Twenty-Two

Willa listened for the click. Turned the knob. Slipped into the hotel room in what was becoming habit and slid the skeleton key back into her bag. She wasn’t exactly sure what she expected to find on a third search that she hadn’t on the first or second.

But she’d spotted Cor Akkerman that afternoon, trailing Lukas and Jules and the other musicians as they went for rehearsal. He wasn’t going to vanish with his tail between his legs. He was going to cause her whatever trouble he could. So far as she could tell, he didn’t yet know about Mr. Brown, to try to work that angle, but he was too observant. He could well realize soon that the German was trying to hire her, and use it against her, if V didn’t arrest the agent soon.

Her hands still hurt from where the wood had pierced them. Her soul still hurt far more.

The pieces of the violin had been gone when she’d finally pulled herself out of bed the next morning at a ridiculously late hour. Gwen. She’d probably taken it to some luthier she knew and asked him if he could fix it.

He’d no doubt taken one look at the collection of splinters and declared it beyond redemption.

Her eyes burned as she shut the door to Lukas’s hotel room behind her without a sound.

She’d begged off her lessons for the last three days, claiming to be unwell. It wasn’t a lie. Never in her life had she felt so miserable. He’d come to see her, of course, but she had claimed she wasn’t well enough to come down.

He would see the bandages and demand to know why they were there. He would look into her eyes and know the music was gone. Another something that would demand an explanation.

She hadn’t one to give him. Not now.

Her time was running out. Cor would act again soon. He wouldn’t realize that the blow he’d already dealt had felled her so completely. He’d think it nothing but an instrument. A thing. Something she could replace. He would think he had to strike again, harder.

She had to strike first. Get what she needed and get out of here before Cor could ruin it all with his quest for revenge.

Before Brown could ruin it all with his promise of violence.

Before Lukas could ruin it all with his blasted devotion.

Before Willa could ruin it all just by being who she was.

She sighed and looked around her at the scant belongings she’d already searched through. Wandered through the sitting room as she tried to engage her mind. She had to think. Not just look, but think. Think like Lukas—where would he keep something so dear? Something that allowed him to communicate with his family? Think like his father, who had given it to him. What would be a logical thing to hide a key in for his son?

His violin? No. No one but no one would dare to change a Stradivarius even slightly. And the bow had no room for any sort of key.

The case?

Maybe. It wasn’t here now, of course. And hadn’t been with him in London. And she’d looked all through it when she was getting the Strad from it and hadn’t noticed any letters.

What had he had with him in London? Clothes. The sheet music for the symphony. Those paragraphs of French.

What if there had been something else, too, that Ellie and Retta had missed? It would make sense that he’d carried it with him. Unwilling to let it out of his sight. Unwilling to go off to send a message to his mother without it. Maybe it was still in his bag, even.

The bag was nowhere out here, of course. So she drifted into the bedroom. And halted. It smelled like him. Was like walking into his arms. She hadn’t expected to miss that sensation after a measly few days apart from him. Couldn’t miss it, miss him. It wasn’t allowed. Though maybe she wouldn’t have missed him quite so much if it hadn’t gone hand in hand with that other loss.

Her nose ached, though she hadn’t let herself cry again after that night.

“Chin up, Willa. Snap out of it.” It was just a violin. A friend, yes.

But a thing. It wasn’t Rosemary who Cor Akkerman had hurt, or Barclay or Lucy or Retta or any of them. Even Lukas hadn’t been scathed by Cor Akkerman’s fury.

It was just a thing. She’d find another one somewhere, and it would sing for her too. There’d been nothing magical about that wood.

And Barclay’s words echoed in her head. “You’re letting them win.” He’d been speaking of her parents, but they were no less true here and now. If she couldn’t stand up straight and keep going, then Cor Akkerman had won.

And he would not win.

Her head had been silent these past three days. Not so much as a strain of music, not a whiff. She’d been empty. Hollow.

Defeated.

“You won’t beat me.” She said it into the armoire, but it was for Cor. Her mother. Her father. She yanked open the doors and pulled out the small black bag Lukas had been carrying when he got off the train.

It was empty.

She tossed it back into its place with a halfhearted growl. What else? Clothes. The sheet music for the symphony. Those paragraphs of French.

V already had the paragraphs. She could check his clothes, she supposed. Or . . .

Her breath caught. The music. Of course! It wouldn’t be in the symphony for the orchestra—but her family wouldn’t have known the difference between that and any other music he had with him.

And hadn’t she read in one of the old, tattered books on the subject that Barclay had found for her about composers hiding messages for their friends in their music? They hadn’t hidden anything complicated—no secret instructions. Just their names. Or something special to them—one little word that the composers would turn into a motif.

But if she were a cryptographer with a musician for a son, wouldn’t that be the logical place to put a cypher key?

Life pumped through her veins for the first time since Cor Akkerman had shattered her. It wasn’t quite music, but it was life. Pumping and surging and making her head spin. Lukas’s music crate was there, just inside the bedroom door. He must have moved it in here when Barclay stayed in the outer room, to be out of his way.

She moved to it, her fingers flipping through the sheets like they always did—quickly, searching for something she wanted to play.

No. She had to slow down. It wasn’t as though the correct paper would shout, Me! Look at me! She must think.

How would she know which piece it was in? He had so many, and Barclay hadn’t said anything about the titles of what he’d had with him in London. The Bach motif, if she recalled correctly, had been deliberately written to include notes that spelled out B-A-C-H, with the H being played by . . . wasn’t it a B natural or something, with the B being a B flat?

But if his father had developed a key for his son, he could have based it on any melody and instructed him in how to use it. That was what keys sometimes were, according to the brief information Mr. V had given her—a book both parties had. A dictionary, perhaps. A map. Something both had been instructed in how to use a certain way, read a certain way.

It could be absolutely any of these pieces.

Maybe he’d marked whichever he’d chosen somehow. Willa pulled out a handful of sheet music and sat on the foot of the bed. Her eyes skimmed the margins for any notations, but there were none.

She’d played this one last week. It was lovely. A strand of it filtered into her silent head, distant and faint and tantalizing. She closed her eyes and reached for it, willing it closer like a man dying of thirst, seeing an oasis on the horizon. Come, please. Please.

She half-heard it for one second, two. Then it drifted away again.

Her shoulders sagged. She turned to the next piece. Scanned it again for any markings. And there were a few—pencil scratches.

She traced them. Not put there by his father, or by Lukas for any secret reasons. He’d simply scratched legato onto a section that she kept playing, according to him, too fast. Though the composer hadn’t said it should be legato, had he? And what made Lukas De Wilde the authority?

Her lips felt a little lighter, not pulled so far down. Her fingertip settled on the first note and followed its successors. She liked it better as a rapid ascent up the scale, not a slow climb.

The music gathered in her throat. She wasn’t one for humming usually, but she had no violin. And she needed to hear it.

Her eyes slid shut as the first note filled her mouth, her ears, without quite making it into that place in her head. She added the second to it, the third. Her shoulders relaxed, and that aching band across her chest eased a bit. She didn’t have a very good singing voice, and there was no way she’d be able to hit the high notes at measure twenty, but she heard it. That sweet melody.

And a click. There was no click in the music. Her eyes flew open.

Lukas filled the doorway, frozen there with his brows arched and a smile at half bloom. “Willa. I must say, mon amour, I never expected to walk into my bedroom and find you waiting on my bed. You are not the type.”

There should have been panic. Or a dozen excuses. Or something other than what there always was when she was with him—too much pleasure at seeing him, too much ease at knowing he was there.

She stood, but not quickly, with a roll of her eyes. “Get over yourself, Lukas De Wilde. I’m not here to throw myself at you.”

The music settled. There, but muted. Present, but with its lips sealed, as a random thought spun through her head.

She would tell him.

It was stupid. But according to the music, it was right.

Lukas sauntered closer in that way he had. Pure confidence, never a frisson of doubt. “So I assumed, given that you would have expected me to be away another hour yet. If you wanted to borrow some music, ma belle, you need only have asked.”

Her fingers tightened on the paper. Relaxed. She set the stack back in its crate. “I didn’t come to borrow music.”

“Did the clerk let you up? I really need to have a talk with that man.” He stopped a foot away, his brows knit. He reached for her hands. “What happened here? You were injured? You were injured and no one told me?”

“Lukas.” She tried to hide the bandaged appendages behind her back, but he was too quick. He already had them in his hands. Was already kissing them. Was already breaking her into more splinters. “I’m a thief.”

He paused. But then he grinned. Loosed a sound that crossed a chuckle with a snort. “Perhaps that would be a better joke, mon amour, were the orchestra not still buzzing about that fickle thief from Sunday. Or will you tell me that was you?”

“No.” A bit of the venom meant for Cor slipped out. “No, I would never steal from those worse off than me. Never.”

His smile froze. And melted right off his face. “But you would steal from . . . ?”

“You.” She’d meant to say it as a simple fact. It came out as a sorrowful one.

He still held her hands, but he lowered them. “You sound . . . serious. But you cannot be. You have known all along that all my assets are frozen in a bank in Brussels.”

She had to look away. “I wasn’t sent here to steal your money. I was sent to steal the key.”

Her fingers went cold and lonely as his fell away. He took a step back. “Who are you?” His voice was ice. No, darkness. No . . . silence.

She sketched a bow, masculine style, just to try to bolster her resolve. “Willa Forsythe—one of London’s best pickpockets.”

“No.” He hadn’t moved a muscle. Not a single one, but for those in his mouth required to speak. “You are Willa Forsythe, violin virtuoso. Willa Forsythe, friend of the Davieses.”

Her fingers curled into her palms. “I’d never even met them before coming here.”

He shook his head. “Willa Forsythe. Woman I love.”

It was a punch in the stomach. The eye. The heart. Her nostrils flared. “I’m not. Or you don’t. Or . . . it’ll pass.”

He moved then. Exploded, more like. Spewing a stream of rapid French, he spun, dragged his hand through his hair, gestured wildly with his other arm, and then turned back, jabbing a finger her way. His eyes blazed. Absolutely blazed.

What had the music been thinking? This was a stupid, stupid idea. He would never understand. How could he when she wasn’t so sure she did? What, really, did V need with this key? It was just something to get a message to someone, right? Was it so brilliant that the government wanted to be able to use it with their own spies? Could they not compose their own? How in the world could it help them acquire a device?

She held her ground without flinching. If he wanted to rant and rave and hurl accusations at her that she couldn’t understand, he had a right.

He stopped after another moment, chest heaving as if he’d just run ten miles. He didn’t quite look at her. “You said you were sent. By whom?”

She lifted a shoulder, though he likely wouldn’t see it. “The British government, more or less.”

Now he didn’t just look at her, he pierced her with his gaze. “By whom in particular?”

“I don’t know. A man called V. I cannot say exactly who—”

He must not have needed to know exactly who Mr. V really was. He spun away again, an incredulous breath huffing out. As if that single letter said so much.

Perhaps it did.

He strode a step into the sitting room and held out an arm toward the door to the hall. “Get out of my room.”

He looked like she must have three nights ago, when Cor stood there with her violin in his hand and that money on the bed. The righteous one.

Willa swallowed. “I can’t. It isn’t so simple anymore, Lukas. V isn’t the only one who’s come to me. There’s a German agent here who has tried to hire me as well. Whatever this key is, England and Germany both want it. Badly enough that the German threatened to kill me. Or Barclay.”

“Barclay.” His arm lowered. His eyes narrowed. “He is your what exactly? Husband? Lover, playing me for a fool?”

“Brother.”

Lukas scoffed. “He is not your brother.”

“Not by blood. But he is.”

Lukas closed his eyes, jaw set. She watched the flicker of movement behind his eyes. “The girls. In London. Blondes. Elinor something and . . .”

“Retta. Two of our sisters. Again, not by blood. But sisters.”

“They took my bag. Or took the things from it. They were in the wrong pouches.”

Amateurs. Willa would have to speak with them about that. But that was hardly the point. “They had to. I couldn’t find it here.”

Another snort that may have sounded amused on a different day, in a different conversation. “All that talk about never taking the food from the mouth of a starving child.”

“I wouldn’t. It was Cor, not me, who stole that money! I got it back.” She sliced a hand through the air.

He’d opened his eyes again and followed the motion. Something on his face shifted. Just a bit. “Cor Akkerman. Did he do this to you?”

He sounded as though . . . as though he cared about the answer. As though he would find him and do something about it if he had.

Willa tucked her bandages into the folds of her skirt. “Only indirectly. He broke my violin, and I grabbed at it without paying enough attention.”

His expression didn’t change in movement. Just in color. It darkened. “You said you had no violin with you.”

It was her turn to try out that snort. “I confess I’m a thief, and you wonder that I’m a liar too? It was old and battered, Lukas. Not something a gentleman’s daughter would own, that I could bring down into that parlor.”

His larynx bobbed. “So you would stop Cor Akkerman from stealing the money for the relief fund because it was akin to taking food from a child’s mouth. Yet you would help V—and perhaps the Germans—”

“I was never going to help them.”

“—you would help them steal my sister from me. Or do children only get your consideration if they are poor?”

“Your sister.” She shook her head, even took a step closer. “No, you misunderstand. They want your father’s work, that’s all. He said the key was the first step toward getting it. Some . . . some cypher machine. That’s all.”

He held her gaze. Held it so steadily she wanted to look away. “My sister was my father’s work—the key is the only way to communicate with her and find where she is. There is no device. No machine. Just Margot.”

Willa sank back down onto the foot of the bed. “No.”

“I doubt they realize that she is what they are after. But yes. If they seek his work, she is all they will ever find. She is . . . She is with puzzles what you are with music.”

Her shoulders sagged, her head following. She couldn’t help them find his sister. That went against every conviction she had left. “I’ll talk to Mr. V. I’ll tell him he’s on the wrong track, that there’s no device, that—”

“You will not mention her to him. Do you understand? You will not. A man like that—he will not care if it is a girl or a mechanism that performs the task he wants, only that the task is performed. He would take her, he would sit her in some little room and call her a weapon. He would—”

“You’re right.” She wanted to deny it—who would treat a child that way? But V just might. “Of course. I . . . I’ll just tell him you haven’t the key. That you mentioned your father’s work to me and that . . . it was all destroyed in Louvain.”

Silence.

She lifted her head. He was still looking at her, a slight curl to his lip. Like she had looked at Cor three days ago.

She was better than him, wasn’t she? She didn’t steal from the poor. She didn’t steal from refugees, or from the people left in their homes under an invading army. She would never hurt a child.

But in Lukas De Wilde’s eyes, she was no better.

She stood. She’d known all along it would come to this someday. Today was no worse than tomorrow. At least today, she was already just a collection of splinters. He couldn’t possibly hurt her any more.

He stopped her when she was sliding past him. Stopped her with a hand on her cheek. Not as gentle as it would have been an hour ago, but nowhere near as forceful as it should have been. And it trembled.

She looked up into his dark eyes. She chanted to herself, He can’t hurt me any more.

His eyes wept without a single tear. “I loved you.”

She was wrong.