Is it a ridiculously overwrought story? Of course it is. But even the guard cannot help but open the door another crack. He’s young, perhaps younger than me.

“The children,” I stagger forward. “Please, sir! Come help the children.”

I can see Emily now, behind him, her bound hands lowered as if to hide them. Our eyes meet.

“Oh!” she exclaims. “The poor children. You must help, Rodgers. I shall remain here. Go with the poor girl and help that dying child!”

He glances over his shoulder. “You’ll stay here?”

“Yes. You go with the governess, and I will remain right here until you return.”

One long pause, and then the guard—Rodgers—awkwardly slides from the captain’s quarters while closing the door behind him, blocking me from seeing Emily is a bound captive. I pretend not to have noticed, and I wheel to lead him down the hall.

Jenkins and Nicolas are waiting down that hall. Each is inside a room. Jenkins is the closest to me, hidden behind a half-open door. Nicolas is farther down, his door open. When Rodgers passes that open door, Nicolas will swing out to confront him, and Jenkins will emerge from his hiding spot to run back and free his daughter while I help Nicolas with Rodgers.

I pass the first door where Jenkins waits. It is supposed to be half-closed. It is not. The door is open, and I catch a glimpse of a figure within.

Oh, no. We trusted Jenkins to follow the plan, and he has bungled it. Forgotten to half close the door or—worse—decided he must fight his daughter’s captor himself.

I will not look that way. I will keep going in hopes Rodgers does not glance in Jenkins’s direction. I am one step past the door when Lord Thomas flies from the woodwork, charging at me, his face contorted. I stumble. It takes that one heartbeat for me to remember he is only a ghost, but that heartbeat is enough. I fall back. Hands grab me, and a voice shouts, “He is in the next room!”

It all happens at once, a jumble of sound and sight as I’m yanked off my feet by those hands and dragged into the room my attacker sprang from.

I have made an unforgivable error. I saw the door partly open, with a figure within, and I did not look toward it, fearing I would call Rodger’s attention to Jenkins. Yet it must not have been Jenkins in that doorway at all, but another of Norrington’s men lying in wait, one who subdued Jenkins and now has me and—

That’s when I twist to fight off my attacker, and I see his face.

It is Jenkins.

32

A clang of metal sounds from the hall beyond the room where Jenkins has dragged me. Another clang. A grunt. Nicolas’s voice, saying something I cannot make out over the clash of swords.

Jenkins whips me around and shoves me against the wall. I kick and snarl, but he has me pinned, rope cinching around my wrists before I can free myself.