They were in for a long conversation, he feared. And then what? That Rowan had not yet been brought back was a very good sign. That she might not be coming back left an unsettling dilemma for Lilly Junior. So what could the Baron and Baronne possibly do to her? his mind mocked savagely. Kill her?

They talked of her life in the crèche. He teased out an account of the Dendarii raid from her point of view. How she had managed to rejoin the Baron. Sharp, sharp kid. What a mess for Mark. The pauses grew longer. He was going to end up talking about himself soon, just to keep things going, and that was incredibly dangerous. She was running out of conversation, her eyes turning more and more often toward the door.

"Rowan's not coming back," said Lilly Junior at last. "Is she."

"I think not," he said frankly. "I think she's escaped clean."

"How can you tell?"

"If they had caught her, they would have come for you, even if they didn't bring her back here. From their point of view, Rowan is still in here. It's you who's missing."

"You don't think they could have mistaken her for me, do you?" she gasped in alarm. "Taken her to be united with my lady?"

He wasn't sure if she was afraid for Rowan, or afraid that Rowan would steal her place. What a ghastly, hideous new paranoia. "How soon are you . . . no," he reassured her. Himself. "No. At a glance in the hallway, sure, you'd look quite alike, but someone would have to take a closer look for that. She's years older than you. It's just not possible."

"What should I do?" She tried to get to her feet; he held her arm, pulled her back to his side on the bed.

"Nothing," he advised. "It's all right. Tell them—tell them I made you stay in here."

She looked askance at his littleness. "How?"

"Trickery. Threats. Psychological coercion," he said truthfully. "You can blame it on me."

She looked most dubious.

How old was she? He'd spent the last two hours teasing out her whole life story, and there didn't seem to be very much of it. Her talk was an odd mixture of sharpness and naiveté. The greatest adventure of her life had been her brief kidnapping by the Dendarii Mercenaries.

Rowan. She's made it out. Then what? Would she come back for him? How? This was Jackson's Whole. You couldn't trust anyone. People were meat, here. Like this girl in front of him. He had a sudden nightmarish picture of her, empty-skulled, blank-eyed.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "You are so beautiful . . . on the inside. You deserve to live. Not be eaten by that old woman."

"My lady is a great woman," she said sturdily. "She deserves to live more."