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There was a hint of amusement in his voice, which was vastly preferable to the irritation from earlier this morning. Not that I could blame him for being annoyed with me. I did have a nasty habit of finding myself in close scrapes—it wasn’t intentional, and I was trying to do better. I simply couldn’t help it. At least most of the time. Perhaps I should come with a warning sign myself.

I turned back to the lock and resumed fiddling with it before the blasted thing finally surrendered. I cast him a glance over my shoulder. “Shall we see what certain death awaits?”

“I cannot wait,” Ruan said dryly, holding the door open. I stepped into the small cupboard. For it was no more than that. An abandoned tool chest and empty crates from the war sat just to my left. I ran my light over them cautiously. Based upon the markings, the German army must have stored explosives and other munitions in here, hence the sign. Two of the crates had been turned over and shoved together, creating a makeshift table in the center of the room. Violet had been staying here.

A pile of blankets formed a pallet in the far corner with a stack of clothing stuffed into one of the old crates. I stepped inside, ducking below a clothesline stretched across the room where Violet Devereaux’s unmentionables hung to dry.

I blew out a breath. What now?

There was nothing here to kill anyone, unless one counted dust. I crept across the room, flicking my light over the walls, which had been papered in old newsprint. I drew nearer, half expecting it to be another carryover from the German Occupation. Upon closer inspection, the papers were much more recent. The headlines from all around the world. Some in French. Others British. American. German. Italian. My mind raced as I began to read them—testing my translation skills against the sheer number of words and languages before me. From what I could decipher, they were variants of the same story, and chronicled the German advance upon Belgium in August 1914. I’d been a girl then, summering in Cornwall with Tamsyn’s family after the scandal that drove me from New York. I kept reading, switching from language to language.

One word kept appearing over and over, underlined in pencil. Dinant. Anyone who lived through those horrible days recalled the story. Dinant had been one of the early atrocities of the Great War. The town wasn’t far from where we were now, some thirty miles to the east. The Germans had advanced upon it in August of 1914, and before the end of the month over six hundred men, women, and children had been slaughtered. Tales of Dinant were half the reason I’d signed up to do my bit for the war effort. To do something to combat the unspeakable horrors occurring around me. It had been unthinkable at the time—young and foolish as I was—but Dinant was just the beginning of the atrocities that would follow.

Even now, I struggled to understand those who hunger for war and the blood of their neighbors. Those terrible days had been seared into my mind. I could not escape them, nor did I want to forget, for if we grew complacent it would simply happen again and again. The death and sacrifice would have been in vain. Memories surged over me like high tide, followed by rage. I let it come.

But what could that have to do with this?

“What are you thinking…” Ruan asked me.

What wasn’t I thinking? The sack of Dinant had been almost nine years earlier. Nine years. The thought tugged at something at the edges of my mind and I could not quite put my finger upon it.

I stepped over Violet’s makeshift bed and examined the next wall, coming to a dead stop as I beheld my own face looking back at me. It was a photograph from New York, one that had been all over the newspapers when I was sixteen years old. The weathered newsprint frayed at the edges. I looked from one to another. There were hundreds of articles spanning my entire life. It was all there, every event categorized and documented in black and white and gray. Some of the bylines were by V. E. Devereaux. Violet. But others were from long before. Each one had been nailed to the wall with rusted nails. There were stories of my exploits in London in the immediate aftermath of the war. Photographs from this past December in Oxford. Ones of Ruan and me. Mr. Owen. Notes in an unfamiliar hand mentioning Hari. Tamsyn, my former lover. Everyone who’d ever crossed my path.

My lungs would not work.

Someone had been watching me.

I kept reading.

The Lusitania. My mother. My sister. Someone had taken red ink, making notes—drawing lines between articles. Circling words. My skin grew cold as I recalled the article I’d found lodged underneath von Keller’s desk, the one recalling my disgrace in New York. It too had been marked in red.

“Gods…” Ruan murmured, echoing my own thoughts as he followed alongside me. His fingers found the small of my back. The gentlest reminder I was not alone in this.

Frantically, I read one article after another, trying to understand what Violet had been amassing here. Some clippings were older yet. Stories from fifty years ago, and the Irish shipwreck off the coast of New York where my mother had been rescued as an infant. She’d been the lone survivor. My hand trembled, running my fingers over records that had been taken from the orphanage where she’d lived before my grandparents adopted her. Words. Names. Dates. All of it led back to me. My stomach recoiled.

Not only did Violet knew who my mother was … who I was … my scandals, my faults. She knew everything about me. Things I’d forgotten myself.

The light trembled as I continued scouring the walls and absorbing every bit of information. A horrified tear slid down my cheek. Marriage announcements. Society pages. News of my own birth and that of my younger sister, Opal. Even the peculiar stories of the Rusalka that Hari uncovered on his own. It was all here. Violet Devereaux had traced my mother’s life, my life, to this place. To Saint Oda’s.

“Ruby…” Ruan murmured behind me, but I couldn’t hear him over the frantic beating of my own heart.

“She wanted me here … Violet Devereaux knew my mother was here. She found her. Then brought me here…” The ground shook beneath my feet as I stared at a wall containing every story I knew existed, along with ones I did not know had hit the presses. Violet had made notes in ink—red, like blood—circling certain words and underlining others with no discernible rhyme nor reason to it.

“Gods be damned…” Ruan murmured, his hand covering his mouth in disbelief. “Ruby … I … This is incredible.”

Incredibly horrible.

I was going to be sick.

I wanted to burn it. To gather it up, rip it down, and turn this place to ash.

Ruan laid a hand upon my arm, interrupting my thoughts. “You can’t … she’ll know we were here…”

He was right. Damn him. Doubly so for eavesdropping in my head. I turned around, jaw clenched. “It’s my life. That woman has no right! What is she doing, what does it all mean?”

Ruan exhaled softly. “I … I don’t know.”

My hands grew numb at the thought. “She pieced it all together before Hari did. Tracked me down and hunted me like a roe deer.”