paused, startled, her veil shifting just enough for Jack to glimpse the sharp line of her jaw, the corner of a mouth painted a severe wine-red. “You dropped something, sir.”

“So I did. Clumsy of me.” He straightened, watch in hand, and gave her a sheepish grin—the kind that had opened more than one locked door for him in Boston. “These decks are slippier than they look.”

She inclined her head, polite but ice-cold, and continued past him toward the first-class entrance.

Jack turned back toward the rail, pocketing his watch. In his other hand, concealed within the fold of his coat sleeve, he now held the silver locket. The clasp had been delicate—a jeweler’s work, not a locksmith’s—and it had yielded to a hairpin in under three seconds flat.

Vance had already moved, striding toward the forward staircase, his broad shoulders cutting a path through the strolling passengers. He never looked back at the veiled woman. That was interesting. They weren’t lovers, then. The exchange had the flavor of business—furtive, exact.

Jack found an empty alcove beside a lifeboat davit and pried the locket open with his thumbnail.

Inside, no portrait. No dried flower or lock of hair. Just a folded scrap of paper, thin as cigarette tissue, covered in a neat, slanted hand.

*W.H. — 45 / 8,309 / 2-L* *C.V. — 61 / 12,447 / 4-H* *E.S. — 30 / 1,112 / 7-D* *H.F. — 28 / 9,000 / 1-C*

Four lines. He read them again, then a third time, his pulse ticking faster.

Initials. Numbers. Cabin designations.

W.H., C.V., E.S., H.F. Harold Finch. *His* stolen name on the list, paired with twenty-eight and nine thousand. Nine thousand in hundred-pound notes, if the leather case was anything to go by. Cabin 1-C—his own borrowed stateroom.

Jack let out a breath that misted in the cold air. He knew what the numbers meant now, or at least the shape of them. A ledger, kept in code. Amounts, likely. Accounts. And the letters:

Vance had cabin H. Four.

Jack’s knuckles whitened around the locket. The ace of spades had called it. Vance was *in* the scheme, not just circling it.

He was about to pocket the locket when a shadow fell across him.

“Mr. Finch.”

Jack snapped the locket shut, tucking it into his waistcoat with practiced ease, and turned.

A steward stood three feet away, wringing a cap between his hands. Young—mid-twenties, sandy-haired, with the nervous twitch of a man who’d had too much coffee and too little sleep. His name badge read *B. PRITCHARD*.

“Can I help you?” Jack kept his tone pleasant, first-class pleasant, the kind that expected deference.

“I—” Pritchard swallowed. He glanced around the promenade, as if expecting someone to be watching. “I was told to find you, sir. Brought a message from the purser’s office. They’ve misplaced your reservation card.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Misplaced it?”

“Temporary, sir. They asked if you’d stop by before dinner to confirm your details. Paperwork, sir. Nothing more.”

Something in the steward’s voice didn’t match his words. The man’s eyes kept flicking to Jack’s waistcoat—where the locket had just been hidden.

“Right,” Jack said, easy as driftwood. “I’ll pop down. Appreciate the heads-up.”

Pritchard nodded too quickly, backed away two steps, then turned and hurried toward the companionway, his gait stiff with dread.

Jack watched him go. A man who’s afraid of someone is a man who can be turned. And a man who’s afraid of *you* is a man worth interrogating.

But the purser’s office was a front. It had to be. Jack’s reservation documents had been meticulous—forged in Quebec, stamped with enough official wax to satisfy the most suspicious purser on the White Star line. Nobody misplaced those cards by accident.

He turned the locket over in his fingers. Four names. A key. A list of fortunes left unclaimed in bank vaults, if the leather case could be believed.

And now Vance was on the move, and someone on this ship had the run of the passenger manifest.

Jack stepped back onto the promenade and found an empty stretch of railing. The sea stretched grey-green to the horizon, endless and indifferent. In a few hours, the dinner gong would sound. He’d sit at the captain’s table, smile at the ladies, toast the voyage, and pretend the cold sweat at the small of his back was just the ocean spray.

But first, he had a steward to find.

The purser’s office sat on C-deck, a narrow room lined with brass grilles and caged mahogany. A bespectacled clerk looked up as Jack entered, blinking through thick lenses.

“Mr. Finch?” The clerk shuffled papers. “I’m not aware of any issue with your reservation.”

“The steward Pritchard said you’d misplaced my card.”

“Pritchard?” The clerk’s brow furrowed. “We don’t have a Pritchard on the steward staff, sir.”

Jack’s smile didn’t waver. “Must have misheard the name. Tall fellow, sandy hair, nervous disposition.”

The clerk shook his head slowly. “Doesn’t ring a bell, sir. But I can double-check your file if you’ll give me a moment.”

“No need,” Jack said, already backing toward the door. “I must have been mistaken. These corridors all look alike.”

He was halfway back to the staircase when he felt it—the weight of eyes on the back of his neck.

He didn’t turn around. He knew that weight. It followed him in every port, every stolen name, every borrowed suit.

It was the weight of a man who’d been sent to find him, and who knew exactly where to look.

Pritchard—or whoever he was—hadn’t been sent to inform Jack of a clerical error. He’d been sent to *find* the man carrying the locket.

And Jack had just confirmed it.

The dinner gong rang somewhere in the depths of the ship, deep and bronze. Jack tightened his jaw and climbed the stairs toward the first-class dining saloon, the silver locket burning against his ribs like a brand.

Someone on this ship knew the stowaway’s face and the dead man’s name.

And by tomorrow, they’d know he had the key.