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Neil lingered beside Constance after he stumbled onto the landing. He was slump-shouldered with guilt. The two bored-looking mercenaries hovered at his back.

“Connie, I…” he began.

“Not now,” Constance snapped impatiently under her breath.

“Welcome to theIsis,” Julian announced grandly as he turned back to her—though his eyes revealed a flash of nervousness over his elegant mustache.

“It’s very nice,” Constance said dismissively, slipping into her role. “But is there any lemonade?”

“Lemonade! Yes, of course!” Julian hurriedly assured her. “You there! Reis!” he called out to an older, better-dressed fellow who had stopped to speak to the other crewmen—the ship’s captain, based on the title Julian had used for him, however condescendingly.

The reis schooled his features into an expression of barely tolerant courtesy.

“We need a suite prepared for my guest,” Julian rattled authoritatively. “And see that she is brought some lemonade. On ice, this time! I don’t know why anyone would think it acceptable to present a glass of lemonade without it.”

He turned to Constance, picking up her hand and planting a dry kiss on the back of it. “I shall be with you shortly, my dear, after I have taken care of the tiniest little bit of business. Dry stuff, but needs must. Dawson, have those Al-Saboors escort Fairfax to the study and see that he’s settled.”

Dawson looked up from the tablet and shot a panicked look from Julian to the two thugs. “But I don’t speak any—”

Julian cut him off, already walking away and clearly not really listening. “And do be sure to provide any…encouragementthat Fairfax might require to be helpful with the translation.”

Neil went over even more pale, throwing Constance a panicky look. She returned it with a glare that she hoped communicated something along the lines ofquit mucking about and play along until I say otherwise.

“Er… Come? Go?” Dawson attempted awkwardly as the two thugs stared at him.

“You could try ‘yalla,’” Constance offered tiredly.

“Yalla?” Dawson echoed hopefully.

The scarred fellow shot his gap-toothed cousin a look. The cousin shrugged, and the pair plucked Neil up by his arms and propelled him into the hall, Dawson scurrying ahead of them.

“Sitt el Kol?” one of the remaining crewmen prompted with nervous courtesy. He gestured into the hallway, presumably toward the room being readied for her.

Wood creaked behind her. Constance glanced back to see the ferry rowing slowly to the shore.

She refused to let the sight intimidate her. Instead, she felt the subtle pressure of the knife against her thigh, the lockpicks between her bosoms, and the capable strength of her own bare hands. No, she had not been deserted here. She was a threat these men had just unwittingly carried on board—and she would not forget it.

“Do lead on, my good fellow,” she declared firmly, and followed him into the gloom.

??

Twenty-Three

Neil Fairfax satin an elegantly appointed gentleman’s study, complete with fine Turkish carpets, cozy armchairs, and piles of books—and wondered if he had ever felt quite so abjectly awful in his entire life.

He was trapped on a boat in the middle of the Nile, surrounded by casually murderous thugs. He had left his sister, his best friend, and a colleague that he had come to care about very deeply in the hands of the most intimidating and obviously violent person he had ever encountered. Now he was charged with translating a clue to one of the most important mysteries in Egyptian history so that his villainous boss could try to steal from it.

And it was all his fault.

He should have trusted Ellie when she told him that Julian Forster-Mowbray was up to no good. Instead, Neil had stubbornly insisted on living in a different world—one where the designated representative of a respected scholarly organization would never have turned out to be capable of kidnapping and murder. One where people laughed at the notion of reasonably sane gentlemen committing acts of violence in the name of chasing down an object everyone knew to be a myth.

But Neil couldn’t blame all of this on his ex-employer. His own stupid, stubborn decisions had led him to be imprisoned in a well-lit library on Julian’s graceful dahabeeyah, ill with worry over what might have happened to his sister and his friends. He was the one who had written that stupid, foolish note to Julian at Saqqara, slipping a coin to one of Sayyid’s neighbors’ children to deliver it to the excavation.

He had been so worried about his blasted job and his academic reputation. Of course, it hadseemedlike an entirely reasonable course of action at the time—but he’d been wrong. Julian Forster-Mowbray really had been in league with a batch of artifact-thieving villains, and Neil had led them right to the tablet—and to the people he cared about.

Memories tormented him—of Ellie, slight and freckled, popping up beside his desk to pepper him with questions about Persian etymologies. Of Adam at Cambridge, the brash American cowboy who tossed viscounts into rivers and befriended a bespectacled scholarship student as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

And what about Sayyid? The man was a brilliant Egyptologist, a deeply skilled conservator, and a natural leader. They had worked side-by-side, debating techniques and challenging each other’s scholarly conclusions for two years now. Sayyid had come to be far more than just a foreman to him, and so Neil was only a little surprised to realize that he was just as twisted up in knots about the man as he was about Adam.