#wrong side of time

Somewhere behind the bar, Harry was setting glasses on a shelf with enough force to prove he had already been awake for some time and resented everyone who had not. The room smelled different in the morning. Less of bodies and drink, more of stale beer, cold ash, damp wood, and whatever men left behind after they had shouted themselves empty and gone home.

Vera sat up slowly.

Every part of her protested.

The chair near the fire had not been comfortable, but it had been inside. That mattered more than comfort. She had learned that quickly. One night in this place, and already her standards had shrunk to heat, walls, and no hands on her while she slept.

Harry glanced over from the bar. “Thought you’d died in that chair.”

“Disappointing you this early would feel rude.”

He gave her a look over his shoulder. “Still got that mouth, then.”

“Unfortunately.”

Vera pushed herself upright and tried not to wince. Her coat had been folded over her lap sometime during the night. She did not remember doing it. For one strange moment, she wondered if someone else had.

Then she dismissed the thought.

Small Heath did not feel like a place where kindness happened quietly. If kindness happened at all, Vera imagined it came with a debt attached.

Harry jerked his chin toward the back room. “Water’s in the jug. Wash your face. You look like you slept in a pub.”

“I did sleep in a pub.”

“And now you look it.”

Vera stood, gathering her coat in one hand. “Your charm explains why the place is so full.”

“It’s the whisky, not the charm.”

“That makes more sense.”

Harry muttered under his breath, but he did not tell her to leave.

That alone made Vera pause.

She looked toward him, waiting for the part where he reminded her that last night had been an exception. A chair by the fire, a few coins, and then out into the street once morning came. She had prepared herself for it sometime before dawn, during one of the many times she had woken with her heart racing, certain she had heard footsteps coming for her.

Harry did not say it.

He only went back to stacking glasses.

Vera walked to the back room with the careful steps of someone trying not to show how badly she needed the floor to stay beneath her.

The water in the jug was cold enough to bite. She splashed it over her face and gripped the edge of the basin afterward, breathing through the shock. The little room was empty except for crates, hooks, the apron she had worn the night before, and a narrow mirror fixed crookedly to the wall.

Vera avoided looking into it for as long as she could.

When she finally did, the sight of herself unsettled her.

Not because she looked different, exactly. She looked tired. Dirty at the edges. Her hair had come loose from how she had arranged it the day before, and there was a faint mark along her cheek from where she had slept against her sleeve. But those things were ordinary enough.

It was the room behind her that made her stomach turn.

The wood. The dim light. The apron on its hook.

For half a second, Vera had the impossible sensation of standing there before.

Not yesterday.

Not last night.

Before.

Her hand tightened on the basin.

The feeling passed before she could catch hold of it. It left nothing useful behind, only the same sick confusion that had followed her since the alley.

“Stop it,” she whispered.

Her reflection stared back, unconvinced.

By the time she returned to the main room, Grace had arrived.

She was behind the bar, tying her apron with neat, practiced hands. Vera noticed that about her first. Grace always seemed arranged. Even when the work was hard, even when a drunk man grabbed her wrist, even when her eyes moved too carefully over a room, there was something composed about her that Vera did not trust.

Grace looked up as Vera approached.

“Good morning.”

Vera gave a short nod. “Morning.”

“You stayed?”

It sounded like a simple question.

It did not feel like one.

“Harry offered the chair.”

Grace glanced toward Harry, who was making himself busy with a crate of bottles and pretending he could not hear them. “That was kind of him.”

Harry snorted. “Don’t make a habit of saying that.”

Vera reached for the apron. “I won’t.”

Grace watched her tie it. “Have you eaten?”

The question was gentle enough that Vera nearly answered honestly.

No.

Not since before the rain, before the alley, before she woke in the wrong century with mud under her hands and smoke in her throat. Her stomach had cramped sometime in the night, then gone quiet in that dull way hunger sometimes did when it realized it would not be obeyed.

“I’m fine,” Vera said.

Grace’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in suspicion this time, but concern. Somehow that was worse.

Harry set a heel of bread and a small piece of cheese down on the counter without looking at either of them. “Eat before you fall into the glasses.”

Vera stared at it.

For a moment, her throat did something strange.

She recovered quickly and picked up the bread before anyone could read too much into her silence. “If this is part of the wages, I’ll be negotiating.”

Harry pointed a finger at her. “You’ll be sweeping if you keep on.”

Vera tore off a piece of bread. “I can sweep.”

Grace hid a smile by looking down at the glass in her hand.

The morning passed quietly compared to the night before. Quiet did not mean peaceful. Men came in early, shoulders hunched against the damp, boots tracking mud across the floor Vera had only just wiped. They drank like the day had already wronged them. Some looked at her because she was new. Some looked because they liked making women feel the weight of their attention. Others barely noticed her at all, which Vera began to prefer.

Grace showed her more of the work.

Which bottles disappeared quickest. Which regulars needed watching. Which men paid without being asked and which required a hand held out before the glass touched the bar. She was helpful. Too helpful, maybe. Or maybe Vera was too tired to know the difference between kindness and strategy.

“Harry said you worked well last night,” Grace said, setting clean glasses in a row.

“Did he?”

“In his way.”

“Was there grunting involved?”

“A little.”

“That sounds like praise from him.”

Grace smiled, then reached for another glass. “He doesn’t usually let strangers sleep here.”

“Lucky me.”

“You must have been desperate.”

Vera’s hand slowed on the cloth.

There it was again.

A question dressed as concern.

She wiped a ring from the counter that did not want to lift. “Most people are, in one way or another.”

Grace looked at her. “That sounds like something learned.”

“It sounds like something obvious.”

“Not everyone notices obvious things.”

Vera met her eyes. “You do.”

The smile Grace gave her was small and careful. “That depends on the thing.”

Vera should have left it there. She knew she should have. But exhaustion had worn down the part of her that knew when to stop.

“And what have you noticed about me?”

Grace did not answer immediately.

She set the glass down, aligned it with the others, and only then said, “You are alone. You don’t want anyone to know how alone. You are afraid, but you get angry quicker because you think it hides it better.”

Vera stared at her.

The words landed too close. Worse, Grace had not said them cruelly. She had said them the way someone might identify bad weather on the horizon.

Vera looked away first, angry with herself for giving even that much.

“You should save that for the men,” she said. “They’d pay good money to hear themselves described.”

Grace’s gaze lingered. “And you would?”

“I’d charge more.”

Grace almost laughed.

Almost.

The door opened before she could answer, and the air changed with it.

Vera hated that she felt it before she looked.

The pub did not fall silent this time. There were fewer men to perform for, fewer voices to dim. But something in Harry’s posture shifted. Grace’s hand stilled at the shelf. A man at a table near the window lowered his eyes to his glass with sudden dedication.

Vera turned.

Thomas Shelby stepped inside alone.

No Arthur filling the doorway with noise. No John grinning like trouble was a favorite coat. Just Thomas, rain darkening the shoulders of his overcoat, cap low enough to cast shade over his eyes until he removed it.

He looked even more dangerous in the quiet.

Last night, with his brothers around him and the Garrison full of men, Vera had been able to pretend he was simply part of the chaos. This morning, there was nothing to hide him in. He moved through the room like a decision already made.

Grace straightened. “Thomas.”

Vera heard it.

The softness.

It was not much. It was not enough for most people to notice. But Vera had been noticing everything because everything might matter.

Thomas glanced at Grace. “Grace.”

Then his eyes moved to Vera.

She forced herself not to look away.

“Still here,” he said.

It was not a question.

Vera reached for a clean glass because her hands wanted something to do. “So are you.”

Harry made a sound behind her that might have been warning or prayer.

Thomas’s expression did not change. “I own the place.”

“That would explain it, then.”

One of the men at the tables coughed into his drink, trying not to laugh.

He took off his gloves slowly. “You found somewhere to sleep.”

“A chair by the fire.”

“No London friends to take you in?”

There was no sharpness in his voice. That made it worse. Men like Arthur came at a person with force. John, probably with charm first and violence waiting behind it. Thomas did not need either in the beginning. He only placed words down and watched what they crushed.

Vera set the glass on the shelf. “London is far.”

“Not far enough to forget which part of it you came from.”

Grace’s gaze flickered toward her.

Vera felt heat rise in her chest, not embarrassment exactly, but something close to panic dressed up as irritation. She had slept badly. She was hungry despite the bread. Her head still hurt in a dull line behind her eyes. She did not have the energy to outmaneuver Thomas Shelby, and they both knew it.

“I didn’t realize you were waiting on my full address.”

“I wait on all lies eventually.”

The words landed quietly.

Vera looked at him then, really looked, and saw that he had not come in by chance. Maybe he had business with Harry. Maybe the Garrison always drew him in. But he had come early enough to find her before the noise of the evening, before his brothers, before she could hide behind work.

He had come to look at her again.

The thought should have frightened her.

It did.

But fear still chose anger when it rose in her.

“You’ll be bored, then,” she said.

Thomas took one step closer to the bar. “Will I?”

“I’m not interesting enough for this much attention.”

For the first time, something like amusement moved behind his eyes. It was gone too quickly to trust.

“No,” he said. “You’re not.”

Vera’s grip tightened on the glass she had picked up.

Thomas watched her hand, then her face.

It was a small movement, his attention shifting. Most men would not have noticed the way her fingers tensed around something breakable. He did. He noticed everything and made no apology for it.

Grace moved before the silence could deepen. “Your usual?”

Thomas did not look away from Vera immediately. Then he nodded once.

Grace poured his drink.

Vera busied herself with wiping the counter, listening to the muted clink of bottle against glass. Her heart had not settled. She hated that too. She hated the way her body reacted to him like it knew something she did not.

Grace set the whisky down.

Thomas took it but did not drink.

“Harry,” he said.

Harry came over with his towel thrown across one shoulder. “Tommy?”

“Private room.”

Harry nodded at once and reached beneath the bar for a key.

Vera should not have looked toward the door at the back.

She did anyway.

The private room sat half-hidden behind a narrow door near the end of the bar, the kind of room meant for men who did not want their business overheard but wanted everyone to know they had business worth hiding. Vera had not been inside it. Not knowingly.

Still, when Harry passed Thomas the key, Vera knew exactly which lock would stick.

The knowledge came so cleanly that she almost turned toward it before stopping herself.

Her pulse jumped.

He noticed.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

Vera picked up the cloth again. “No.”

“You looked at the door.”

“So did everyone else.”

“Not like that.”

Grace glanced between them.

Vera forced herself to keep her hands busy. “I didn’t realize there was a correct way.”

Harry shifted behind the bar, uneasy now.

Thomas held her gaze for a moment longer, then turned the key over in his fingers. “You’re very quick to answer questions I haven’t asked yet.”

He walked toward the private room.

Vera told herself not to watch him go.

She watched anyway.

Thomas placed the key into the lock and turned it. It caught halfway. Vera knew, with horrible certainty, that he would need to lift the handle before turning again.

Her own hand twitched against the counter.

He paused.

Then, very slowly, he lifted the handle.

The lock gave.

Thomas opened the door and looked back at her.

Not long.

Just enough.

Vera’s mouth went dry.

After he disappeared inside, the pub seemed to breathe again. Harry went back to pretending none of it was happening. Grace wiped the same glass twice.

Vera stared down at her hands.

She did not know that lock.

She had never opened that door.

She could not have known.

“You all right?” Grace asked quietly.

Vera hated the question because it was almost kind.

“I’m working.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“It’s the answer I’m giving.”

Grace accepted that for exactly three seconds.

Then she said, “Tommy doesn’t like unanswered questions.”

“Then he must have a very difficult life.”

“That depends on who refuses to answer.”

Vera looked at her. “Are you warning me?”

Grace’s expression softened into something that looked practiced because it had to be. “I’m saying it’s easier here if you give people less reason to wonder.”

Vera leaned closer, lowering her voice. “You first.”

The words hit.

Grace did not flinch, but she did go still.

Vera wished she felt victorious. She didn’t. She felt as if she had stepped onto rotten wood and heard it crack beneath her.

Before Grace could answer, Thomas’s voice came from the private room.

“Grace.”

Grace looked away first. “Yes?”

“Bring the ledger.”

Harry, still at the end of the bar, reached automatically toward a shelf beneath the counter.

Vera moved at the same time.

Her hand went under the bar and found the ledger before she had thought about where it might be. Brown cover. Worn edge. Kept behind the second stack of old newspapers, tucked far enough back that spilling drink would not reach it.

She pulled it out.

Then froze.

Grace was looking at her.

Harry was looking at her.

From the open door of the private room, Thomas was looking too.

Vera’s hand remained on the ledger.

The room seemed to narrow around it.

Harry spoke first. “How’d you know where that was?”

Vera could hear the blood in her ears.

The answer should have been easy. It wasn’t.

“I saw you reach for it.”

Harry’s brows drew together. “No, you didn’t.”

Vera’s grip shifted on the cover. “Then I guessed.”

“That’s a very lucky guess,” Grace said.

Vera looked at her. “I have many gifts.”

The joke fell flat.

Thomas stepped into the doorway. “Bring it here.”

For a second, Vera thought he meant Grace.

He didn’t.

His eyes were on Vera.

Harry looked as if he wanted to object, but he did not. Grace’s expression was difficult to read. Concern, suspicion, maybe both.

Vera picked up the ledger.

Each step toward the private room felt like walking deeper into a trap that everyone else understood better than she did. The air seemed colder near the doorway, though that was impossible. The room beyond was dimmer than the bar, lit by a lamp and a low fire. A table sat in the center with chairs arranged around it, ashtray already waiting, papers stacked in a careless-looking order that Vera suspected was not careless at all.

Thomas stepped aside to let her enter.

Vera did not want to turn her back to him.

She did anyway because refusing would show too much.

She crossed to the table and set the ledger down. Her eyes moved despite herself. The fireplace. The cabinet. The narrow pass-through window. The wall panel near the corner with a faint split in the grain.

Her gaze caught there.

Only for a second.

Thomas saw it.

“Have you been in this room before?”

“No.”

“You knew where the ledger was.”

“I told you I guessed.”

“You looked at that wall.”

Vera faced him. “Maybe I’m admiring your decor.”

Thomas closed the door behind him.

The sound was soft.

It still made her stomach drop.

Outside, Grace’s voice became muffled behind the wood. Harry called something to a customer. The ordinary life of the pub continued, separated from Vera by one closed door and Thomas Shelby standing between her and the only way out.

He did not move closer.

That restraint unsettled her more than if he had.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I told you.”

“Vera Hart.”

“Yes.”

“From London.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

The same soft answer as the night before.

Vera’s temper snapped through her fear. “Then why ask if you’ve decided already?”

“Because liars change when they get tired.”

She laughed once, without humor. “And what have I changed into?”

“Someone less careful.”

Vera looked toward the door and back again. “Is this how you welcome all your barmaids?”

“You’re not a barmaid.”

“I’m wearing the apron.”

“That doesn’t make you one.”

“No. It makes me employed.”

“For now.”

The words were not loud. They did not need to be.

Vera felt them settle where he meant them to. Under the ribs, near the fear she kept trying to pretend wasn’t there. He could have her sent out. Harry might feel sorry for her, but Harry answered to Tommy. Grace might help her, or she might not. Vera did not know enough about anyone to rely on mercy.

She swallowed.

Thomas saw that too.

Something in his expression shifted, not soft enough to be comfort, but less sharp than before. It irritated Vera that she noticed.

“You’ve no people here,” he said.

Vera held herself still.

“No money,” Thomas continued. “No bag. No proper story. You sleep in a chair and wake knowing where things are kept in a pub you entered yesterday.”

He paused.

Vera said nothing.

Thomas reached for his cigarette case. “That makes you either very unlucky or very dangerous.”

“I’d prefer unlucky.”

“You don’t get to choose how men see you.”

“No, men seem very committed to doing that themselves.”

This time, Thomas almost smiled.

Almost.

He lit his cigarette, and the brief flame turned the room gold at the edges. Vera watched his hands despite herself. Steady. Precise. Familiar in a way that made her feel sick if she let herself think about it too long.

Then she saw the watch chain.

It was tucked against his waistcoat, glinting faintly where the firelight caught it. Thomas followed her gaze.

His hand stilled.

Vera looked away too late.

“Time bothering you now?” he asked.

Her mouth felt dry. “Should it?”

Thomas pulled the watch free.

The chain slipped over his fingers with a faint metallic whisper. He opened it with his thumb, checked the face, then looked back at her as if the movement had been casual. It was not casual. Nothing he did was.

The click of the watch opening went through Vera like a struck match.

For one impossible second, the room shifted.

The fire seemed too bright. Smoke thickened in the air. A chair scraped hard against the floor. Someone was shouting nearby, but the sound came to her as if through water.

Thomas was in front of her, but not like this.

Closer.

His hand was around her wrist, not hurting her, holding her there with the force of someone who could not afford for her to run.

“Look at me,” he said.

Or had said.

Or would say.

Vera blinked.

The private room returned.

Thomas stood several feet away, watch open in his palm, cigarette burning between his fingers. His eyes had narrowed.

Vera realized she had reached back for the table to steady herself.

“Vera,” he said.

She hated the sound of her name in his mouth.

Not because it was cruel.

Because for a heartbeat, it had sounded familiar.

“I need to go back to work,” she said.

Thomas did not answer right away. He closed the watch with the same quiet click.

Vera’s stomach turned.

Then he stepped aside.

She moved quickly, but not so quickly that she looked like she was fleeing. At least, she hoped not. She opened the door with a hand that nearly slipped on the knob and stepped back into the main room.

Grace looked up at once.

Vera kept walking.

“I need air,” she said to no one in particular, and did not wait to see whether anyone allowed it.

Outside, the cold hit hard enough to make her gasp.

She stopped beside the wall of the pub, one hand pressed to the brick, and forced herself to breathe. The street was alive around her, carts and boots and voices, smoke flattening the sky into one long gray bruise. None of it made sense. None of it had made sense since she opened her eyes in the alley, but the private room had been worse.

Because for the first time, the wrongness had not felt like being lost.

It had felt like remembering.

Vera closed her eyes.

Look at me.

She heard it again, not with her ears, but somewhere deeper.

Thomas’s voice.

Urgent.

Not threatening.

That frightened her more than anything else had.

The door opened behind her.

Vera turned too quickly.

Grace stepped out, shawl pulled close around her shoulders. For a moment, they looked at each other in the narrow strip of space between the pub wall and the street.

Grace spoke first. “You shouldn’t run from him.”

“I didn’t run.”

“You left quickly.”

“I needed air.”

Grace looked toward the street. “He’ll only wonder more.”

“He was wondering plenty before I breathed wrong.”

Grace’s mouth softened, but not into a smile. “Tommy notices things.”

“So do you.”

That settled between them again, sharper now.

Grace lowered her voice. “You don’t want him thinking you’re hiding something dangerous.”

Vera stared at her, tired enough that the words came before caution could stop them. “And what are you hiding, Grace?”

For the first time, Grace truly looked caught.

It was small. A blink held a fraction too long. Her fingers tightening in the edge of the shawl. But Vera saw it, and Grace knew she saw it.

Then the mask returned.

“I’m not the one he brought into the private room.”

“No,” Vera said. “You’re the one listening outside it.”

Grace’s expression went still.

Vera’s heart knocked once, hard.

She had guessed. Mostly. She had seen Grace near the door when she came out, seen the way she straightened too quickly, the way her attention had been fixed somewhere it shouldn’t have been. But the accuracy of the accusation startled even Vera.

Grace drew herself up. “You should be careful.”

Vera laughed under her breath. “Everyone keeps saying that.”

“Maybe you should start listening.”

“And maybe you should start asking fewer questions.”

The pub door opened again before Grace could respond.

Thomas stood there.

Both women went quiet.

His eyes moved from Grace to Vera, then back again. If he had heard them, he gave no sign of how much.

“Inside,” he said.

Not loud. Not harsh.

It was still an order.

Grace went first.

Vera remained where she was for one stubborn second longer, because apparently terror had not cured her of being foolish. Thomas looked at her, waiting. He did not repeat himself.

Finally, Vera stepped past him into the Garrison.

The day worsened as it went on.

By evening, the pub filled until there was nowhere Vera could stand without brushing against someone’s shoulder or reaching across someone’s arm. Noise rose with the smoke. Men pressed close to the bar, impatient and laughing, some already drunk, some mean with the desire to become so. Vera worked because work was easier than thinking. Pour, take coins, wipe, move, refuse to flinch.

But her awareness had split.

One part of her stayed behind the bar, measuring whisky and dodging hands.

The other remained in the private room, hearing the click of Thomas Shelby’s watch.

She did not see it again. He had left sometime in the late afternoon, slipping out after speaking quietly to Harry and exchanging a few words with Grace that Vera could not hear. His absence should have made the room easier.

It did not.

A thing did not have to be present to cast a shadow.

Grace’s mood changed after that too. She was still polite, still helpful when the crush at the bar became too much, but there was a careful distance in her now. Vera felt it and understood that whatever fragile courtesy had existed between them had been damaged outside.

Good, Vera told herself.

Then, almost immediately, she wondered if good was another word for stupid.

A man near the end of the bar snapped his fingers at her.

Vera turned her head slowly.

He grinned, showing teeth stained by tobacco. “You deaf?”

“No.”

“Then bring us a drink.”

“Ask properly.”

His friends made a low sound of amusement.

The man leaned forward. “You forgot where you are, girl?”

Vera held his gaze. She could hear Grace shift beside her.

No sharp mouth, she reminded herself. Not every fight needed her name on it. Not here.

She reached for a bottle. “No. I remember.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

Vera poured the drink and set it down, keeping her hand around the glass when he reached for it. “Coin first.”

His smile thinned.

For a moment, she thought he might grab her. A day ago, before waking in the alley, she would have trusted a bar between them more. Now she knew better. Wood did not stop men who felt entitled to cross it.

A hand came down on the man’s shoulder.

John Shelby leaned beside him with that bright, dangerous grin Vera remembered from the night before.

“She said coin first.”

The man’s expression changed at once. “John.”

John did not remove his hand. “You know, I like this one. She’s mean.”

“I’m not mean,” Vera said.

John looked at her. “You are, a bit.”

“I’m efficient.”

“Mean efficiently, then.”

Despite herself, Vera almost smiled.

The man paid.

John watched until he did, then clapped him once on the shoulder hard enough to make the warning clear beneath the friendliness. “Good lad.”

Arthur appeared behind John with a cigarette in his mouth and impatience in his whole body. “John, stop flirting with the barmaid and drink.”

“I’m defending her honor.”

“I didn’t ask,” Vera said, taking the coins.

John’s grin widened. “See? Mean.”

Arthur barked a laugh and turned toward Grace for his drink.

The Shelby brothers changed the pub simply by existing inside it. Men made room without being told. Some became louder in the hope of seeming unafraid. Others quieted. Vera watched it happen and understood, in a way she had not fully the night before, that Tommy did not stand alone. His name had weight because it came with brothers, with men, with violence that had already taught this street where to bend.

John leaned his elbows on the bar. “Tommy been bothering you?”

Vera kept wiping a glass. “Does he consider it bothering?”

“Tommy considers it conversation.”

“That explains why no one looks happy during it.”

John laughed. “You’re learning.”

Arthur took his drink from Grace and looked Vera over with a squint. “You still claiming London?”

Vera paused.

John’s grin sharpened.

Grace looked down at the bar.

Vera placed the clean glass on the shelf. “Do you still ask every woman you meet where she’s from?”

Arthur laughed like she had pleased him. “Only the suspicious ones.”

“That must keep you busy.”

John pointed at her. “I’m telling Tommy you said that.”

“Will he be hurt?”

“No.”

“Then it won’t be worth your breath.”

Arthur laughed again and moved away, already calling to someone near the tables. John lingered half a second longer.

“You know,” he said, quieter now, “if you are running from something, there’s better places to hide than this.”

Vera looked at him.

There was still humor in his face, but less of it. John Shelby, she realized, was not careless. He only wore careless well.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

He nodded once, as if that was the best he expected, and followed Arthur into the room.

Vera watched him go.

Grace came to stand beside her. “They like you.”

“They don’t know me.”

“That doesn’t always matter to men.”

Vera turned. “Does Tommy like me?”

Grace’s expression shifted before she could stop it.

There it was.

Something Vera had touched without meaning to.

Grace reached for a bottle. “Tommy doesn’t like people easily.”

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“No,” Grace said. “It wasn’t.”

The rest of the evening dragged. Vera’s feet hurt. Her head hurt. The noise grated against her nerves until every shout felt personal. Still, she worked. She worked because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant the private room, the lock, the ledger, the watch, Thomas’s voice telling her to look at him in a memory she could not possibly have.

By closing, Vera felt hollow.

Harry ushered the last men out with all the charm of a door slamming. Arthur and John had gone earlier. Grace stayed until the room was nearly empty, tying her shawl with slow fingers.

“You’ll sleep here again?” Grace asked.

Vera stacked glasses without looking at her. “Apparently I look good in chairs.”

Grace did not smile. “You shouldn’t stay alone.”

“With Harry?”

“Harry leaves.”

Vera paused.

She had not known that.

Harry was counting coins near the bar and either did not hear or chose not to. The fire burned low. Outside, the street had quieted into that uneasy kind of dark that did not feel empty so much as waiting.

Vera put another glass on the shelf. “Where do you sleep?”

Grace’s eyes met hers.

The question was too pointed. Both of them knew it.

Grace reached for her gloves. “Good night, Vera.”

Vera watched her leave.

Harry locked the front door behind her a few minutes later and turned the bolt. The sound sank into Vera’s chest.

“You,” he said, pointing toward the private room, “clear the glasses in there. Then you can sit by the fire. I’ll be upstairs for a bit, then I’m out. Don’t open the door for anyone.”

“Does anyone try?”

Harry gave her a look. “It’s Small Heath.”

“That’s becoming a very flexible explanation.”

“It’s the only one you’ll need.”

He went into the back, leaving Vera alone in the main room.

The silence after a full night of noise felt unnatural. Vera could hear the building settling around her, the faint tap of rain against the windows, the scrape of Harry moving somewhere overhead. The Garrison without men in it seemed less like a pub and more like something holding its breath.

She stood still for a moment, listening.

Then she picked up a tray and went to the private room.

The door was unlocked now.

Vera hesitated before opening it.

She told herself that was reasonable. Thomas Shelby had spent the morning asking her questions inside that room with the door shut. Anyone would hesitate.

But when she stepped inside, the feeling that went through her was not fear of Thomas.

It was the awful certainty of entering a place that had been waiting.

The private room looked ordinary enough. Chairs slightly out of place. Two glasses on the table. Ash in the tray. Papers gone, though Vera could still see the cleaner rectangle where they had rested. The fire had nearly died, turning the room into amber shadow.

Vera set the tray down.

She collected the glasses first.

Then she wiped the table.

Then she moved a chair back where it belonged and stopped with her hand still on the wood.

The wall panel near the corner had shifted.

Or maybe it had always been that way.

A narrow line ran between two pieces of wood, almost invisible unless the firelight caught it. Vera stared at it until her eyes began to water. Her heart had started beating harder, though nothing had happened. No sound. No movement. No reason.

She should leave it alone.

She knew that as clearly as she had known the ledger’s hiding place.

Leave it.

Take the glasses.

Go back to the fire.

Instead, Vera stepped toward the wall.

The floorboard beneath her left boot gave the smallest creak.

She did not look down.

She had already avoided that board earlier without knowing why.

Her mouth went dry.

Vera lifted a hand, then lowered it again. She looked back at the door. Empty. No one there. Harry’s footsteps had faded upstairs. Rain ticked faintly against the window.

She faced the wall.

“This is how stupid women die in stories,” she muttered.

The sound of her own voice helped for half a second.

Then she pressed her fingers against the panel.

Nothing happened.

Vera almost laughed at herself. Relief came so quickly that it made her angry. She had been standing in a private room pressing walls because a century had gone wrong around her and she had begun to believe the building knew her.

She pulled her hand back.

The panel clicked.

Vera stopped breathing.

A thin section of wood loosened inward, not opening fully, just enough to reveal darkness behind it.

For several seconds, she did not move.

Then, slowly, she pulled the panel aside.

There was a hollow space inside the wall.

Dust lay thick along the bottom. The smell that came out was stale and old, trapped wood and metal and time. Vera’s fingers shook as she reached inside, already hating herself for doing it, already knowing she would not stop.

Her hand touched something cold.

Round.

Metal.

She drew it out.

A pocket watch rested in her palm.

It was not the same as Thomas’s. Vera knew that immediately, though she did not know enough about watches to say why. This one was older, heavier, its surface dulled by years hidden in the wall. The chain was wrapped around it tightly, as if someone had put it away in a hurry and meant to make sure it did not catch on anything.

Vera stared at it.

The room seemed to tilt.

She could hear ticking.

That was impossible. The watch could not still be ticking. Not after being hidden in a wall for God knew how long. Not after dust had settled over it like a burial sheet.

Still, Vera heard it.

Slow.

Steady.

Louder than her own breathing.

Her thumb found the catch.

The moment she pressed it, the world tore sideways.

Smoke filled her lungs.

Vera was standing in the Garrison, but not the Garrison as it was now. The room was louder, hotter, full of panic. Someone shoved past her hard enough to make her stumble. Glass shattered nearby. A woman screamed from the direction of the bar, sharp and terrified.

Grace.

Vera knew it was Grace without seeing her.

Then Thomas was there.

Not the cold, controlled man from the morning.

This Thomas had blood at his collar and fury stripped bare across his face. His hand closed around Vera’s wrist, strong enough to hold her but not enough to hurt.

“Look at me,” he said.

Vera tried to pull away.

He stepped closer, blocking out the smoke behind him. “Vera, look at me.”

There was fear in him.

The sight of it stunned her.

Thomas Shelby, afraid.

Not for himself.

For her.

Something crashed against the door. Men shouted. Someone called Tommy’s name like a warning.

Vera looked down and saw the watch in her hand.

Her fingers were slick.

Blood.

She did not know if it was hers.

Thomas gripped her face then, making her look at him. His mouth moved, but the words came broken, swallowed by the roar around them.

Then she heard one sentence clearly.

“If I remember you, I lose you.”

Vera gasped.

The private room came back so violently that she nearly fell.

Her shoulder struck the wall. The loose panel clattered against the floor. She clutched the pocket watch to her chest with both hands, breathing too fast, trying to drag air into lungs that still believed they were full of smoke.

There was no shouting.

No broken glass.

No blood.

Only the dying fire and the rain and the watch in her hand.

Vera looked down.

The watch was open.

Inside, beneath the cracked glass of the face, something had been tucked into the casing. Not behind the hands, but into the other side, hidden beneath the lip of the cover. A small folded paper. No, not paper.

A photograph.

Vera’s fingers had gone numb, but she managed to ease it free.

The photograph was old. Worn at the corners. Creased down one side from being folded too tightly into the watch. For a moment, she could not make sense of it in the dim light.

Then the image settled.

Vera stopped breathing.

She was in the photograph.

Standing outside the Garrison beside Thomas Shelby.

Not smiling.

Not posed like lovers. Not sweet. Nothing that simple.

Thomas’s hand was around her arm, not dragging her, not quite holding her back, but gripping her with urgency. His head was turned slightly toward someone out of frame, eyes hard and alert. Vera’s own face was turned toward him, mouth parted as if she had been speaking when the photograph was taken. There was something in the angle of her body that looked like she had been caught between running and staying.

It was unmistakably her.

It was unmistakably him.

And at the bottom of the photograph, written in small, faded ink, was a date.

Vera made a sound she did not recognize.

The photo trembled in her hand.

No.

This could not be another strange feeling. It could not be a door she seemed to know or a lock she understood too quickly. This was proof. This was her face printed in a photograph from a year she had only arrived in yesterday.

Her knees weakened.

She sat down hard in the nearest chair, still staring at the image.

The room felt too small around her. Too hot, then too cold. Vera turned the photograph over because some desperate part of her thought the back might make it less impossible.

There was writing there.

Not much.

Only one line.

The handwriting was hers.

She knew it the way a person knew their own voice even when it came from another room. The slant of the letters. The pressure of the pen. The slight drag at the end of the words where she always grew impatient.

Vera read it once.

Then again.

Her chest tightened until breathing hurt.

Do not let him remember you.

The words blurred.

She blinked hard, but they remained.

Do not let him remember you.

A floorboard creaked outside the room.

Vera’s head snapped up.

For one dreadful second, everything went still.

Then Thomas Shelby’s voice came from the doorway.

“Vera.”

Thomas sat at the table near the private room with his sleeves rolled to his forearms and a cigarette burning low between his fingers. He had been pretending to read the same paper for ten minutes.

Vera noticed because she had been pretending not to notice him.

“You’ve been on that line a while,” she said.

Thomas did not look up. “Have I?”

“Either it’s very interesting, or you’re not reading.”

He turned the page with deliberate care. “Perhaps I’m thorough.”

“You’re many things. Thorough is only one of the less irritating ones.”

That brought his eyes up.

The look he gave her was quiet, but there was warmth beneath it. Not softness exactly. Thomas Shelby never became soft in the simple ways. He only allowed certain edges to lower when he thought no one else would see.

Vera had learned to notice those moments. She had learned not to name them too loudly.

He set the paper aside. “Come here.”

She wiped the counter with unnecessary focus. “No.”

“You’re angry.”

“I’m working.”

“You’re angry and working.”

“I contain multitudes.”

A faint smile touched his mouth before he looked down, hiding most of it behind the cigarette. Vera hated how fond that made her feel. She hated it because the feeling had nowhere safe to go. There was nothing safe about Thomas, nothing safe about the life that gathered around him like smoke, and still there were nights when he looked at her across the Garrison and she forgot, for a dangerous second, that love could make a person stupid.

He leaned back in his chair. “I told you not to go near the docks alone.”

Vera’s hand stilled.

There it was.

The argument again.

She dropped the cloth onto the counter and faced him properly. “And I told you I didn’t go there for fun.”

“You were followed.”

“I noticed.”

“After they had you against a wall.”

Her jaw tightened. “I got away.”

Thomas stood then, the chair scraping softly beneath him. He did not move fast. He did not need to. The air changed when he rose, just as it always did, but Vera held her ground behind the bar and refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing her retreat.

He came to the counter and stopped on the other side.

“That isn’t the point.”

“It usually is when I’m the one bleeding.”

His eyes dropped to her wrist.

The cut there was small, already cleaned and wrapped, but Thomas looked at it as though it were an insult done to him personally. She knew that look. It was the one that got men hurt. It was the one that made her feel protected and frightened in the same breath.

“Don’t,” she said.

He looked back at her. “Don’t what?”

“Turn it into a debt someone has to pay.”

“They touched you.”

“And I’m still standing.”

“That does not settle it.”

“It should.”

“It won’t.”

Vera laughed under her breath, but it came out tired. “One day, Thomas, you are going to hate me for what follows me to your door.”

He said nothing.

That silence was worse than an answer. It gave the words room to sit between them, ugly and true. Vera looked away first, because there were some fears she could say only if she did not have to watch him hear them.

The fire shifted in the grate.

Thomas came around the end of the bar.

Vera should have stepped back. She did not.

He stopped in front of her, close enough that she could smell smoke on his coat and whisky beneath it. His hand lifted, not quickly, not with the force she had seen him use on other people. He took her injured wrist with such care that it unsettled her more than roughness would have.

His thumb brushed just beneath the bandage.

“You keep looking for the worst of me,” Vera said, quieter now.

Thomas’s eyes stayed on her wrist. “No.”

“No?”

“I found that early.”

Something in her chest tightened.

Then he looked at her.

“I stayed anyway.”

Vera’s breath caught before she could stop it.

That was the trouble with him. He could cut a room to pieces with silence, could stare a man into confessing, could make violence seem like arithmetic. And then, when Vera had prepared herself for cruelty, he said something plain and ruined her more thoroughly than any tenderness dressed up in pretty words could have.

“You don’t know what I am,” she said.

“I know enough.”

“You don’t.”

“I know what you are when you’re afraid.” His voice was low, meant only for her. “I know when you’re lying. I know when you’re about to run and pretending you aren’t. I know you think needing someone is the same as giving them a knife.”

Vera swallowed.

His thumb stilled beneath her wrist.

“And you’re still here?” she asked.

“Aye.”

“Why?”

Thomas looked at her for a long moment. “Because you are.”

The words landed with terrible simplicity.

Vera wanted to laugh at him. She wanted to tell him that was not an answer, that he could not build loyalty out of stubbornness and call it sense. But the Garrison was too quiet, and his hand was too careful on hers, and she was so tired of being the only person prepared to leave first.

“When this turns ugly,” she said, “you’ll regret standing close to me.”

Thomas’s eyes did not move from hers. “Then I’ll regret it standing beside you.”

A sound came from somewhere outside.

A shout, maybe. Or the street shifting in the rain.

Thomas turned his head slightly, listening.

Vera felt his hand tighten, not enough to hurt, just enough to hold.

“Where you go,” he said, still looking toward the door, “I go.”

The words should have comforted her.

For half a second, they did.

Then the fire snapped too loud.

The room tilted.

The warmth drained from the Garrison, leaving only smoke. A chair overturned somewhere behind her. Men shouted in the street. Glass shattered. Someone screamed Thomas’s name, and another voice answered, rough and furious.

Arthur.

Then John, closer, breathless. “Tommy, move!”

Thomas’s hand closed around Vera’s wrist.

The careful touch became a grip.

The Garrison darkened around the edges.

Vera heard herself say, “No.”

Thomas looked back at her, but his face was wrong now. Blood at his collar. Soot on his cheek. Fear in his eyes.

“Vera.”

“No,” she said again, but the room was already breaking apart.

She woke with a gasp.

For a moment, she did not know where she was. Her hand flew to her wrist as if she expected to find Thomas still holding it, but there was only her own skin, cold and damp beneath her fingers.

Not the Garrison.

Not the fire.

Not Thomas.

Vera lay on a narrow bench in a room that smelled of damp paper, old tobacco, and walls that had held too many frightened people. The ceiling above her was cracked. A lamp burned low on a desk near the door, its flame turned down until the corners of the room were thick with shadow. Somewhere beyond the wall, a man coughed. Keys moved faintly at someone’s belt.

Campbell.

The thought returned with the force of a hand closing around her throat.

Vera sat up too quickly and nearly doubled over as dizziness rushed through her. Her coat was beside her on the bench, folded badly, as if someone had thrown it there after deciding she was not worth gentleness.

The watch.

Her hands went to the lining before she had fully breathed.

It was still there.

Hidden beneath the inner seam, heavy and impossible. She pressed her palm over it, and only then did she let herself close her eyes for half a second.

The relief did not last.

The memory came back in pieces.

Thomas’s hand on her wrist, gentle first. His voice in the quiet. The way he had looked at her as if the worst of her had already been weighed and accepted. The promise that should have been the kind of thing a woman kept near her heart.

Where you go, I go.

Vera opened her eyes.

The words were not sweet anymore.

Not here.

Her stomach twisted.

He had loved her.

The knowledge sat inside her like something newly broken.

Not suspected. Not imagined from a photograph. Not built from the strange ache she felt whenever he looked at her too closely. She remembered it now, not all of it, not enough to understand the beginning or the end, but enough to know the feeling had been real.

Thomas had loved her.

And the Thomas she knew now had let Campbell take her.

Vera pressed her hand harder over the coat lining until the watch dug into her palm through the fabric.

That was unfair.

The thought came bitterly, unwanted. Current Thomas did not know her. He had no reason to choose her like the man in her memory had. He had suspicion, fragments, a strange woman lying badly in his pub and hiding something from his wall.

Still, the hurt remained.

It burned because somewhere inside her, another Vera had expected him to come.

That frightened her most.

Vera forced herself to look around the room.

A desk. Two chairs. A narrow window too high to reach without climbing, its lower frame painted shut beneath years of grime. One door. No proper handle on her side, only a latch plate where a handle had once been removed. A basin in the corner. Floorboards warped near the far wall.

She knew the window would not open before she tried it.

She knew the board by the desk would creak if someone stepped on it.

She knew there was a hook outside the door where keys sometimes hung, though she had no reason to know any of it.

Her breath shortened.

She had been here before.

Not this morning. Not in this life she understood. Before.

The realization did not arrive cleanly. It pressed through her body instead, making her palms sweat and her throat close. She saw nothing clearly, only flashes without enough shape to become memory. Her knees against the floor. A man’s voice telling someone to wait outside. Grace’s face turning away too fast.

Vera stood.

Her legs were unsteady beneath her.

She went to the window anyway and pulled at the frame. It did not move.

Of course it didn’t.

A sound came from beyond the door.

Footsteps.

Vera turned and grabbed her coat, dragging it around herself just as the lock shifted.

The door opened.

Inspector Campbell entered with the patience of a man who believed time belonged to him. Two men stood behind him in the hallway, not the uniformed officers from the Garrison, but heavier men with the look of hired force. One had a scar along his jaw. The other did not bother hiding the way his eyes moved over the room before landing on her.

Campbell closed the door behind him, keeping his men just outside.

“Miss Hart.”

Vera tucked one hand into her coat pocket and kept the other near the hidden seam. “Inspector.”

“You slept.”

“No one asked me not to.”

His mouth moved as if he almost appreciated the answer. Almost.

“You seem calmer now.”

“Give me time.”

Campbell stepped to the desk and removed his gloves finger by finger. “You have caused a considerable amount of trouble for a woman who claims to have no importance.”

“I never claimed that.”

“You claimed very little, actually.” He placed the gloves down. “No address. No family. No papers. No employer before Harry Fenton. No explanation for your sudden appearance in Small Heath.”

Vera said nothing.

Campbell looked at her. “And yet Thomas Shelby speaks for you.”

“He speaks for a lot of things. Doesn’t make them special.”

“No,” Campbell said. “But it makes them useful.”

The word slid coldly through the room.

Useful.

Vera had the awful sense that she had heard him say it before. Maybe not to her. Maybe about her. Her fingers tightened in the pocket of her coat until her nails bit her palm.

Campbell watched the movement.

“Why did you accuse Miss Burgess?”

Vera kept her face still. “Did I?”

His eyes sharpened. “Do not play stupid with me.”

“I’m trying not to overplay my hand.”

“Your hand is empty.”

“Then you’ve nothing to worry about.”

Campbell came closer by one slow step. “What did you see?”

Vera thought of the alley. Grace’s back turned. The word inspector slipping through the damp air. Grace’s face when she realized Vera had seen enough to be dangerous.

“Two people who didn’t want to be seen,” Vera said.

Campbell’s expression did not change, but the silence after her answer told her something had landed.

“You are either very observant,” he said, “or very well informed.”

“Can’t a girl be both?”

“Not a girl with no past.”

Vera’s jaw tightened.

Campbell’s gaze moved to her coat.

It was only a glance. Brief. Controlled. But Vera felt it like fingers against the hidden watch.

“You seem attached to that coat.”

“It’s cold.”

“You said that last night.”

“So did the weather.”

Campbell looked at the door. “Martin.”

The man with the scar opened it and stepped inside.

Vera’s body went still.

Campbell nodded toward her. “Search the coat.”

For a second, the room became very quiet.

Not empty.

Waiting.

Vera drew the coat tighter around herself. “No.”

Campbell’s eyes returned to her. “No?”

“You men do enjoy repeating me.”

“Search it,” Campbell said again.

Martin stepped forward.

Panic came up so fast that Vera nearly choked on it. Not the coat. Not the watch. Not the photograph tucked inside the watch with her face and Thomas’s and the warning that had started to feel less like a note and more like a sentence.

If Campbell found it, he would not understand all of it.

That might be worse.

Martin reached for her sleeve.

Vera moved before sense could catch her.

She grabbed the nearest thing on the desk, a heavy glass ink bottle, and threw it at the lamp.

The lamp did not shatter the way she hoped, but it tipped hard, oil spilling across the desk as the flame guttered wildly. Campbell cursed and stepped back. Martin lunged for her, but Vera shoved the chair into his legs and bolted toward the door.

The second man tried to block her in the hallway.

Vera lowered her shoulder and drove into him with all the strength fear could lend her. It was not graceful. It hurt. Pain shot through her arm where she struck him, but he stumbled enough for her to slip past.

Behind her, Campbell’s voice cracked through the hallway.

“Stop her!”

Vera ran.

The corridor ahead of her was narrow and badly lit, walls stained with damp, doors closed on either side. She should not have known to turn left at the end.

She turned left.

A man shouted behind her.

Boots hit the floorboards.

Vera nearly slipped at the corner and caught herself against the wall, splinters biting into her palm. She kept going, breath tearing in her throat, one hand clutched against the front of her coat where the watch lay hidden. The hallway dipped, then opened near a back stairwell.

She knew the third step would bow under her weight.

It did.

Her foot caught, and she nearly fell, but she grabbed the railing and dragged herself forward. A hand caught the back of her coat for one awful second. Fabric tightened at her throat. Vera twisted, half choking, and drove her elbow back into whatever part of the man she could reach.

He swore and lost his grip.

Her coat tore somewhere near the seam.

Terror sharpened into something almost clean.

The watch.

Vera slapped a hand to the lining. Still there.

She plunged down the stairs.

At the bottom was a door with a bolt high enough that she had to stretch for it. Her fingers fumbled, slick with sweat. The bolt stuck.

No.

Behind her, the men were coming down.

Vera lifted the door slightly on instinct before pulling again.

The bolt slid free.

She stared for half a breath.

Then the door opened, and wet air slapped her face.

She stumbled into an alley behind the building.

Rain had turned the ground dark and slick. Smoke hung low over the roofs, mixing with the damp until the world seemed made of gray breath and brick. Vera ran before she knew where to go, choosing the narrower passage because her body chose it first.

Campbell’s voice followed from the open door.

“After her!”

Boots hit the cobbles behind her.

Vera ran harder.

The streets blurred into sharp fragments. A puddle exploding beneath her boot. Brick scraping her sleeve. The stink of horse dung and rainwater. Someone shouting as she shoved past them. A cart wheel grinding over stone close enough that she felt the spray from it against her skirt.

She did not know Birmingham.

But she knew this path.

That was the worst part.

She turned down an alley before seeing the man ahead who would have blocked the street. She ducked through a gap between two buildings before understanding there was space enough for her shoulders. She crossed a narrow yard, climbed a low wall, and dropped badly on the other side, pain jarring up through her knees.

Every turn she took felt less like a choice and more like surrendering to something inside her that had run these streets before.

The men were still behind her.

One shouted, “There!”

Vera clutched her coat tighter and forced herself onward.

Her lungs burned. Her side ached before the wound ever came, a stitch opening beneath her ribs from running too hard and breathing too badly. Rain stuck her hair to her neck. Her boots slipped more than once on wet stone, each stumble wasting precious seconds.

She had the sudden, vivid memory of Thomas’s voice.

Where you go, I go.

“No,” she gasped, though no one could hear her.

Not him.

He could not come.

The thought made no sense and perfect sense all at once. She wanted him to come so badly that it hurt. She wanted the man from the memory, the one who had held her like he knew what she was and stayed anyway. But wanting it felt like reaching for a match in a room full of oil.

Another alley opened ahead.

Vera turned into it.

A mistake.

She knew it as soon as she saw the wall at the far end.

For one second, she stopped.

That was all it took.

A hand closed around the back of her coat and yanked her hard enough that her shoulder hit the brick. Pain flashed white behind her eyes. Vera twisted and struck blindly, nails catching the man’s face. He cursed and grabbed her arm, slamming her back again.

The man with the scar.

Martin.

“You little bitch.”

Vera drove her knee up.

He grunted, grip loosening just enough for her to tear partly free. The coat shifted, and something inside the lining dragged downward.

The watch.

She grabbed the coat with both hands.

Martin saw the movement.

“What’s that, then?”

“Nothing.”

He lunged for the coat.

Vera threw herself sideways, but the alley was too narrow. His hand caught the torn lining. Fabric ripped open with a sound that made her blood go cold. The watch chain snagged on a loose thread, glinting once in the dim rain.

Martin’s eyes dropped.

Vera shoved him with everything she had.

He stumbled back, but not far enough.

His hand moved to his belt.

She saw the knife only when it was already too close.

He did not swing like he meant to kill her. It was worse somehow, more careless than that. A quick, cruel slice meant to frighten, to stop, to punish her for fighting. Vera twisted away, but the blade caught her side.

Heat tore across her ribs.

For a second, she did not feel pain.

Only shock.

Then the pain opened, sharp and bright, and she gasped so hard she nearly lost her footing. Her hand flew to her side. When she pulled it back, her fingers were wet.

Martin grabbed for her again.

Vera swung the loose end of the watch chain without thinking. It struck his face, not hard enough to truly injure, but enough to startle him. He swore, and Vera used the second to rip the watch free from the torn lining and clutch it against her chest.

She ran.

The cut at her side screamed with every step.

She could not breathe properly now. Each inhale dragged against the wound. Warmth spread beneath her hand, soaking into her clothes, too much and not enough to stop her. Behind her, Martin shouted for the others, his voice echoing off the brick.

Vera turned out of the alley and into a wider street.

For half a second, there was space.

Rain. Smoke. The dull glow of lamps. A cart moving slowly at the far end. A woman hurrying across the road with a shawl over her head. The world had not stopped for Vera Hart bleeding in the street, clutching an impossible watch in both hands.

She staggered forward.

Maybe she could disappear.

Maybe the rain would take her shape and the smoke would swallow what remained of her. Maybe she could find somewhere to hide, somewhere Thomas would not think to look, somewhere Campbell would not reach.

Then she heard voices.

Not Campbell’s men.

A shout cut through the rain.

“Vera!”

She froze.

Arthur Shelby came into view first, broad and furious beneath the streetlamp, cap pulled low, one hand already reaching beneath his coat as if the whole street had offended him personally.

John was just behind him, moving fast, eyes scanning the road with a sharpness that made him look older than his grin ever did.

And between them, a few steps ahead, was Thomas.

For one impossible second, Vera felt relief so strong it nearly brought her to her knees.

He had come.

Even after the Garrison. Even after the silence. Even after the hesitation that had cut through her worse than Campbell’s questions. Thomas Shelby had come into the rain looking for her, and the sight of him cracked something open in her chest.

Then Arthur moved past a lamp, and the memory struck.

Arthur shouting Tommy’s name through smoke.

John’s cap on the floor, dark with something Vera did not want to understand.

A gunshot.

Thomas on his knees, one hand stretched toward blood spreading across Garrison boards.

Vera’s own voice saying, “This is because of me.”

The street returned with a sickening snap.

Thomas saw her properly then.

His eyes dropped to the hand pressed against her side, to the blood darkening her clothes, to the torn coat clutched tight against her chest. His face changed.

Not much.

Enough.

He started toward her.

Vera stepped back.

Thomas stopped.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Arthur looked between them, impatient and confused. “Tommy?”

John’s eyes sharpened as he saw her retreat. “Vera, come on.”

She shook her head.

Not at John.

At all of them.

“No.”

Thomas took another step, slower this time. “You’re hurt.”

“You can’t be here.”

His brows drew together. “Vera.”

The sound of her name almost undid her.

She pressed the watch harder against her chest and felt the blood slip warm beneath her other hand.

“You can’t bring them,” she said.

Arthur went still.

John glanced at Thomas.

“What?” Thomas asked.

Vera could hear boots behind her now.

Campbell’s men. Closer than before.

She looked past Thomas to Arthur and John, alive in the rain, angry and confused and ready to follow their brother into any fire he named. Her throat tightened until the words nearly broke coming out.

“Not for me.”

Thomas’s eyes held hers.

For the first time since she had met him in this life, the suspicion was not the first thing there. Something else had moved ahead of it. Concern. Anger. A question he did not yet know how to ask.

Behind Vera, hands seized her arms.

She cried out as one of them caught near her wounded side. The watch nearly slipped from her grip, and she clutched it harder, fingers locked around the casing. Martin had her left arm. Another man took the right.

Arthur surged forward.

John moved with him.

Thomas lifted his gun.

The street tightened into one breath.

Then Campbell’s voice came from behind her, calm enough to be obscene.

“I wouldn’t, Mr. Shelby.”

Vera did not turn. She could not. She kept her eyes on Thomas because if she looked away, she thought she might fall apart entirely.

Campbell stepped into the edge of her vision, rain running off the brim of his hat. “You’ve already made quite a public display for a woman you claim merely works in your pub.”

Thomas’s gun did not lower.

Vera felt one of Campbell’s men pull her backward.

Pain tore through her side, and she bit down hard enough to keep from crying out again.

Thomas took one step forward.

Vera shook her head, frantic now. “Don’t.”

He stopped, and that frightened her as much as if he had not.

Because he was listening.

Because some part of him had come close enough to remembering her that her fear mattered.

Arthur’s voice came rough from behind him. “Tommy, give the word.”

John said nothing, but his hand was already inside his coat.

Vera looked at them and saw them dead.

Not fully. Not clearly. But enough to feel the shape of the loss waiting behind the rain.

Her vision blurred.

Thomas had come for her.

Arthur stood behind him with his jaw set and his shoulders lifted, ready to break the first man who gave him reason. His collar was already torn from the fight that had carried them through the street, one side of his coat hanging loose where someone had grabbed at him. Blood marked his knuckles. Rain ran down his face and made dark tracks through the dirt there.

John was on Thomas’s other side, cap low, eyes sharp, one hand inside his coat. He was breathing hard, but there was a grinless look about him now that made him seem more dangerous than when he smiled. His sleeve was ripped near the elbow, and one of Campbell’s men had left a bruise coming up along his jaw. He looked at Vera once, saw the blood at her side, and the last bit of boyishness went out of his face.

Campbell stood just behind Vera as if the whole street had arranged itself for his benefit.

“I wouldn’t, Mr. Shelby,” he said.

Thomas did not lower the gun.

He looked at Campbell as though he were deciding where the first bullet would go. His coat was wet through, the black wool shining under the lamps. Blood sat at the corner of his mouth, not enough to be serious, enough to make him look less like the clean, controlled man Vera had first seen in the Garrison and more like the man from her broken memories. His cap had been pushed back slightly, his hair damp beneath it, and his eyes had fixed on her with a force that made her want to move toward him and away from him in the same desperate instant.

Campbell noticed.

Of course he did.

“Remarkable,” he said, his voice carrying easily through the rain. “The devotion one can inspire in such a short time.”

Thomas’s face did not change.

Vera felt Martin’s grip tighten around her arm, fingers digging into bruises already left there. The other man held her right side too close to the cut, and every shallow breath pulled fire through her ribs.

“Let her go,” Thomas said.

It was not shouted. It did not need to be.

Campbell’s mouth curved. “You have no authority here.”

Arthur shifted. “Neither do you.”

Campbell glanced at him. “Arthur Shelby. Always eager to mistake volume for power.”

Arthur gave a short, humorless laugh. “Say another word.”

“Arthur,” Thomas said.

The warning was quiet, but Arthur heard it. He rocked back half a step, though his hands remained ready.

Vera stared at Thomas. He looked at her with the question she had been afraid of since the moment he appeared in the rain.

Why are you more afraid of me coming than of him taking you?

She wanted to answer. The words were lodged so deep in her throat they hurt.

You come for me.

They follow.

They die.

But she could not say it with Campbell standing so close, with Arthur and John already in the line of danger, with the rain making everything shine like the memory of blood.

Campbell stepped nearer to her. “I confess, Miss Hart interests me. No past, no papers, no sensible explanation for her presence here. And still, here you all are.”

John’s hand moved inside his coat.

“Don’t,” Vera said.

He looked at her, confused.

Not Campbell. Not the man holding her. John.

“Don’t,” she said again, and her voice nearly broke with it.

John frowned. “We’re trying to get you out of this.”

That was the trouble.

That had always been the trouble.

Arthur leaned forward, voice rough from the rain and anger. “Vera, love, you need to stand still and let us handle it.”

A laugh caught in her chest and came out as something almost painful. Let them handle it. That was what men like them did. They walked into fire with their brother’s name in their mouths and believed walking out was only a matter of will.

Thomas watched her too closely.

Campbell noticed that as well.

“You see?” Campbell said softly. “She understands better than the rest of you. One mistake here, and men will die.”

Arthur’s eyes went flat.

Thomas’s gun lifted by the smallest measure.

Vera felt Campbell’s men stiffen on either side of her.

Then everything happened at once.

Martin yanked her backward, maybe meaning to pull her clear, maybe meaning only to remind Thomas who held the leverage. His hand caught too close to the cut in her side. Pain burst through her so sharply that Vera cried out before she could stop it.

Thomas moved.

So did Arthur.

One of Campbell’s men raised his pistol. John saw it first and lunged sideways, catching the man’s arm just as the shot cracked open the street. The bullet went wild, smashing through a window somewhere behind Thomas. Glass exploded inward with a bright, awful sound.

Arthur hit Martin before Martin could drag Vera another step.

They went down hard against the wet cobbles. Vera stumbled free, nearly falling as the sudden loss of support made the world tilt. Thomas was already coming toward her, but another man came from the side alley and swung at him with a baton. Thomas turned into the blow enough to keep it from his head, took it hard against his shoulder, then drove his fist into the man’s stomach and dropped him with the cold efficiency of a man who had no time to enjoy violence.

“Vera!” he shouted.

The sound of her name should have anchored her.

Instead, it terrified her.

Arthur had Martin by the front of his coat and was driving him backward toward the Garrison doors. John was still fighting for the pistol, rain slicking his hair to his forehead, teeth bared as the man tried to bring the gun around again. Campbell had stepped away from the worst of it, not running, not joining in, simply watching his trap take shape.

Vera clutched the watch tighter and ran.

Not far.

She did not get far because her side was screaming and her legs were weak from blood loss and fear. She cut between two men grappling near the door and staggered into the narrow alley beside the Garrison, one hand on the wall to keep herself upright. The bricks were wet and cold beneath her palm. Her breath sounded wrong in her own ears, too fast, too thin.

Behind her, the fight crashed on.

Men shouted. Someone hit the Garrison door hard enough to rattle the glass. Arthur cursed so loudly it cut through the rain. John yelled Tommy’s name, not in warning yet, but close enough to it that Vera’s stomach turned.

She forced herself onward.

A hand caught her arm.

Vera twisted with a sound that was closer to a sob than a curse.

Grace.

Grace had followed her into the alley, one hand wrapped around Vera’s wrist and the other braced against the wall, blocking her from slipping past. Her fair hair had come loose from its careful pins, strands stuck damply to her cheek. The neat barmaid mask was gone. So was the cold little smile she had worn when she wanted people to underestimate her. There was only anger now, tight and frightened.

“What are you doing?” Grace demanded.

Vera tried to pull free. “Let go.”

“No.”

“You don’t know what you’re stopping.”

“I know exactly what I’m stopping.” Grace’s grip tightened. “You are going to get them killed.”

Vera laughed once, and it hurt. “You always did know how to arrive late.”

Grace shoved her back against the brick, not hard enough to break anything, hard enough that pain tore through Vera’s side. Vera sucked in a breath and nearly folded. Grace’s eyes dropped to the blood spreading beneath Vera’s hand.

Something shifted in her face.

Only for a second.

Then the anger came back, but thinner now.

“Stop fighting me,” Grace said.

Vera went still.

Rain ran down between them. Somewhere beyond the alley, a man hit the ground with a heavy grunt. Glass broke inside the pub. The world was coming apart in the street, and all Vera could hear was the echo of those words in another place, another life.

Stop fighting me.

Grace saw the change.

“What?” she asked.

Vera looked at her hand around her wrist. “That’s what you said last time.”

Grace’s brows drew together. “What are you talking about?”

“You found me once.”

The grip loosened by half an inch.

Vera was shaking now, from cold or pain or memory, she could not tell. The words were not coming from the part of her that had learned to survive by lying. They came from somewhere older than this rain, somewhere that still hurt when Grace looked at her like a stranger.

“You told me I was safer with you.”

Grace stared at her.

“No,” she said, but there was no strength in it.

Vera swallowed hard. “You said blood didn’t need a house to be family.”

Grace’s hand dropped from her wrist.

For a moment, she looked almost young. Not innocent. Grace Burgess had never been innocent, not in the way people wanted women to be. But young, yes. Young and frightened and suddenly forced to stand in front of a door she had spent a lifetime pretending was not there.

Her lips parted.

The alley seemed to narrow around them.

“I found you once,” Grace whispered.

Vera’s eyes burned.

Grace looked at her as if pieces were being placed behind her eyes one by one and each one hurt more than the last. “I thought that meant I could save you.”

The words should have softened something.

They did, maybe. Somewhere beneath the fear and fury, a place Vera had no time to reach.

“You didn’t save me,” Vera said. “You handed me to him.”

Grace flinched.

Not dramatically. Not enough for anyone else to have noticed if anyone else had been watching. But Vera saw it. She saw the guilt break through her face before Grace covered it with breath and rain and the practiced stillness she wore when she was trying not to feel.

“I didn’t know what he would do,” Grace said.

“You knew enough.”

Grace looked past her, toward the sounds of fighting. The alley flashed with light as another lamp outside the Garrison swung hard in the wind. Smoke began to thicken in the air, not from the factories this time. Sharper. Closer.

Grace turned back to Vera.

For one terrible second, Vera thought Grace would choose the same way again. That she would take her arm, drag her back, hand her over to Campbell because fear had always been easier to obey than love.

Instead, Grace stepped aside.

The movement was small.

It changed everything.

“Go,” Grace said, voice barely there.

Vera stared at her.

Grace’s face twisted, as if the word had cost her more than she expected. “Go.”

Vera did not thank her.

There was no time, and perhaps no forgiveness either.

She pushed away from the wall and stumbled back toward the mouth of the alley.

Behind her, Grace remained where she was, one hand pressed against the brick as if she needed the wall to stay standing.

The Garrison was burning.

Not all of it. Not yet.

The first fire had taken the back room, where the fight had shoved men through tables and against shelves stacked with bottles and crates. Vera saw it as she came out of the alley: orange light pulsing behind the side windows, smoke rolling through the cracks around the door, flames licking along the lower edge of a curtain that had already begun to curl black at the bottom.

Someone had knocked over a lamp.

A table had gone with it.

Broken whisky bottles glittered across the floor inside, and the spilled alcohol had carried flame faster than anyone could stamp it out. The fight had moved through the Garrison like weather. Chairs overturned. A stool lay split near the bar. One of Campbell’s men had gone headfirst into a shelf, and bottles had burst around him in a shower of glass and drink. The fire had found the mess and fed.

Men were still fighting.

That was the madness of it. The room was filling with smoke, and still they swung and grabbed and pulled guns. Campbell’s men were trying to force the Shelbys back, and the Shelbys were doing what they always did: refusing to be forced anywhere.

Arthur was inside near the bar, coat torn open, one sleeve ripped at the seam. Blood ran from a cut above his eyebrow and made a dark path down the side of his face. He had one man by the throat and another trying to haul him off from behind, and his whole body looked built from rage.

John was nearer the door, fighting the man with the pistol.

The gun came up again.

Vera saw it before she understood she was seeing it.

The barrel lined toward Thomas, who had turned halfway toward the alley, looking for her.

John saw it too.

“Tommy!”

He drove himself into the man with the gun. The shot went off as they hit the floor. For a second, Vera heard nothing but the crack of it and the ringing that followed.

John rolled onto his side with a curse, one hand going to his upper arm.

Blood spread through the torn sleeve of his coat.

Not dead.

Not dead.

The words struck through Vera so violently that she almost fell.

John was swearing, alive and furious, trying to push himself up while Thomas turned toward him. Arthur saw the blood and went madder. He threw the man he held into a table and started toward John, but the fire had found the floorboards behind the bar now, crawling toward the curtain, the shelves, the place where the heat began to thicken.

“John!” Arthur shouted.

“I’m fine!” John snapped, though he clearly was not.

Thomas moved toward him, but another man came at him from the side. Thomas caught the man’s wrist, twisted, struck him once, and dropped him. His face was set in that terrible stillness Vera had seen in memory. The stillness before the breaking.

Smoke pushed out through the side door in a hard gray breath.

Arthur bent to haul John up.

Then the back shelf gave way.

It did not fall fully. Not enough to crush. Enough to send burning wood and glass crashing across the floor, cutting Arthur off from the clean path to the door. Flames leapt higher with a hungry sound as more alcohol caught. Arthur stumbled backward, dragging John with him. Smoke swallowed them from the waist up.

“Arthur!” Thomas shouted.

There it was.

The sound from the memory.

Not exactly the same, not yet, but close enough that the world blurred at the edges. Vera saw Thomas trying to turn both ways at once. Toward Arthur and John in the smoke. Toward her in the street. His body made the choice before his mind could, stepping toward the brothers, then checking back toward her as if losing sight of her for even a second was unbearable.

This was how it happened.

Not because he did not love them.

Because he loved too many people at once and believed he could pay every price with his own blood.

Vera staggered toward the doorway. “Thomas!”

He turned.

For one second, the Garrison burned behind him like something remembered. Smoke coiled around his shoulders. Rain darkened the front of his coat. Blood marked his mouth, his knuckles, his collar. His cap was gone now, lost somewhere in the fight, and his hair had fallen damp across his forehead.

He saw her and started forward.

She shook her head.

“Get them out,” she said.

His eyes sharpened. “Come here.”

“Get them out.”

“Vera.”

“Please.” Her voice cracked on the word. “Please, Thomas.”

That reached him differently.

He looked back. Arthur had John by the back of his coat now, half dragging, half carrying him through the smoke. John was coughing, blood running down his sleeve and dripping from his fingers. Arthur was coughing too, eyes watering, face streaked black with soot. A burning beam had not fallen, not truly, but a strip of shelving had collapsed close enough that Arthur had to kick through broken wood to clear a path.

Thomas went to them.

He moved fast, grabbed John under the arm, and pulled him the last few steps toward the door. Arthur came with them, swearing, coughing, furious at needing help. They spilled out into the rain, all three of them staggering. John hit one knee and tried to get up immediately. Arthur shoved him back down with a shaking hand.

“Stay down, you daft bastard,” Arthur rasped.

“I said I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”

“It missed.”

Arthur looked at the blood on his sleeve. “Missed what, your fucking arm?”

Thomas crouched near John long enough to look at the wound. His hand was steady, but Vera saw the strain in his face. He had almost lost him. He knew it. Some part of him knew how close the bullet had come, even if he did not yet know why the sight made Vera press a hand to her mouth and tremble.

Then Thomas stood and looked at Vera again.

The fire roared behind him.

The back room was worse now. Flames had climbed higher, catching along wood, curtains, spilled drink. Smoke was pushing out in heavy rolls. Someone yelled from inside. Campbell’s men were retreating now, no longer trying to win the fight, only trying to avoid being trapped by the fire they had helped create.

Campbell himself stood across the street, hat wet with rain, face lit faintly by the growing glow from the Garrison windows.

Vera barely noticed him.

Thomas came toward her.

Slowly at first, as if sudden movement might send her running again.

She wanted to run.

She wanted to step into his arms.

The wanting of both tore through her so completely that when he reached her, she could not speak.

He looked at her side. At the blood beneath her hand. At the torn coat and the broken lining and the watch chain wrapped around her fingers. His eyes stopped on the watch.

The world seemed to draw inward.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

Vera shook her head. Tears had already started, but she did not remember deciding to cry. “Don’t.”

Thomas looked from the watch to her face.

“Open it,” he said.

“No.”

“Vera.”

“You can’t.”

His jaw tightened. “Give it to me.”

“No.” She backed up half a step. “No, because if you see it, then you know, and if you know, then you’ll try to change it.”

Thomas took one step closer. “Change what?”

“The cycle.”

Behind him, Arthur coughed hard enough to bend at the waist. John sat on the curb with one hand clamped around his bleeding arm and his eyes fixed on Thomas like he knew something bad was coming but not what shape it would take.

Thomas did not look away from Vera.

“What cycle?”

Vera’s breath hitched. The firelight moved across his face, turning one side of him gold and leaving the other in shadow. He looked so alive. So present. So close to remembering that she could feel it like pressure in the air.

“It keeps happening,” she said.

His expression shifted. “What keeps happening?”

“You come for me.”

The words scraped her throat.

Thomas went very still.

“They follow you,” Vera said, looking past him to Arthur and John. “Something goes wrong. You lose them. Then I bring it back, and you find me again, and it starts over.”

Arthur’s cough stopped.

John stared at her.

Thomas’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in disbelief exactly. More like pain finding a place to enter.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“I made you forget,” Vera said. “I thought that would be enough.”

The watch ticked once in her hand.

Or maybe she imagined it.

Thomas heard it too.

His eyes dropped again.

Vera tried to hide the watch against her chest, but her fingers were shaking too badly. The casing slipped. The ruined chain swung loose, catching the firelight.

Thomas reached for it.

She tried to pull back, but he caught her wrist.

Gently.

The gentleness broke her worse than force would have.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

His thumb brushed near the place his hand had held her in another life.

The memory seemed to pass between them before the watch ever opened.

Thomas froze.

Vera watched it happen.

Not all at once. Thomas Shelby did not fall apart like other men. His face did not crumple. He did not stagger back or make some grand sound of realization. It came into him quietly and violently, like a blade slid under the ribs.

His eyes changed first.

The suspicion left.

Then the caution.

Then something older than this night moved behind them.

He remembered loving her before he remembered losing her.

Vera saw the moment it began. His hand on her wrist in some quiet room that was not burning. Her sitting in his office with one leg tucked beneath her, reading papers she had no right to touch. Her voice telling him he looked miserable even when he was pleased. Her asleep in his bed with her back turned to him because being held still frightened her at first. Her walking with him by the cut, arguing that his answer to everything could not be threatening men until the world behaved.

He remembered her at Watery Lane, standing stiff beneath Polly’s measuring stare, pretending not to care whether the family liked her. He remembered Arthur laughing at something she said and then trying to hide it behind a cough. He remembered John leaning in too close just to annoy Thomas and Vera swatting him away with a look that made John grin.

He remembered the first time she stayed.

Not in a room. Not in a bed. Stayed as in stopped looking at the door.

He remembered her fingers against his palm under a table where no one could see. Her mouth near his ear in the noise of the Garrison. Her anger when he tried to protect her without asking. Her fear when she thought wanting him would become another way to lose herself.

Then the rest came.

Smoke.

Gunfire.

Arthur shouting his name.

John falling where he should not have fallen.

Grace screaming from the bar.

Vera with the watch in her blood-slick hand.

Thomas’s own voice saying, “If I remember you, I lose you.”

His fingers tightened around her wrist, still not enough to hurt, but enough to tell her he was here now. Fully.

“Vera,” he said.

Not as a question.

Not as a test.

Her name in his mouth became something she had no defense against.

She shook her head. “No.”

He stepped closer.

“No,” she said again, crying harder now. “Please don’t look at me like that.”

Thomas’s face had gone pale beneath the soot and blood. He looked like a man standing in two lives at once and choosing the one that hurt most because it was true.

“I know you,” he said.

Vera tried to pull free. “You weren’t supposed to.”

“I know you.”

“Thomas—”

“You think forgetting you stopped me?” His voice roughened. “I still came.”

The words took the air from her.

Behind him, Arthur muttered something Vera could not hear. John shifted, grimacing as he pushed himself to his feet.

Thomas did not notice.

Or he did, and could not turn away.

“I found you once with no memory of you,” he said. “I’d find you again with nothing but your name.”

Vera covered her mouth for a second, trying to hold in whatever sound wanted out.

There were flames behind him. Blood on his collar. His brothers alive but hurt only yards away. Grace standing at the mouth of the alley now, one hand pressed to her chest as she watched the two of them like she finally understood the shape of what she had helped break.

Thomas reached for Vera’s face.

She let him.

His fingers were cold from the rain, rough at the knuckles, careful against her cheek. There was nothing neat about him now. No perfect mask. No untouched suit. No calm man sitting in judgment. His coat was torn, his mouth bloody, smoke in his hair, and still he touched her like she was the only thing in the street that might vanish if handled wrong.

“You’re not leaving me twice,” he said.

Vera closed her eyes.

For one second, she almost believed him.

That was the cruelest part. Not Campbell. Not the fire. Not the watch. That one impossible second where Thomas remembered her and wanted her and had his brothers alive behind him, and Vera’s tired, frightened heart reached for the lie that maybe this time love could be enough.

Then John coughed behind him.

A hard, painful sound.

Arthur’s hand gripped John’s shoulder to steady him.

The fire cracked loudly inside the Garrison.

Vera opened her eyes and looked past Thomas.

John was alive, but blood ran down his sleeve. Arthur was alive, but smoke had blackened the side of his face, and he was breathing like each pull of air scraped him raw. They stood together in the rain, battered, furious, confused, alive because the pattern had not completed itself yet.

Not yet.

Vera looked back at Thomas.

He saw the decision before she moved.

“No,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

His hand closed around hers. “No.”

“I can’t let it keep happening.”

“It won’t.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“I can.”

“No, Thomas.” She was crying openly now, past shame, past fear of being seen. “You can’t. Because you’ll always come.”

His face tightened.

“And I wanted you to,” she whispered. “God help me, I wanted you to every time.”

“Then stay.”

“If I stay, you try to keep all of us.”

“I will.”

“I know.” She gave a broken smile that hurt more than weeping. “That’s why I can’t.”

Understanding moved over his face and turned to horror.

Vera twisted her hand sharply, not away from his grip but into it, using the movement to slip the watch from between them. Her wounded side screamed as she pulled back. Thomas reached for her, but she was already moving.

“Vera!”

She ran toward the Garrison.

The heat struck her before she reached the door. Smoke shoved against her face, bitter and thick. The front of the pub was not swallowed yet, but the back room burned bright enough to turn the windows white-orange. The flames had climbed into the woodwork, licking along beams and shelves, finding every spilled drop and every dry edge.

Someone shouted behind her.

Thomas.

Always Thomas.

She heard him coming and knew without turning that he would follow her straight in.

Of course he would.

He had found her with no memory. He had come into the rain for a woman he did not understand. Now that he remembered loving her, there was no force in the world that would make him stop himself.

Except the brothers she was saving him for.

Arthur saw where she was running before Thomas reached the door.

He also saw the back room.

His face changed.

Not fear exactly. Recognition. The kind of practical terror men like Arthur had when they knew what was stored where it should not be. Crates in the back. Bottles. Powder. Things the Shelbys had no business keeping behind a pub and every reason to keep there anyway.

“Tommy!” Arthur roared.

Thomas did not stop.

Arthur lunged and caught him around the middle from behind, dragging him back with a force that would have dropped another man. Thomas fought him instantly, elbow driving back, body twisting.

“Get off me!”

“Tommy, there’s powder in there!”

Vera reached the doorway and looked back.

Thomas was fighting Arthur like a trapped animal, all control gone. John grabbed him too, injured arm close to his chest, using the other to get a fistful of Thomas’s coat.

“Don’t make us drag you out too!” John shouted.

Thomas nearly broke free.

Arthur slammed him back against the side of the doorway, not to hurt him, but hard enough to stop him for half a second.

“You go in there, you’re dead!” Arthur shouted into his face.

“She’s in there!”

“I know!”

The words ripped out of Arthur, raw and helpless, and for one heartbeat even Thomas stilled.

Vera held his eyes through the smoke.

She wanted the last look to be gentle. It wasn’t. It was wet with rain and firelight and grief, his face twisted with rage because she was choosing for him and he hated being chosen for. She wanted to tell him that she loved him. She thought he knew. She wanted to tell him she was sorry. She thought he knew that too.

The watch was hot in her hand.

Grace stood behind Thomas now, a few steps away, her face streaked with rain and soot. She looked at Vera, and whatever passed between them was not forgiveness. It was not enough for that.

But Grace did not move to stop her.

This time, she let her go.

Vera stepped backward into the smoke.

Thomas shouted her name.

Not Vera.

Not Miss Hart.

Her name as he had said it in every life she could remember and all the ones she could not.

She turned before the sight of him could undo her.

Inside, the Garrison groaned around her.

The heat was enormous. It wrapped around her, pushed at her, crawled into her lungs. Smoke lowered from the ceiling in thick black folds. The bar was half-hidden. Tables lay overturned. Flames had eaten the curtain near the back and moved along the shelves where bottles burst one by one with sharp cracks. Vera kept one hand pressed to her side and the other around the watch, moving toward the back room because some part of her knew that was where the fire had to reach.

The watch had started everything.

It had brought her back. It had dragged memory across time like thread through a wound. It had proved she existed. It had given Thomas enough to find her again.

Maybe it could end here.

Or maybe nothing could.

Vera did not know anymore.

She only knew Thomas would keep coming as long as there was a path to take. He would cross years, fire, grief, memory, forgetting. He would bring Arthur and John because they were his brothers, and they would follow because that was what love looked like in the Shelby family. Not clean. Not safe. Not sensible. Devoted unto ruin.

She could not let them make a grave of that devotion again.

A beam cracked overhead.

Vera flinched but kept moving.

The back room was nearly gone. The doorframe burned along one side. Heat poured from it in waves, and beyond it she could see the stacked crates, the broken bottles, the place where orange light had become white at the center. The sound there was different. Not just flame. Pressure. A building holding its breath before it came apart.

She stopped at the threshold.

For the first time since she woke in 1919, Vera felt no pull backward.

No alley. No Garrison wall. No watch tugging her toward another chance.

Only forward.

Her fingers closed around the casing. It burned her palm.

She opened it.

The photograph was still inside. Singed now from the heat. Herself beside Thomas in another 1919, both of them caught in a second that had no right to survive.

She looked at his face in the photograph.

Then she closed the watch.

Outside, Thomas was still shouting.

Arthur and John were still holding him.

Alive.

She stepped into the back room.

The explosion threw the street into white fire.

For a moment, there was no rain. No voices. No Garrison. Only heat and sound and the force of the blast ripping through glass, wood, and brick. The windows blew outward. The door burst from its hinges. Flames rolled out in a hard breath that knocked men from their feet and scattered burning splinters across the street.

Thomas hit the ground with Arthur over him.

John was thrown sideways into the curb, landing hard on his injured arm. Grace fell near the alley mouth, one hand over her face as glass rained down around her. Campbell disappeared into smoke and shouting, no longer the center of anything.

Then the sound came back.

Not all at once.

A ringing first.

Then coughing.

Men groaning.

Rain hissing against fire.

Thomas pushed himself up.

Arthur’s hand clamped around the back of his coat before he made it fully to his knees.

“No,” Arthur said, voice broken by smoke.

Thomas dragged himself forward anyway.

John, bleeding and half-dazed, grabbed his arm. “Tommy.”

Thomas shook him off.

Arthur grabbed him harder.

“Tommy, no!”

The Garrison’s back room was gone. What remained burned too hot to enter. Wood collapsed inward with a crash that sent sparks into the rain. Smoke poured black into the street. The heat drove everyone back, even the men who thought themselves brave.

Thomas fought them.

Not for long.

Long enough that Arthur had to wrap both arms around him from behind, teeth bared as he held on. Long enough that John, pale with pain, got in front of him and shoved both hands into Thomas’s chest.

“She’s gone,” John said.

Thomas stared at him as if the words made no sense.

John’s mouth trembled, just once. “Tommy, she’s gone.”

Thomas looked past him to the fire.

The fight left his body in a way that was almost worse than rage.

Arthur felt it and held him anyway.

Rain came down harder. It struck Thomas’s hair, his shoulders, the blood on his collar, the soot on his face. He stood in the street with his brothers alive on either side of him and looked at the place Vera had chosen to die.

Grace was on her knees near the alley.

She was crying, though silently, one hand pressed against her mouth as if she could hold the sound in. Vera’s blood marked her sleeve where she had grabbed her. The sight of it made her close her eyes, and whatever memory lived behind them was hers to carry.

No one spoke for a while.

The fire settled slowly into smoke.

Men moved around them. Someone shouted for water. Someone else called for a doctor. Arthur kept one hand gripped in the back of Thomas’s coat like he did not trust him not to run even now. John leaned against the wall with his injured arm held tight, breathing through the pain and watching his brother with a fear he did not try to hide.

Thomas did not move until something caught the weak light near the blackened stones.

Small.

Half-buried beneath ash.

He saw it before anyone else did.

Arthur said his name, warning low in his throat, but Thomas was already walking.

The heat was still strong enough to sting his eyes. Smoke curled around his boots. Broken glass cracked underfoot. He bent near the edge of the burned threshold and reached into the ash.

The watch was hot.

He took it anyway.

The face was ruined, blackened around the edges, the hands stopped beneath cracked glass. Thomas wiped his thumb over it, leaving a clean smear through the soot. His hand was shaking now. Not much. Enough that John looked away.

Thomas forced the casing open.

Inside, the photograph had survived.

Singed at the edges. Darkened by smoke. But there.

Vera stood beside him in a life only he remembered now, caught close enough that the space between them looked like it had already given up pretending to be distance. Her handwriting remained on the back, smudged but legible where the ash had not taken it.

Do not let him remember you.

Thomas closed his eyes.

For a long moment, the street, the rain, the fire, and the men around him seemed to fall away. He could feel her everywhere memory allowed. In the quiet office where she had stolen his chair. In the bed she had once pretended not to need. In the Garrison after closing, telling him one day he would regret standing close to her. In the rain, crying because he had remembered too late.

He opened his eyes and looked at the stopped watch in his palm.

Arthur was alive behind him, coughing hard with one hand fisted in the back of his coat, and John was on his other side, bleeding through his sleeve but breathing. Vera had given him exactly what she had meant to give him. His brothers. His family. Their lives bought back with hers.

Vera’s fingers tightened.

“Nothing.”

It was a bad lie.

She knew it before his expression changed, and it barely changed at all. That was the worst of it. Thomas did not need to scowl or raise his voice to make the room feel smaller. He only looked at her as if he had already found the weak seam in her answer and was waiting to see how long it took her to split open.

“You found nothing in my wall?”

Vera glanced toward the fallen panel before she could stop herself.

His eyes followed.

Stupid.

She drew in a breath and made herself look annoyed because fear had never done her any favors. “Loose wood. Dust. If that belongs to you, I’m sorry for disturbing it.”

Thomas stepped into the room.

Vera’s body reacted before her mind did, shifting back half a step. He noticed that too. Of course he did. He noticed every small thing and kept each one like a coin placed in his pocket for later.

He closed the door behind him.

Not hard enough to be called a threat. Quietly enough that it felt more like one.

“Open your hand,” he said.

“No.”

The answer came out too quickly.

Thomas tilted his head slightly. “No?”

“I heard myself.”

His gaze remained on her fist. “You’re standing in my private room with something you took from my wall.”

“I didn’t take anything.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Then open your hand.”

Vera’s pulse beat hard in her throat. She could feel the watch against her palm as if it were alive. She had the awful thought that if he came any closer, he would hear it ticking. He would hear it and know. He would know before she understood what there was to know.

She moved toward the door.

Thomas stepped into her path.

Vera stopped.

There was still space between them, but not enough. The room held its breath around it.

“Move,” she said.

He did not.

“Vera.”

She hated the way he said her name. Quiet. Measured. Like he had already decided she belonged among his questions.

“I said move.”

“You’re frightened.”

She laughed once, though it sounded wrong even to her. “Am I?”

“Yes.”

“And what a brilliant detective you are.”

His eyes narrowed a fraction. “Open your hand.”

“No.”

This time, when she tried to move around him, he caught her wrist.

Not roughly enough to bruise. Not violently enough for the kind of pain that would make a person cry out. But his hand closed around her with purpose, his fingers firm beneath the bone, stopping her so suddenly that she drew in a sharp breath.

The room changed.

Or maybe she did.

Smoke seemed to thicken in the air where there was no smoke. The dying fire flared too bright. She felt another hand around her wrist, the same and not the same. Thomas’s voice, closer than it should have been, telling her to look at him.

Vera, look at me.

Her breath caught.

Thomas looked down at where he held her, then back at her face.

“Open it.”

For a moment, she could not answer. The memory from the night before pressed against the present until she no longer knew which version of him she was standing in front of. This Thomas with suspicion in his eyes. That Thomas with blood at his collar and fear stripped bare across his face.

If I remember you, I lose you.

Vera pulled once against his grip.

He held.

“Let go.”

“Then show me.”

“No.”

“Vera.”

Her voice broke sharper than she meant it to. “Let go of me.”

Something shifted in him.

Not softness. Not guilt. Thomas Shelby did not look like a man easily moved by either. But his eyes dropped once more to his hand around her wrist, then returned to her face, and he seemed to understand that her fear was not behaving the way guilt should.

His grip loosened.

Vera tore her wrist free and stepped back, holding the watch behind her hip with a clumsy movement she hoped he did not see. The place where he had touched her burned with the memory of pressure more than pain.

Thomas watched her.

“You found something.”

“I found out you don’t like being told no.”

“That isn’t new.”

“No,” she said, breathing too hard. “I imagine it isn’t.”

His gaze moved over her, slower now. “Whatever it is, you’ll hand it over.”

“I don’t have anything.”

“You’re getting worse at this.”

“Then stop asking.”

Thomas looked toward the wall panel, then at her hand. Vera shifted before she could stop herself, and his attention sharpened.

The door opened somewhere beyond the room, far off in the pub. A footstep overhead. Harry, maybe. The sound broke the hold of the moment just enough.

Vera moved for the door again.

This time, Thomas let her pass.

She did not mistake that for mercy.

As she reached the door, his voice came from behind her.

“Vera.”

She stopped with her hand on the knob.

“I’ll know what was in that wall.”

The watch seemed to grow heavier in her palm.

Vera did not turn around. “Then I suppose one of us has something to look forward to.”

She opened the door and stepped out before he could answer.

The Garrison was dark and empty beyond the low fire. Harry’s footsteps moved somewhere overhead, but he did not come down. Vera crossed the room quickly, careful not to run, careful not to look like what she felt.

She made it to the small room behind the bar before her knees threatened to give.

Only then did she open her hand.

The watch sat there, dull and old and impossible.

Vera stared at it until the metal blurred in her sight.

Then she hid it inside the lining of her coat.

She did not sleep.

Not properly.

She sat in the same chair near the fire with her coat wrapped around her, one hand pressed against the place where the watch was hidden, and listened to the Garrison settle around her. Every creak became Thomas returning. Every distant step became Harry finding her. Every breath of wind at the windows became the year itself trying to get in.

At some point before morning, Vera closed her eyes and saw Grace standing in a doorway.

Not the Grace she knew now, composed and careful behind the bar.

Another Grace.

Her face wet. Her voice shaking.

“I didn’t know he would take her.”

Vera woke with her hand clenched around the fabric of her coat.

The fire had gone low. Her neck ached. Her mouth was dry. Gray morning pressed weakly at the windows, and for a moment she could not tell whether the memory had been a dream or another piece of whatever broken thing was happening inside her.

She only knew that when Grace arrived an hour later, Vera’s stomach turned.

Grace stepped behind the bar without greeting her.

That was new.

Or maybe it was not new. Maybe it was only the first time Vera had noticed the absence of warmth. The neatness was still there. The calm hands. The quiet attention. But the softer tone Grace had used with her before had gone.

She hung her shawl on the hook and looked at Vera’s coat.

“You stayed again.”

Vera tied her apron. “So did the building.”

Grace did not smile.

Harry moved past them carrying a crate. He glanced from one to the other and seemed to decide immediately that he had lived long enough not to stand between two women with that kind of silence on their faces.

Grace reached for the clean glasses. “Did something happen last night?”

Vera felt the watch tucked into her coat like a second pulse.

“No.”

Grace lined up two glasses. Then a third. “You don’t look as though nothing happened.”

“I didn’t realize you’d made a study of my face.”

“I don’t have to study people who make themselves obvious.”

Vera’s hands slowed.

There it was.

The cold under the courtesy.

Grace did not look at her when she said it. She did not need to. Vera heard it perfectly well. Yesterday, Grace’s questions had been dressed as concern. Today, they arrived stripped down, bare and sharp, with none of the pretense that Vera might mistake them for kindness.

Vera looked at her. “Then stop looking.”

Grace set another glass down. “That would be easier if you stopped drawing attention.”

“Whose?”

Grace’s eyes moved to her then.

For half a second, Vera saw something in them she could not name. Irritation, yes. Suspicion. Something more personal than either, though neither of them had earned anything personal between them.

“You should be careful with Thomas Shelby,” Grace said.

Vera’s mouth tightened. “You first.”

Grace went still.

The words had come before Vera measured them. Too quick. Too pointed. And with them came another flicker.

Grace’s hand on her arm.

Grace whispering, “Do as I say for once.”

A door closing.

Vera’s own voice, younger in its fear, saying, “I thought you were helping me.”

Vera blinked hard.

The bar returned.

Grace was watching her now with open suspicion.

“What did you mean by that?” Grace asked.

Vera picked up a cloth and began wiping a counter that was already clean. “Nothing.”

Grace stepped closer, lowering her voice. “Whatever happened with him last night, it would be wise not to pretend it didn’t.”

Vera looked at her. “Nothing happened that concerns you.”

Grace’s expression hardened.

“Everything in this pub concerns someone.”

The words settled strangely.

Vera felt them before she understood them. A tightness low in her stomach. A warning without shape. The sound of Grace’s voice in a place that was not this one, saying a word Vera could not fully hear.

Inspector.

Vera looked down at the cloth in her hand and made a decision with a calmness that surprised her.

She would tell Grace nothing.

Not a guess. Not a fear. Not a single strange thing that had happened since the alley. If Grace asked whether the sky was gray, Vera would look out the window before answering.

The day crawled toward afternoon.

Thomas came in before the pub filled.

Vera felt him arrive the way the room did, in the small changes people made to survive being noticed by him. Harry’s shoulders lifted and settled. One of the early drinkers became interested in his glass. Grace’s spine straightened, though she did not turn immediately.

Vera refused to look up.

That refusal lasted three seconds.

Thomas stood near the end of the bar, cap in hand, rain darkening the edge of his coat. He looked first at Harry, then Grace, then Vera’s hands.

Not her face.

Her hands.

Vera curled her fingers around the cloth before she could stop herself.

A trace of satisfaction passed through his eyes, faint enough that she might have imagined it.

“Harry,” he said.

Harry came over quickly. “Tommy.”

“Any trouble?”

The question was ordinary. It did not feel ordinary.

Harry looked toward Vera for the briefest second.

“No,” he said.

Thomas let the pause sit. “Good.”

Grace moved to pour his drink. Her movements were controlled, but Vera saw the tension in them now. Yesterday she might have missed it. Today she noticed every small tightening. Every silence. Every careful glance that went in Thomas’s direction and returned with less than it wanted.

Thomas accepted the whisky and did not drink.

His eyes moved to Vera.

“Sleep well?”

Vera set the cloth down. “Beautifully.”

“In the chair?”

“It has many qualities.”

“That why you’re shaking?”

Her fingers stilled.

Grace looked at her.

Harry looked away.

Vera leaned one hand against the counter, refusing to give him the satisfaction of checking whether she really was. “It’s cold.”

Thomas’s gaze dropped briefly to her coat, hanging behind the bar.

The watch seemed to drag at its lining from across the room.

“Is it?”

Vera’s jaw tightened.

Before she could answer, the door opened hard enough to announce Arthur before his voice did.

“Tommy,” he called, stepping inside with John just behind him. “Tell John he’s a daft bastard.”

John looked offended. “I won the money.”

“You cheated a drunk man.”

“That’s called business.”

Arthur pointed at him with the hand holding his cigarette. “That’s called being a daft bastard who’ll get stabbed.”

John grinned. “Only if he sobers up.”

The noise should have relieved Vera.

It did, in a way. Arthur and John filled the room with something easier to understand than Thomas’s quiet. But it also brought the Garrison closer to life, and with life came eyes, ears, bodies, questions.

John’s grin found Vera almost immediately.

“You look worse.”

“Good afternoon to you too.”

“Did you rob a church last night?”

Vera reached for a glass. “If I had, I wouldn’t be here.”

Arthur laughed, but he was looking at her harder than John was. “Tommy’s got you jumpy.”

“I was born delightful.”

John leaned on the bar. “That’s not a no.”

Vera poured without being asked and slid a glass toward him. “That’s because I’m learning not to answer Shelby questions.”

Arthur laughed again. John looked delighted.

Thomas did not.

He had taken a seat near the private room, close enough to see her without making a show of it. Vera hated that he did not need to stare. His attention had weight even when turned slightly aside.

Grace noticed too.

Of course she did.

As the afternoon wore on, the pub filled in uneven waves. Men came in from the damp street shaking rain from their caps, calling for whisky, talking too loudly about work, horses, war, women. Vera moved through the work with the watch hidden close and her body wound tight around the secret.

Every time someone brushed too near her coat, she felt sick.

Every time Thomas moved, she felt the watch beneath the fabric as if it were responding.

Grace was colder than before, but not openly cruel. She did not have to be. She simply stopped making space for Vera. She stopped explaining things unless Harry told her to. When Vera reached for the wrong bottle, Grace corrected her in front of a customer. When a man made a comment about the new girl’s mouth, Grace did not intervene. She only watched to see what Vera would do.

Vera learned quickly.

Not the work.

The woman beside her.

Grace’s kindness had been a door. Now it was shut.

Near dusk, Vera saw her slip out.

It should not have mattered. Grace could step outside. Anyone could. The air inside the Garrison was thick enough to choke on, and Vera herself had gone out the day before to breathe.

But Grace did not leave through the front.

She moved toward the side door near the back, shawl pulled around her shoulders, her face composed in that careful way that now made Vera’s instincts sharpen. Harry was arguing with a man over a short payment. John was telling a story to three men who appeared to be enjoying it against their better judgment. Arthur had gone to the private room with Thomas.

No one else noticed.

Vera did.

She waited ten seconds.

Then she followed.

The narrow passage beside the Garrison was wet and dim, the brick slick beneath a smear of evening light. Vera stopped just inside the side door, keeping herself mostly hidden. Grace stood near the mouth of the alley with her back turned.

A man waited there.

Not close enough for Vera to see his face clearly.

She heard only one word.

“Inspector.”

The alley dropped away for half a breath.

A hard-lit room flashed through Vera’s mind.

Grace standing near a desk, twisting gloves in her hands.

A man’s voice, old and cold, saying something Vera could not make out.

Then the moment vanished before she could catch any more of it.

Grace turned.

Their eyes met.

Neither of them spoke.

The man at the mouth of the alley shifted, and Vera saw enough of him now: older, rigid, watchful in a way that made the hairs along the back of her neck rise. Not a drunk. Not a worker. Not a man who belonged to the street in any ordinary way.

Grace’s expression changed.

Not fear.

Calculation.

Vera stepped back inside before Grace could call out.

Her hands were shaking by the time she returned to the bar.

Inspector.

She did not know what any of it meant.

She knew enough.

When Grace came back several minutes later, she did not look at Vera at first. She removed her shawl, hung it up, and returned to the bar as if nothing had happened.

Vera was pouring whisky for a man with half his attention on John’s story.

Grace came to stand beside her.

“You shouldn’t follow people.”

Vera did not look at her. “You shouldn’t meet men in alleys.”

Grace’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know what you saw.”

“No,” Vera said. “But I know you don’t want Thomas to know I saw it.”

That hit its mark.

Grace turned her head slightly, eyes on Vera now. “Be careful.”

Vera gave a small, humorless smile. “There it is again.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

Grace’s voice lowered. “You are making enemies in a place where you have no friends.”

Vera looked at her then.

For a second, the anger inside her slipped, and something older moved beneath it. Hurt without a memory attached. Grief with no story. She did not understand it, and because she did not understand it, she hated it.

“Funny,” Vera said quietly. “I could have sworn you were trying to sound like one.”

Grace looked away first.

Before Vera could decide whether that meant anything, the front door opened.

The room quieted in a way it had not even for Thomas.

Not fully. The Garrison did not go silent all at once. It resisted, voices dragging to a stop in pieces. A laugh died near the window. A chair scraped. Harry looked toward the door and went pale in a way Vera had not seen before.

The man from the alley stepped inside.

Inspector Campbell looked around the room as if every person in it had already disappointed him.

He was not alone. Two uniformed policemen stood behind him, broad in the doorway, rain on their coats, hands resting where men rested hands when they wanted others to notice what they carried.

Grace’s fingers curled once around the edge of the bar.

Vera saw it.

Thomas emerged from the private room before Campbell had taken more than three steps.

Arthur came behind him, shoulders already tense. John’s grin had vanished.

“Inspector,” Thomas said.

“Mr. Shelby.”

The words carried enough dislike to sour the air between them.

Campbell removed his gloves slowly. “I trust I’m not interrupting.”

Thomas looked around at the pub, at the drinkers, at Harry, at the policemen in the doorway. “You are.”

Campbell smiled faintly. “Then I’ll be brief.”

No one believed him.

Vera stood behind the bar with the cloth in her hand and the watch hidden in the coat behind her. She felt suddenly exposed without it on her body, as if leaving it even a few feet away had been a mistake.

Campbell’s eyes found her.

She knew then.

Whatever Grace had said in the alley, whatever had passed between them, had been enough.

“You,” Campbell said.

The room seemed to tilt toward her.

Vera did not move.

Thomas did.

Not much. Only half a step, but it shifted him between Campbell and the bar in a way that was difficult to mistake.

Campbell noticed.

So did Vera.

That was worse somehow.

“What is your name?” Campbell asked.

Vera set the cloth down. “Vera Hart.”

“Hart.” Campbell repeated it like he was testing the weight of a counterfeit coin. “And where is home, Miss Hart?”

Vera felt Thomas’s gaze without looking at him.

London would not survive this.

She said it anyway.

“London.”

A pause.

Campbell’s smile deepened at the edges. “London is a large city.”

“So I’ve heard.”

John looked toward the floor as if suppressing the urge to laugh. Arthur did not. He looked ready to hit someone and was deciding how much he cared about the uniform.

Campbell took another step. “Which part?”

Vera’s mouth went dry.

Grace stood beside her, still as a figure in a painting.

Vera could feel her there. Feel every unsaid thing. Every cold glance. Every question tucked behind polite words.

“East,” Vera said.

Campbell’s brows lifted. “East London.”

“Yes.”

“Where, precisely?”

Vera had no answer.

The silence stretched.

Thomas’s jaw tightened.

Campbell looked pleased.

“Do you have papers?”

Vera stared at him. “Papers?”

“Identification. Employment record. A letter of reference. A family name that can be confirmed. Anything at all that proves you are who you claim to be.”

Vera could feel the walls again.

Not the Garrison walls. Worse ones. Legal ones. Social ones. The kind that had existed before she arrived and had no reason to bend for her now. She had no papers. No home. No family here. No person who could stand up and say where she came from without lying.

“I work here,” she said.

Campbell glanced at Harry. “Does she?”

Harry opened his mouth.

Thomas answered first.

“She works here.”

The room held still around the words.

Vera looked at him despite herself.

It was not warm. It was not gentle. It was not enough. But it was something placed down between her and Campbell, and she hated that part of her wanted to lean toward it.

Campbell turned slowly to Thomas. “Since when do you employ women whose names cannot be checked?”

Thomas took his cigarette from his mouth. “Since I bought the pub.”

A faint laugh moved through a corner of the room and died quickly.

Campbell’s eyes hardened. “I am asking about the girl.”

“And I answered.”

“No, Mr. Shelby. You claimed her employment. Not her innocence.”

Vera’s stomach twisted.

Claimed her employment.

Not her innocence.

The distinction hurt more than it should have. It should not have hurt at all. Thomas owed her nothing. He did not know her. Not this Thomas. Not in any way that mattered now.

But the watch said otherwise.

The photograph said otherwise.

Some version of him had held her wrist in smoke and told her to look at him like he was afraid she would disappear if she didn’t.

This Thomas looked at her like a problem.

Campbell stepped closer to the bar. “Are you in the habit of sheltering strangers, Mr. Shelby?”

Thomas’s eyes did not move from him. “Only when police come sniffing after them.”

Arthur shifted near the private room door.

One of the policemen at the entrance shifted too.

The air thinned.

Campbell seemed to enjoy it. “A young woman appears in Small Heath with no address, no papers, no family, and a story too poor to be called a lie. She sleeps in your pub. You take an interest in her. I’m merely curious.”

“Curiosity doesn’t bring two officers.”

“No,” Campbell said. “Experience does.”

Vera’s heart beat harder.

Thomas looked at her then, only briefly.

That glance was enough to make something inside her break loose.

Because there was still suspicion in it.

Even now.

Even with Campbell turning the whole pub into a courtroom, even with Grace standing beside her too quiet, even with Vera feeling as if the century itself had found a way to put hands around her throat, Thomas still looked like he wanted an answer from her before he decided how far to go.

She almost laughed.

She almost told him everything right there.

The watch. The photo. The warning. His hand around her arm outside the Garrison in 1919, both of them caught in a moment neither one of them remembered properly.

Instead, Campbell spoke again.

“Miss Hart,” he said, “you will come with me.”

“No.”

The word left her before she knew she would say it.

Campbell’s attention sharpened. “No?”

“No.”

“You are not being arrested.”

“How comforting.”

“You are being taken in for questioning.”

“That sounds like arrested with better manners.”

John muttered something under his breath. Arthur’s mouth twitched once, but his eyes stayed on the police.

Campbell’s face cooled. “You are a very careless young woman.”

Vera felt Grace move beside her.

Not toward her.

Away.

Only a small shift, but Vera noticed it because every part of her was searching for the blade.

Something in her stomach tightened.

Grace had stepped away like that in the alley too. Calmly. Carefully. As if distance could make her innocent. As if silence could keep blood off her hands.

Vera looked at her.

Grace did not look back.

That was when Vera understood enough.

Not everything. Not even close. But enough to know that Grace had not been surprised when Campbell walked through the door. Enough to know that the coldness in her had not come from fear.

It had come from being caught.

The anger rose so fast it nearly choked her.

“Why ask me?” Vera said.

Every head turned.

Grace’s hand stilled on the edge of the bar.

Vera did not know why the words felt older than the moment, only that once they started, she could not swallow them back.

“Ask Grace,” she said. “She’s the reason you came.”

The room went so quiet it felt dead.

Grace’s face emptied.

Campbell’s expression changed so quickly that Vera knew she had hit something real. Not enough to understand, but enough to wound.

Thomas turned his head toward Grace.

Slowly.

That was worse than if he had snapped.

Grace recovered first, because of course she did. “She’s frightened.”

Her voice was steady, but Vera heard the strain beneath it.

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Grace continued.

Vera laughed once, soft and ugly. “Funny how everyone says that when I’m right.”

Grace looked at her then, and for one second Vera saw something break through the cold. Not guilt exactly. Not memory. Something that looked almost like pain.

Then Campbell moved.

“This girl is clearly unstable.”

Thomas’s gaze remained on Grace a moment longer before returning to Campbell. “Careful.”

“I would say the same to you.” Campbell gestured toward one of the officers. “Bring her.”

The first officer stepped forward.

Arthur did too.

The whole pub shifted with him.

Chairs scraped. Men rose without fully standing, caught between loyalty, fear, and the knowledge that violence in the Garrison had a way of becoming everyone’s problem. John moved quietly to Arthur’s side, all humor gone from his face.

Thomas did not raise his voice.

“No.”

Campbell looked at him. “No?”

“She stays.”

Vera could not breathe around the sudden, terrible relief that tried to rise inside her.

Campbell’s eyes sharpened. “On what grounds?”

“She works here.”

“We have established that employment at the Garrison now requires no background and no truth.”

Thomas stepped closer. “You don’t take people from my pub.”

Campbell smiled then, and there was nothing pleasant in it. “Your pub is not a country, Mr. Shelby.”

“No,” Thomas said. “It’s mine.”

For a moment, Vera thought the room might truly erupt.

Arthur’s hand lowered near his side. John’s eyes moved to the officers. Harry looked like he might be sick. Grace stood very still, caught between Campbell and Thomas and whatever Vera had just dragged into the light.

Campbell leaned slightly toward Thomas.

“If you prevent me from questioning her, I can return with enough men to turn this place over floorboard by floorboard.” His eyes moved toward the private room. “I wonder what I might find.”

Thomas said nothing.

The silence that followed was not weakness.

Vera understood that even through her panic. It was calculation. Thomas was measuring the room, the officers, the risk, the secrets hidden in the walls or under ledgers or in men’s pockets. He was deciding what could be lost if he turned one woman’s questioning into a war in the middle of his own pub.

One woman.

A stranger.

A liar.

Vera saw the decision before he made it.

Something inside her went cold.

Campbell saw it too.

“There we are,” he said softly.

Thomas’s eyes cut to him.

Campbell gestured again. “Miss Hart.”

The officer came around the bar.

Vera backed up once and hit the shelf behind her. Bottles rattled.

John took one step forward.

Thomas lifted a hand.

John stopped, but not happily.

The officer took Vera by the arm.

She jerked away on instinct, but there was nowhere to go. The bar hemmed her in. Grace stood to one side, pale and silent. Harry looked at the floor. Arthur swore under his breath. John stared at Thomas like he was waiting for the order that did not come.

Vera looked at Thomas.

His face gave away almost nothing.

Almost.

There was something in his eyes now that had not been there before. Not trust. Not even belief. But doubt had entered the room and found him. Vera could see it working behind his stillness, turning over what she had said about Grace, what Campbell had known, what Vera should not have known at all.

It was not enough.

The officer pulled her toward the end of the bar.

As she passed her coat, Vera’s hand shot out.

Thomas noticed.

So did Campbell.

Vera caught the coat in her fingers and dragged it down from the hook, clutching it to her chest before the officer could stop her.

“Cold out,” she said.

Her voice sounded distant to her own ears.

Thomas’s eyes dropped to the coat.

For one terrible second, Vera thought he knew.

Then the officer pulled her onward.

The room moved around her in fragments. A man stepping aside. Harry whispering her name like he regretted learning it. Grace’s breath catching as Vera passed. Campbell turning toward the door with the satisfaction of a man who had taken exactly what he came for.

At the threshold, Vera stopped fighting the officer’s grip.

She looked back.

Not at Grace.

At Thomas.

The words rose before she could make them softer.

“You really don’t know me.”

Thomas went still.

The pub seemed to hold the sentence after she said it.

It did not sound the way she meant it to sound. It did not sound like anger. Not only anger. It sounded like grief, deep and old and impossible, and Vera hated herself for giving him even that much.

Thomas said nothing.

But his expression changed.

Not enough for the room to read.

Enough for her.

The officer pulled her out into the rain.

The door shut behind them, cutting off the warmth and smoke of the Garrison all at once.

Outside, Campbell’s motorcar waited at the curb, dark and wet beneath the gray evening. The officer kept hold of Vera’s arm as he led her toward it. She clutched her coat tightly with her free hand, feeling the hidden weight of the watch inside the lining.

The watch was still there.

Still hers.

Behind her, the Garrison remained closed.

Vera did not look back again.