Read Chapter 18: The Truth in the Cave

The cave smelled of wet stone and copper. Ashworth slumped against the wall, his hand pressed hard against his left shoulder, blood seeping between his fingers in dark ribbons. The Prussian torchlight had faded to a distant glow above them, but the sound of boots crunching gravel still drifted down through the fissure.

Élise tore a strip from her petticoat and knelt beside him. "Let me see it."

He didn't argue. When she pulled his hand away, the wound gaped—a clean hole, front to back, the ball having passed through the meat of his shoulder. She packed the cloth against it and pressed. He hissed through his teeth.

"I need to know who you are," she said, not looking up. "The real answer. Not the name you gave at Brussels."

He watched her work, eyes half-lidded with pain. "You first."

She tied the bandage tight and sat back on her heels. The cave walls dripped. Somewhere above, a Prussian officer barked an order in guttural syllables. They had minutes at best, maybe an hour. He was bleeding too fast to run much farther.

"I am Élise Delacroix," she said, her voice low and steady. "My father is Émile Delacroix. He was Napoleon's mapmaker. And he is dead because of the secrets they made him keep—or the ones he chose to hide. My brother André disappeared somewhere between Quatre Bras and Waterloo. The army told my mother he was killed. They gave her a folded flag and a pension slip. But André was not the kind of man to die without leaving a mark." She paused. "I came to find him. Whatever he knew, it went to the grave with him—or it didn't. I intend to find out which."

Ashworth—if that was his name—stared at her for a long moment. Then he laughed, a dry, brittle sound that cost him visibly.

"Delacroix," he repeated. "The mapmaker's daughter."

"You know the name."

"I know the map." He shifted, grimacing, and pulled a folded oilskin from inside his coat. His hands were shaking. He offered it to her. "This is what Whitmore carried on the night he was taken."

She took it carefully and unfolded it. It was a map of the border region, but annotated in a hand she recognized only distantly—her father's markings, the careful notations of contour lines and supply routes. The château was circled in ink. Laurent.

"I'm not Ashworth," he said quietly.

She looked up.

"My name is Captain Julian Whitmore. Lieutenant Ashworth was my wife's brother. He died at Quatre Bras, leading a charge that should never have been ordered. The papers he carried—the ones everyone says were lost—they weren't lost. They were taken. And the woman who took them was my sister-in-law, Mary Ashworth, who vanished from Brussels the night before the battle." He swallowed hard. "I've been hunting her ever since, using her brother's name because it opens doors mine would slam shut. There are men in London who want those papers buried. There are men in Paris who want them burned. And there are men in between who would kill anyone who's touched them."

Élise looked down at the map in her hands. Her father's hand. The château. The same destination Étienne's note had promised.

"You think your wife's sister has been looking for my father's maps?"

"I think your father and Whitmore—the real Whitmore, Mary's brother—were both tracking the same thing. And I think whoever killed your father is the same man who took Mary."

The word *took* hung in the damp air.

"You said taken," Élise said. "Not hiding."

Julian Whitmore's jaw tightened. "I said taken."

Above them, another shout. A stone skittered down the fissure and struck the cave floor. Julian's eyes flicked upward, then back to her.

"The château," he said, "is three days southeast of Paris. My sister-in-law was last seen on the road to it. Your brother's name appears in dispatches from the same region, two weeks before Waterloo." He reached out and took her wrist, surprising her with the strength in his grip. "You and I are not allies, Mademoiselle Delacroix. I don't trust you. You don't trust me. But we are going to the same place, and if we go separately, the Prussians above us will pick us off one by one."

Élise looked at his hand on her wrist, at the blood already soaking through the bandage, at the map in her lap that smelled faintly of her father's tobacco.

"What happens when we reach the château?" she asked.

"Then we decide whether we're still enemies."

A long, ragged breath escaped him. His eyes fluttered, and for a moment she thought he would lose consciousness entirely. But he caught himself, jaw set, and forced his gaze back to hers.

"You have a token," he said. "The tunnel man's token. It will get us through the border posts as long as we move before dawn. After that, fever takes me, and you'll have to carry my weight or leave me behind."

"I won't leave you," she said.

His mouth curved into something that was almost a smile, though it didn't reach his eyes.

"Everyone says that," he murmured. "Before they do."

His hand slipped from her wrist. His head lolled back against the rock. For a horrible moment, Élise thought he was gone—but his chest rose, shallow and steady, and she exhaled.

She folded the map carefully, as her father would have, and tucked it into her bodice.

Above, the Prussians had gone quiet.

That was worse.