Chapter 32
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Thirty-Two
Ellie marched toward the waiting soldiers, her heart pounding in her chest. Jacobs’ presence was a cold threat at her back.
Borthwick had gathered his forces around the small building that served as a gatehouse for the stepwell.
Ellie quickly picked out Adam’s figure among them.
He wasn’t bound and still had his machete, but two men stood at his back with rifles in their hands—leaving her with no illusions as to whether or not he had gone from a curiosity to a prisoner.
The colonel faced another captive, one whose hands had been lashed behind his back.
“Subhas Kōnja,” Borthwick said smoothly.
“I’ve had my eye on you for a while now.
Always suspected you were something more than just a law student.
Leading an armed band of revolutionaries against an official military expedition is certainly evidence enough to brand you a criminal—along with the rest of your village. ”
At his final words, Subhas’s air of mutinous calm burst into fury. He pulled against the men who held him as Borthwick circled him like a newly caged tiger.
“These hill villages are like wasp nests, you see.” Borthwick spoke as though for an audience, but Ellie wasn’t sure who was meant to be listening. The milling sepoys, who didn’t speak English? Singh Rao, who watched the proceedings with stoic silence?
Perhaps it was Adam, whose expression tightened with barely concealed disgust.
He had never been much of an actor. Ellie rather liked that about him.
Borthwick faced Subhas with distant contempt. “There’s always violence seething under the surface.”
Ellie recalled what a declaration of criminal status would mean for a community like the Adrija—forced relocation and controlled movement as everyone’s livelihoods and homes were stripped away from them.
Helpless fury washed through her.
Borthwick waved a dismissive hand. “Put him with the others.”
The soldiers hauled Subhas away. He didn’t struggle any longer, but his gaze found Ellie as he was taken, hard with determination and rebellion.
She read the promise in that look. Subhas wasn’t done yet—and they were still in this together.
Ellie let herself be reassured by that, even if the odds were still increasingly overwhelming.
Everything had happened too fast.
The events in the stepwell had only taken minutes to unfold. Ellie had barely had time to realize that Neil and Constance were there before Dawson was tumbling into the well and the place started falling apart.
She knew that her brother and her best friend must be relatively safe. Adam wouldn’t have casually reported them crushed if it had been true. He wouldn’t have been capable of it.
Jacobs’ lip had twitched with irritation at Adam’s words—because he’d also known that Adam was lying.
In a terrible moment of tension, Ellie had waited to see whether Jacobs would call him out—but as much as he must have wanted Neil and Constance in his clutches, he’d known that exposing Adam’s real motives would put all the control in Borthwick’s hands.
Jacobs wasn’t ready to risk that—not when he still needed them alive—but the situation was locked in a precarious state of balance that might easily tip into disaster.
The weight of that sat like lead in Ellie’s gut right alongside her worry for Neil and Constance. She and Adam would have to find a way to go back for them, and soon—but she had no idea how they were going to do it.
There were too many people at risk. It felt like juggling fire.
Sitting by Ellie’s boots, Kalb perked up his head as a soldier passed by munching dried rations. The dog made a low, grumbling whine of desire in the back of his throat.
Ellie glared down at him. “You have not been even remotely lucky.”
Kalb wagged his tail at her, panting hopefully.
All of this would feel far less desperate if she had another ally, someone else in Borthwick’s camp who might possibly lend them aid… or at least look away at the right moment.
There was one person here who might serve that purpose—if Ellie could convince him that loyalty to Borthwick wasn’t really in his best interests.
Which meant that she needed to know what his interests were.
Ellie had already been itching for the answer to that question. She had been locked into a dance of violence for months, and she was done navigating it half-blind.
She sought out the place where Jacobs walked among the trees.
“Come on,” Ellie ordered, firming with determination.
She stepped forward—but Kalb didn’t follow. The dog froze instead, his attention fixed on a lightly quivering stand of brush.
Ellie recognized the special gleam in his eyes.
Oh no…
The shrubbery rustled, and Kalb bolted. Leaves shook furiously as the lanky golden-haired beast crashed through the growth after some small helpless animal.
“Kalb!” Ellie shouted uselessly after him.
One of the passing sepoys chuckled at her plight, calling over in sympathetic Punjabi.
“Yes, I know he’ll bloody come back eventually,” Ellie grumbled to herself in response.
She was torn. Should she try to go after him?
The blasted dog could run nearly forty miles an hour. She didn’t stand a chance.
Leaving Kalb to his own ill-behaved devices, she set off after Jacobs.
She found him at the far edge of the makeshift camp, leaning against one of the ruined buildings and watching the soldiers with a disinterested glare. His black eyes flicked to Ellie as she arrived, cold and deeply unwelcoming. “Here to ask me to help your friends?”
The words were light, but Ellie could hear the threat in them. She refused to let it intimidate her. She was done playing games with this man.
She set her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Why are you here?”
His tone was smooth as he answered. “That’s hardly a mystery, is it? I’m just a bloke doing his job.”
“You aren’t the sort of bloke who’d take a job that involves licking Borthwick’s boots,” Ellie countered.
His glare heated with a flash of temper. “Careful, Eleanora.”
The sound of her name on his lips made her shudder. It was meant to. Jacobs wanted her to leave.
Ellie stepped closer instead. “You’re after justice. That means someone wronged you.”
Something flashed behind the perfect control of his expression.
“Or maybe not you,” Ellie deduced, her mind whirling with furious calculations as she read the dark nuance of his look. “Someone you cared about. A man like you doesn’t have friends. Family, then. A sister? A mother?”
The anger in him sharpened at the sound of the word.
“It was your mother,” Ellie spilled out with a burst of surprise.
Jacobs seethed with threat as he loomed over her.
She might as well have been baiting a cobra—but she had to keep going.
If Ellie could get to the heart of Jacobs’ motivations, she might find the key to getting him to help her…
help that could mean the difference between saving the Brahmastra and rescuing her friends.
She would solve this mystery, once and for all, using all the power of her reasoning to pry it from Jacobs, whether he liked it or not.
“You aren’t a man who had the care of a loving parent,” Ellie reasoned.
“Whatever happened to your mother, it took her from your life a very long time ago—but you don’t know who did it.
You would have killed them already if you knew.
You’re trying to find out who it was—only you must have some idea, or you wouldn’t know where to search.
And where are you searching? British Honduras? Egypt?”
She read the rage on his face and knew she was pushing him—but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to stop. Not this time. Not until she’d learned what she needed to know.
“No. It isn’t about the places the Order has sent you,” she pressed. “It’s the Order itself—who they are. What they can grant you.”
More of the picture took form—and started to make sense.
“Your accent. The way Borthwick treats you. You were born poor. That’s why the Order matters.
There’s one thing they can grant you that you can’t find anywhere else—access to the upper echelons of society.
They’ll let you get closer because they need a tool—a weapon.
You don’t know who killed your mother… but you know he’s powerful. That he’s one of them.”
A fragment of Ellie’s other life tumbled into place, woven through with memories of purple sashes and wooden placards.
The suffragists had advocated for more than just women’s right to vote.
Desperate people had been drawn to them, hoping that perhaps a group of ladies brave enough to go up against Parliament would be able to save them from threats more intimate and terrible than disenfranchisement.
Ellie recalled what she had learned from that experience with a wrenching burst of sympathy. “Most women are hurt by someone they love.”
His face washed over with an uncharacteristically raw rage, and Ellie knew that she had gone too far.
Jacobs yanked her around the corner of the building, put his hand to her throat, and pinned her against the stones.
With a twitch of his fingers, his grip tightened.
Ellie couldn’t breathe. Instinct took over, and she clawed at his hand where it held her.
His eyes were wild. She had stumbled into a secret that had shattered what little tolerance the man had left for her… and unleashed murder.
With an awkward rustle of leaves, Dawson stumbled around the corner of the building. He stared at Ellie and Jacobs like a startled deer.
For a moment, Ellie felt a desperate, irrational hope that he would intervene—that this weak-willed, self-absorbed man might actually do something to save her.
Dawson took a step back. “I didn’t… That is…”
He turned and ran back into the trees.
A battle raged inside of Jacobs, fury wrenching against his iron habit of control. Ellie watched him pull himself back from the brink. It happened slowly, with immense effort, as the need for air consumed her, blackening the edges of her vision.
Jacobs slammed her violently against the ancient stones, and then let her go.
Ellie fell to her knees in the dead leaves at his feet, gasping rawly.
A storm roiled behind his eyes as he stared down at her. The control he had just regained had been hard won—and remained dangerously precarious.
Without another word, he turned and walked away.
Adam burst around the corner and dropped to the ground. “Ellie!”
She reached for him, and he pulled her into his arms, only vaguely conscious of the soldiers shouting at his back.
Rifles cocked, then went still as Singh Rao’s authoritative voice called out an order. The sepoys moderated their pose, still wary but no longer actively threatening.
Her throat hurt. Her lungs burned. She could feel the quick thrum of Adam’s heartbeat through his shirt as she clung to him.
“What happened? I saw Dawson running like a bat out of hell…” His gaze dropped to the red marks on Ellie’s throat and darkened with low-burning fury. “Who was it?”
Singh Rao stood at Adam’s back, taking in the scene with a frown.
Ellie grasped Adam’s arm and gave it a warning squeeze. “It’s nothing,” she said quickly. “Everything is fine.”
Adam’s look was mutinous, but he wouldn’t contradict Ellie in front of the subedar and his men. He helped her to her feet instead, keeping her at his side as he walked back to where the soldiers were assembling for their march.
Ellie picked out Jacobs stalking alone at the head of the line. Her muscles stiffened on instinct.
Adam felt it, and his hand tensed where he held her waist.
Ellie caught a handful of his shirt, anchoring him to her side. “It was my fault,” she said quickly.
“Your fault?” Adam seethed incredulously.
“I pushed him into it,” Ellie hurriedly explained. “I wanted to learn why he’s here—and I think I succeeded.”
Adam pulled Ellie out of the line of men. He whirled her around to face him, his eyes burning like blue fire. “Let’s get one thing straight right now, Princess. Nobody gets to hurt you. Nobody.”
They weren’t just words. They were a vow, one laced with danger and heat. A tension in Ellie loosened at the sound of it.
Singh Rao flashed them another wary look, and Adam guided her back into the march.
“You stay with me from here out,” he ordered as they started to walk, his hand steady on the small of her back.
A knee-jerk instinct prompted Ellie to protest, but it quickly withered. Adam’s words weren’t about possession or control.
And she still remembered what it had felt like not to breathe.
“I will,” she promised.
“Good,” Adam bit back. “Because we’re getting everybody out of this mess alive. Everyone. That clear?”
Ellie took in the stubborn set of his jaw with a soft glow of admiration. “It’s clear.”
At her warm tone, Adam cast her a rueful sideways look—and then led her on.