“Did you show anyone?”
“No.” Her voice was soft. “Not yet.”
He stood behind her now, not touching, but near. Close enough for her to feel steadiness where her own certainly trembled.
“You did the right thing,” he said.
“I didn’t say I was hiding it.”
“You didn’t have to.”
Leticia turned then, facing him.
“There’s something at work here,” she said. “And I don’t know if it’s following us, or if we’re chasing it.”
Gabriel looked at her for a long moment. “Maybe both.”
He didn’t speak right away.
Would he ask her what it looked like? How certain was she? But he only said, “Show me.”
She led him back up the ridge, her steps careful on the uneven stones. Barrington lingered behind, half in the doorway of the shed, watching the sea with polite disinterest.
The cloister wall curved into the slope like a jawbone left by time. Leticia stepped to the flat stone near its base and brushed the moss aside with the back of her glove.
The carving was still there, simple, shallow, but unmistakable.
A diamond.
And inside it, a raven.
Gabriel crouched beside her. He didn’t touch it, only studied the way light caught in the grooves, the precision that ruled out accident. His gaze swept left, right, cataloguing what was missing, marking everything else that wasn’t there.
When he stood, his voice was quiet. “It’s deliberate.”
Leticia nodded.
“You don’t have to tell anyone,” he said quietly. “But don’t ignore what you saw.”
She looked up at him, breath caught in her throat, words hovering and unsaid.
Behind them, a gull wheeled overhead, calling once before vanishing into the wind.
She turned from the stone. “Let’s go before Aunt Margaret buys the guide’s coat out from under him.”
Gabriel’s tone went dry. “He would be a poorer man for the bargain.”
Leticia glanced up, her lips curving. “And she would still think it a victory.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The morning brokegray and reluctant. Leticia stood at the drawing room window, the newspaper slack in her hand. The quiet in the house pressed close, not peace, but the hush before something declared itself. Her teacup cooled beside her, the porcelain gone pale with waiting. She should have been dressing. Instead, she stood anchored to the spot.
Upstairs, wrapped in linen and in a box in the back of her drawer, the brooch waited heavy with questions she no longer dared to ignore.
Leticia crossed to the writing desk and began sifting through her aunt’s neatly stacked society pages. Announcements. Engagements. Auctions. Each line a trail she hadn’t known to follow. At first, nothing stood out. Then, a rhythm emerged. Lady Vexley. Mrs. Denham, Mrs. Harcourt, names repeating like the tide, a pattern hidden in plain sight.
The door opened, and her aunt entered, quiet as always.
