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Adam’s ears began to buzz. Across the courtyard, Neil’s face fell into lines of guilty dismay.

Ellie’s grip on his arm slackened. Her eyes widened as if the ground were opening up at her feet.

“Note?” she echoed, shock dulling her voice.

Adam groaned, already sensing where things were going.

“I…” Neil stammered, looking pale and uneasy. “I was trying to tell you. I just… It all happened so quickly! And you weren’t making any sense! So it seemed the reasonable thing to do was to… to write an explanation for what had happened. That the incident in the tomb was just a… a slight…” He swallowed thickly. “And that I would be taking a brief leave of absence…”

“And you told them where you were going,” Adam filled in.

He could feel the scrape of the machete blade against his skin as he spoke.

“I… I wanted him to know it was all in good faith!” Neil protested, clutching the tablet to his chest.

“Hold on,” Constance cut in sharply, stepping out from behind the substantial bulk of Muscles. “Are you saying you wrote the baddies anapology letter?”

Mr. Forster-Mowbray whirled around. “Connie?!What on earth are you doing here?”

Adam cocked a surprised eyebrow—but then, Constance had been inside the tunnel by the time Julian entered Mutnedjmet’s tomb. He’d had no reason to suspect she was involved—until now.

The Mustache looked like he’d just got caught with his hand in a cookie jar. Adam couldn’t help but feel a certain sort of satisfaction at the expression.

“I’m with them, obviously!” Constance waved a hand that took in Ellie, Neil, Adam, and Sayyid.

Julian’s jaw dropped.

Ellie barely noticed the exchange. She was staring at her brother with a look of hurt and disappointment. It twisted Adam’s heart to see it.

“Why?” she said softly.

“I’d been employed by the fellow for two years!” Neil burst out. “As the representative of a respected scholarly organization! I thought all of you must be getting yourselves worked up over a big misunderstanding!”

“Big misunderstanding, huh?” Adam commented flatly.

Sunlight glinted off the blade of the machete at the corner of his eye.

Neil’s color drained even further. His face fell into lines of obvious dismay. He stumbled a half step back, nearly falling off the raised platform of the altar. “I didn’t mean…” His gaze whirled from Ellie to Adam, then landed helplessly on Sayyid. “I… I’m…”

At Neil’s look, Sayyid’s eyes blazed with an uncharacteristic, angry heat. His lips thinned as though he were biting back whatever wanted to spill from his mouth.

Neil winced, then pivoted, stalking to the front of the altar and holding the tablet out to Julian and Jacobs. “Take the bloody thing. It doesn’t matter.” He half shouted the rest back at Ellie. “It doesn’t matter!Whatever this is, it can’t possibly be worth dying over!”

“Don’t do it, Fairfax,” Adam warned lowly.

“He has a knife at your throat! Those fellows have guns!” Neil burst out, waving frantically at Ears and Ralph. “I’m sorry! I buggered everything up. I just don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

“Of course not, Fairfax, old bean,” Julian assured him soothingly. “I’m sure we can all settle this like reasonable people.” He waved a dismissive hand at Jacobs. “Do stop threatening that fellow quite so menacingly. It’s not like he can do anything with his hands tied.”

Jacobs’ jaw tightened. Dark emotion flickered through his eyes before it was reined in behind his usual placid expression.

Nowthatwas interesting, Adam noted silently.

There was no way Jacobs would’ve deferred to an idiot like Julian Forster-Mowbray by choice, which meant that The Mustache was actually the guy in charge of all this… maybe because Jacobs had failed to bring back the artifact his mysterious bosses had wanted so badly in British Honduras.

Adam wondered uneasily if Jacobs blamed him and Ellie for that. More than likely, he did. After all, they’d been the ones to blow the whole place up.

The notion didn’t bode particularly well for their current prospects.