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The marks were a crude imitation of the same stylised clematis as had been on the octant. The five petals and the single stem and leaf. Five petals... She placed her fingers and thumb on each of the petals and, holding her breath, she pushed.
She felt Mateo start behind her as the stone sank back with a puff of dust. Spanish curses mixed with her awe as the stone shifted and slid to one side. Her legs began to tremble as an entrance appeared in the side of the rock. Retrieving her flashlight, she peered into the gloom and caught sight of the top of a set of wooden steps.
She turned to find Mateo shaking his head. She could read the concern in his eyes, and she felt it too. She was eager, desperate even, but not naïve. He looked off out to the horizon and she hungrily ate up his profile. The proud brow, the stubble crossing a jaw her palm ached to feel, the perfect outline of lips that had brought her the most intense pleasure. All that she collated in a second. But what took a few more moments to process was that they didn’t need words for this. She knew his thoughts as much as he knew hers. She knew he was finding arguments for them to turn back, warring with his desire to let her do this. Three days ago, he would have thrown her over his shoulder and left the island. But now? It wasn’t just that he was also invested in proving his father’s theories. She felt, believed, hoped, that it was also because of her. Because he trusted her. What they had shared last night, that connection, it was more than just physical, even if she tried to keep telling herself it wasn’t.
‘We do it safe and we do it right,’ he said, when he finally levelled her with a gaze.
‘Yes, we do,’ she agreed.
They checked and rechecked their bags. Mateo pulled ropes, harnesses, torches, flare guns, first-aid kits and water from their bags and put them all back, while Evie stood a little way into the cave that the rock door had revealed.
She passed the torch’s beam over the top of the wooden steps that led down into the maw of darkness below. Behind her she heard the snap of an emergency glowstick, and a flash of bright neon swept over her shoulder and down into the pit.
The staircase that wrapped around the inside of the narrow circular well had been protected from the elements, but that didn’t mean that it hadn’t deteriorated in the last two hundred and fifty years. If they were doing this properly...
‘At least one of us should stay up here,’ she said.
‘There are only two of us,’ he replied.
‘I know, but—’
‘Evie, I know that you’re tough and I know that you’re strong—maybe to your own detriment sometimes—but I’m coming with you and that doesn’t diminish those things about you,’ Mateo stated, and Evie tried not to let the overwhelming relief go to her head.
She was about to take the first step, when Mateo caught her arm. ‘And if at any point, any, you want to turn back or you get a bad feeling...’
She bit back the innate knee-jerk reply of ‘I won’t’, and instead replied as she should and as she felt: truthfully. ‘We’ll turn back. I promise.’
Evie had no idea how much time had passed. She’d been so utterly focused on her footing, on searching for signs of who had made the wooden staircase, scanning the walls for any kind of graffiti, or impressions of who had walked these steps before them.
Had Isabella walked these steps? Who had made them and where did they lead? She had never lied to Mateo...it wasn’t about the treasure at all. But she really did want to find something. It was a need in her blood like...like the way she had needed Mateo the night before.
She’d been so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t immediately notice when the wood of the next step creaked beneath her foot. It happened in a heartbeat that stretched over an eternity. She just dropped, every nerve ending screaming out in shock, her breath catching in her lungs as she reached out to grasp nothing, and then—
Her arm pulled tight and her body hung in mid-air. Mateo’s grip on her hand and wrist a steel lifeline tying her to him.
‘Don’t look down,’ he commanded and nothing in her would have refused his order. His arm bulged beneath the line of the T-shirt sleeve as he worked to pull her up. She had to reach up with her free hand, which he caught and then reached for her elbow, inch by inch dragging her out of the darkness against him until she could get her feet on the same step.
Panting and out of breath, he asked if she could get around the step below. Heart still pounding, legs shaking terribly, she quickly assessed it and nodded.
‘We have to go on, I’m not sure how long the rest of the steps will hold out,’ he said. Clinging to him for support she gingerly stepped around the broken wood. It was a larger step to make, and on shaking legs wasn’t as easy as it should have been, but she made it and slowly, in silence and fierce concentration, they made it to the ground.
She felt Mateo’s hand on her arm.
‘I’m fine,’ she dismissed quickly before he could ask, but her pulse hadn’t yet slowed. She shone the torch around the walls, her heart thundering in her chest, but forced herself to breathe. There was something down here, she just knew it, but...
What would you do?
She took a breath, Mateo’s hand on her shoulder, not holding her back but grounding her, encouraging her to think. She passed the beam more slowly over the jagged stone and saw a glint of gold. A guilder maybe? She made her way towards where she’d seen it. And gasped.
There, set back about half a foot behind a sliver of rock, was a series of bronzed cogs. It must have been used to open a door or entrance to another part of the island, because there was nothing else down here. The workmanship was exquisite, but...there was no lever. No way of making it work. She searched the cave again but there was nothing.
‘May I have a look?’ Mateo asked, sensing her frustration and desperation.
She nodded absently and he peered around the shard of granite that had hidden the panel of cogs. They were incredible. Even rusted and old, they were a thing of beauty. His father would have been in his element here. Not because this might prove that he was right, but because of the human ingenuity that he’d always loved the most about history. He could see, though, that something was missing from the cogs—something to connect one half to the other. He turned his head to the side.
‘Evie, do you have the octant?’
‘Yes, it’s in the bag,’ she replied. And then, as if sensing his meaning, she hauled the bag from her backpack, retrieving the octant and passing it to him.
