He strode toward her, obviously not suffering the same paralysis—but then, he wouldn’t be. He was a man of action. And she was glad of it, just now. He pulled her against him, and she went gladly into his arms, not caring that the admiral, the guard, and whoever had entered behind Drake were looking on. She wrapped her arms around him and held on. “You made it back,” she said into his coat.

“I did.” His voice was a rumble in his chest, beneath her ear.

“I say, do I get one of those?”

The too still dissolved into the here and now. She pulled away with a laugh and shot a glare at Camden. “Threat number thirty-two from my list, Camden.”

He made a show of wincing. “No thank you, I rather like my eyebrows.”

Drake shook his head, rolled his eyes, turned up his lips in amusement. And then he reached into his coat and pulled out one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. A soft, green-papered codebook.

She snatched it from his hands as if it were the last cupful of sugar. “You found it!”

“We found one, anyway. You’ll have to tell me if it’s the correct one. Cam wasn’t certain.”

She sat again, there on the stairs, and flipped it open. A two-second glance assured her it wasn’t one they already had. But there was only one way to be sure it was what they needed. She spread the telegrams and codebook out on the next step up, twisting around to use the stair as a desk, and got down to work.

“You know, my dear, you could take that upstairs.”

As if she had the patience for that trek. Margot ignored the admiral’s advice and pulled a pencil stub from her pocket. She hadn’t spare paper to use for her usual lists of numbers, but that was all right. Paper was more for form and habit than necessity. But her head would work just fine for now.

She went from codebook to telegram and back again, her smile growing a little more with each sentence that made sense. It was the right one. They’d found it. Soon she was slapping the first short decrypt to the side—the plain text scrawled directly onto the telegrams, each word above its encoded counterpart.

Drake snatched it up while she went to work on the next. “Identify targets for plan B3.” He paused, probably looking at the admiral. “Do we know what that is?”

“No. Where was that one sent from?”

Margot didn’t need to check her notes—she’d already memorized the order of receipt and location. “From Berlin. To here in London. As is the next, if we’re looking at them in order of dates received.” It being no longer than the original, she even then wrote the last word. “This one says, ‘Locate admiralty codebooks.’”