As he passed next to one of the windows, he heard Lazarus. “… least he’s quieted down…”

Jack smirked to himself. And when he had only half a dozen feet between him and the ground, he let go of the wall and jumped down, landing in a crouch.

He stood, and saw a pair of wide eyes staring at him from over the top of the fence bordering the yard. A little boy watched him, his look more curious than frightened.

Jack placed his finger to his lips. The boy nodded in agreement. Jack winked, and then ran.

*   *   *

“What’s the capital of Portugal?”

Two blank little faces stared back at Eva. The girls shifted on their chairs and plucked at the stitching on their pinafores. They weren’t particularly engaged in their lessons today, but then, Eva wasn’t particularly interested in tutoring, either. She couldn’t stop her thoughts from circling back to Dalton … Jack. Normally, she compartmentalized very well, going back and forth between her current mission with Nemesis and her daily work here, in her rooms.

Yet she found herself rushing the Hallow daughters through their lessons, growing impatient when their attentions wandered. The longer it took to get them through their tutorial, the longer it would be before she could return to headquarters, and Jack.

“Come now, Elspeth, Mary,” Eva said. “We’ve been over this before. It has a lovely castle with crenellations, and a basilica, and a pantheon called Santa Engrácia.” She held up a few pictures of the landmarks, hoping to jog their memory.

“Barcelona,” said Elspeth.

“No, stupid.” Mary rolled her eyes. She was nine and knew everything. “It’s Madrid.”

“Don’t call your sister stupid, Mary. And Madrid is the capital of Spain, not Portugal.”

“I know!” Elspeth, the younger of the two, kicked her heels against her chair’s legs. “Lisbon!”

“Very good.” When the younger girl beamed, Eva continued, “And what happened in 1755 that nearly destroyed the entire city?”

There was a pounding on the stairs outside, as though someone were leaping up them two at a time, but she ignored it. Likely a workman was running late to make repairs on Miss Siles’s rooms. The writer had left her window open the other night, allowing rain to get inside and damage the floorboards. Eva suppressed a sigh. Writers were the most forgetful lot. And now Eva would have to contend with the sounds of a workman’s hammer throughout the day—as if she weren’t already distracted.

“An earthquake,” Mary answered.

At that same moment, a loud knock sounded on Eva’s door. She never locked it during the day, in case any of her pupils came early, and she didn’t want them waiting out in the hall. Before she could ask who it was knocking now, however, the door swung open.

Jack Dalton stood in her doorway.

For a moment, all she could do was gape. His chest rose and fell quickly, and his hair was disheveled. It looked, in fact, as though he’d been running.

Running. Through the city. Looking for her.

And now here he stood. In her rooms.

A quick, stunning burst of pleasure at seeing him, followed immediately by tension and wariness. She stiffened in her chair. Oh Lord, he’d come all the way from the Nemesis headquarters. Did Simon or the others know he was here? What did he want? How had he found her? Were the police chasing him, given that he was an escaped convict? Worst of all—would he give her identity away to Mary and Elspeth Hallow?

Frowning in puzzlement, he crossed the threshold and shut the door behind him. His gaze traveled from her to the wide-eyed girls to the lesson papers arrayed over the table.

Eva slowly rose from her seat.

“We’re learning about Lisbon,” Elspeth said brightly. “It’s the capital of Portugal.”

“Is it, now?” asked Jack. He took a few cautious steps closer, staring at the girls as if they’d dropped out of the sky.

Could she hurry him out the door, before the girls asked questions, before he said anything to reveal her other life?

“Who are you?” asked Mary.

Eva started to answer, a cover story already constructed, but Jack spoke first. “I’m here for schooling, like you.”

The girls giggled. “You’re too old for lessons!” Mary insisted.

Jack’s gaze moved from the girls to Eva, and held. “You can learn new things at any age.” He broke the contact, turning back to the girls. “Never been to Portugal. Have you?”

“We’ve been on holiday in Ramsgate,” said Elspeth. “I had some barley candy and Mary put sand in my hair.”

“Sisters can be the very devil sometimes,” Jack said. “Mine used to follow me everywhere. Couldn’t turn a corner without running right into her. Like a puppy, she was.” Though Jack spoke cheerfully, his eyes were melancholy.

A hard knot lodged itself in Eva’s throat.

“What about you, miss?” Jack directed the question to her. “Do you have any devilish sisters?”

She narrowed her eyes. With the Hallow daughters gazing at her eagerly, he had her in a perfect place for interrogation.

“No sisters. Nor brothers.” None that had lived past infancy, anyway. “I’m all alone.”

“Ah,” Jack countered, “but you’ve got me and Miss Mary and Miss…”

“Elspeth,” the girl filled in.

“That’s three friends. So you’re not alone.”

Jack was most assuredly not her friend. Yet, with him talking so genially with the children—hardly the picture of a tough street-bred ruffian—and being so circumspect in preserving her secret, she had to wonder. Seeing him like this, she felt he became even more real. More … human. Careful demarcations blurred, like a hand-drawn map left out in the rain.

“All right, girls.” She gathered up the lesson papers. “I think that’s enough for today. This nice gentleman’s come for his lessons, and I don’t want to be rude and keep him waiting.”

Mary and Elspeth jumped up from their chairs. “Hooray!”

The utter joy on their faces made her heart sink. It would always be an uphill battle to teach them. But then, most children didn’t care for school or learning. She couldn’t take their reluctance to be there personally. Dentists had it worse. Barely.

Eva helped the girls into their coats and bonnets and walked them to the door. “Don’t forget to study your French verb conjugations.”

“We won’t, Miss Warrick,” Mary said with all the sincerity of a politician. And then she and her sister were off, running down the stairs. A maid of all work always waited for them at the tea shop down the street, ready to escort them home after their lessons. Eva had met the maid a handful of times. She was barely older than the girls, which was usually the case with families of small means. Teenage maids were far cheaper than their older counterparts.

“No running,” Eva called after the girls. Their footsteps slowed for a second, then sped right back up again.

She closed the door and turned to face Jack. He stood near the table, examining her tutoring materials. The books looked fragile and strange in his hands, yet he flipped through them, frowning in concentration.

“A teacher, then.” He looked up at her.

“A tutor.”

His smile, rueful as it was, still sent a curl of heat through her. “Got the right amount of high-handedness for the job.”

“I’m purposeful, not high-handed.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “How did you find me?”

He paced through her rooms, making everything strange and small by his presence. She’d never thought of herself as a particularly delicate or overly feminine person, yet having him here made her conscious of the differences between them and how transitory, almost feeble, the objects she’d gathered around herself were. As though he were far too elemental, too primal for such things as her chintz-covered sitting chair or the painted china roses given to her by a grateful student’s parents.

It wasn’t a particularly comfortable sensation. Especially the way he looked around her rooms, at her belongings, as if drawing out hidden truths about her. Today, he’d learned one, no, two: where she lived and what she did to make a living.

Yet she’d read his dossier. She knew far more about him than he about her. Or did. Perhaps now they were even.

“Jack,” she said, drawing his attention. “I never gave you my address.”

“You said you lived in Brompton.” He plucked up a bottle of toilet water from her nightstand and gave it a sniff before setting it down. “And I heard you talking to Simon. You mentioned Sydney Street.”

“And how did you figure out in which building I lived?”

“I asked a costermonger. A short chap with a red beard. Said I was in from the country and was here to surprise my cousin, but I couldn’t remember her address. He was cagey at first, since we don’t look related, but I told ’im about your parents being away doing good works and them asking me to look after you.”

He looked over at her bed, the bed where she slept each night. Or didn’t. Last night, she’d lain awake, weary but keenly aware. She’d closed her eyes, only to see Jack, dangerous as the darkness, as he’d lurked in the shadows of the drawing room. She had actually looked on her abdomen to see if his hand had left an imprint, for she’d felt his touch continually afterward, like a burn.

“You sneaked past Simon and the others. Escaped headquarters.”

His grin widened. “One little flat compared to a whole prison is nothing.” He prowled over to her dresser and opened it, revealing her clothing.

She stalked over and closed the door before he could reach into the dresser and fondle her petticoats. “Tell me what you’re doing here. Obviously you thought it couldn’t wait until I came back to headquarters later.”

From his pocket, he produced two squares of folded paper. He held them out to her. No denying the look of pride on his face as she took the paper.

She scanned it. Lines of pencil scratches covered the paper, lines that could’ve been writing in English or possibly Chinese mathematics. “I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

He scowled as he snatched the paper back. Jabbing his finger at the markings, he said, “John Young, Victor Skidby, Matthew Branton, John Gilling. I can read ’em off to you, if you can’t figure my writing.”

She glanced between him and the documents he held. “This is the list of men who visited Rockley.”

“Thirty-four names. Don’t know if it’s all of ’em, but that’s a fair number.” He added, almost bashful, “That method for remembering, the one you told me, it worked.”

Carefully, she took the papers back. It took a bit of squinting, but she began to decipher the scrawl that passed for Jack’s writing. Aside from the nigh illegible quality of his penmanship, the list itself was organized and thorough, grouping names together by the time of year in which they met with Rockley and the quantity of meetings they had with the nobleman.

She couldn’t deny it. “I’m … impressed.”

God protect her, but when a look of pride softened his rough features, her heart tightened. He’d never been praised for thinking his way through a situation.

Self-preservation made her say, far more lightly than she felt, “Perhaps I should start tutoring adults, as well.”

“Like to think that I’m a special case.” His voice deepened, his gaze holding hers, and she recalled with pristine clarity what he’d felt like last night, pressed close behind her as they’d hidden themselves behind the folding screen. The heat and size of him. The response of her own body at his nearness, and its burgeoning hunger to learn more of his touch.

Having him here, in her private space, the only man who’d truly seen both halves of herself—it soothed and troubled her at the same time. To draw someone near, for the first time, brought forth a longing she hadn’t known she possessed. But she feared that desire, too. She needed to keep herself whole, complete.

For all the unexpected connection they shared, Jack was still an unknown. Not fully trustworthy, not truly.

He came here, a voice in her mind insisted, instead of trying to get to Rockley on his own.

Because he realizes it’s too dangerous right now.

She didn’t know what to think, only that she needed him out of her rooms, out of this facet of her life.

“We ought to get back to headquarters,” she said brusquely. “If the others have found you missing, they might call the constabulary. You’re a wanted man, and if you’re taken into custody, or killed in the pursuit, then the mission is over.”