But some of them wereverydifferent.
Her hands shook a little as she began rifling through the ledger, trying to work out what had changed. The location markers and the courier symbols were the same. But the final column of marks, the ones that marked timings—that was where the difference lay.
She shot to her feet. “Charlie!” she bellowed. “Niall! Come quickly!”
It took only moments before she heard the thump of footsteps as they came racing down the stairs.
“What?” Charlie said, bursting into the room a step ahead of her husband. “What is it?”
Ruby waved the parchment at them. “We were wrong! MacInnes hasn’t fallen for it at all! He knew all along!”
Niall went pale. “What do ye mean?”
Ruby spread her new parchment on the table. “I found other marks on the parchment Hamish brought—ones that had been rubbed out and changed.” She swallowed. “The shipment isn’t coming in on the high tide. It’s coming in tomorrow night!”
Realization dawned on Niall’s face. “My God. They passed us false information. They knew it was a trap all along.”
Ruby nodded, swallowing past the sudden lump in her throat. “The shipment is coming tomorrow. MacInnes is meeting Evan tomorrow. Don’t you see what that means?”
Charlie’s hands flew to her mouth. “Oh no.”
Ruby forced the words out. “Tomorrow, after the shipment arrives at Evan’s estate, and the rebellion begins, MacInnes won’t need Evan anymore. He will be expendable.”
“And he’ll kill him,” Niall breathed. “We have to get word to Evan and we have to get Bryce’s forces here before Evan meets MacInnes tomorrow.”
Ruby glanced at the window where dawn was beginning to break. She realized with a start that she’d been up all night.
“Oh, my God. We’re too late,” she breathed. “Because it’s not tomorrow. Look. It’s today.”
