by Alyssa Cole
“My father. He is imprisoned because the army occupying our town thought he was committing treason. He wasn’t.” She pressed her lips together and looked away from him. “Joining the Loyal League means I can help end this war and free him.”
Her fingers were clenching at the grain sack again, but this time not out of fear. When she looked up at him, her gaze was fierce. “I will stop at nothing to do that.”
When she had scurried into the Loyal League meetinghouse, wide-eyed and talking of abolition, Daniel had been annoyed. After he had been assigned as her partner, he’d been angry. But there was feeling in her eyes now, determination overlaid with pain, and it sparked the briefest sense of kinship in him. This was something he could understand better than pithy remarks designed to impress him.
“Do you see your own goal as admirable? Freeing your father?” he asked, and she frowned.
“No, not admirable. But it’s what I must do all the same.”
Her expression was serious, and she didn’t say anything for a long while. Daniel watched her from the corner of his eye. Eventually she murmured something in Spanish and chuckled quietly.
“What is it?” Daniel asked, stiffening. Was she laughing at him?
“I was just thinking that this was perhaps the most pleasant conversation I’ve ever had with a man. On a boat outfitted for war, cruising into enemy territory.”
Daniel was oddly moved. People avoided him now, thought him mad. No one had talked to him like he was a man whose opinion mattered in some time, let alone implied that he was enjoyable to talk to. He’d made sure of that. He didn’t want the bother of interacting with others. And yet . . .
“I used to be known for my charming nature,” he said, and it was a reminder to himself, too. Friends had sought him out after church; peers had listened to him speak. He’d often found himself at the center of social circles at gatherings in any sphere of his life. Perhaps that was why home had been so torturous when he’d returned. He’d been relegated to the outskirts of every group, pushed away by probing questions or pitying stares or uncomfortable silences.
“Your charming nature?” Janeta smiled up at him, and it was warm, much too warm to be calculated.
Daniel had also once known when a woman found him pleasing, though he’d only ever wanted to please but the one. Janeta’s eyes were clear brown, like maple syrup spooling into a pail, and there was something alluring in their disconcerting depths. His gaze slipped away from her eyes, tracing over the curve of her button nose and the shape of her full lower lip as he shifted to look at the floor of the pilot house.
“You might be known for it yet if you aren’t careful,” she said.
“Let’s not put the horse before the cart. I wasn’t entirely annoyed by our discussion, and that’s all,” he added, and was rewarded with a laugh.
“That is high praise from Detective Cumberland. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone that you can be quite the conversationalist if you’re trapped on a boat.”
She stood again to gaze through the slit in the metal wall, and Daniel turned his head away from the curve of her hip that was now in his line of sight.
He forced his thoughts away from their conversation to Enterprise, and what would await them there. His new objective was to find a way into this meeting. Conversation was well and good, but Janeta was not the only one with a goal that must be met.
* * *
Daniel’s eyes flew open—had he fallen asleep? One moment everything was shrouded in darkness, the next he was wide awake, his gaze scanning the pilot house. His head rested on something firm; fabric rubbed against his cheek and the slightest hint of vanilla tickled his nose. When he shifted away he realized he’d been resting on Janeta’s shoulder.
Heat rushed to his face—the job required some intimacies with fellow detectives, but usually not this. He’d never allowed himself the liberty of using one of them as a pillow. When he glanced at her face, her expression was tight.
“We’re—”
The sound of pellet shot hitting the metal walls enclosing them, followed by shouted orders from the deck of the ship, cut her off, and he understood why he’d awoken.
He grabbed Janeta by the lapels of her coat and shoved her to the floor, laying his body over hers as the hail of bullets assailed the ship. Soldiers shouted as they took their positions; Hooper’s voice rose above the fracas, calling the men into order. Daniel hoped he had more control over his men than Janeta had conjectured.
The fusillade lasted what seemed like forever, and then finally there was the sound of return fire from their boat, the boom of the heavy guns firing out toward the banks of the river along with the soldiers’ rifles.
Beneath him, Janeta’s heart thudded under her rib cage, and he could feel it in his own chest. Her face was pressed into his collarbone, then he had the top of her head cradled in his hands.
He remembered his own first engagement with the enemy. He wasn’t some natural-born warrior, for God’s sake. He was large, and years of helping his father at his smithing had made him strong. But even after all he’d been through—even with his burning desire for vengeance—he’d nearly pissed himself the first time a bullet had whizzed past him. He didn’t value his life dearly, but something inside of him had cried out in fear and displeasure that such a small, inconsequential glob of metal might end it. After the fear had come the rage. He hadn’t survived so much to be killed so easily.
But Sanchez was new to this, and soft for all her bravado and her supposed purpose—she hadn’t had time to harden, and seemed to be just beginning to understand the gravity of what she’d undertaken. He felt the slightest twinge of pity for her, though he shouldn’t have. She was a detective, like any other, and had chosen to be one.
She shivered with fear beneath him and he began to push himself up and away from her.
“I’m going to return fire,” he said calmly, raising his head to locate each of the slits that would allow for offensive action. Somewhere in his mind he understood that if anyone should have been receiving his protection it was the Captain Kendall, but that was no matter now.
“There’s a rifle just here,” the captain said. “I imagine it’s a sight more useful than whatever you’re carrying.”
Daniel grabbed the weapon and munitions and loaded the shot, ignoring the pellets that slammed into the iron encasing the pilot house at regular intervals. He was sliding the muzzle of the rifle through the slot allotted for just that when he heard clambering behind him. When he glanced over his shoulder, Janeta had stumbled up to her feet and was loading her small revolver with shaking hands.
“Stay low, near the grain,” he ground out, and turned back to take his shot.
“I am your partner,” she said. Her voice was farther from him—she had moved to the slot on the other side of the cabin. “I will not leave the defense of my life or your own solely on your shoulders.”
Her voice shook, but there was a resolve there that surprised him. She had no questions, had simply overcome her shock and begun to do what was needed of her.
Daniel didn’t argue, and he didn’t pay attention to the admiration that slammed into him harder than anything he’d felt in months. Anything more than wary resignation was dangerous when it came to this woman. Instead, he peered through the slot, watching for tell-tale flashes in the shadowy forest along the riverbank, took aim, and fired.
CHAPTER 10
Janeta thought she’d known darkness, but the inky black of a Mississippi woods on a moonless night was something else entirely. It was full of unfamiliar sounds and strange rustlings, and she was frightened. The darkness reminded her of tales her serving girl—her slave—would tell her, of El Cuco, El Viejo del Saco, the monster wandering the night with his giant sack looking for misbehaving children to snatch up and carry away.
She was no longer a child, but she would deserve any punishment meted out to her if El Cuco came upon their camp.
She had plaited her hair into a single braid
after they’d made camp, and tucked the folded notes she’d taken at the Loyal League camp and on the boat as Daniel slept into her hair. She had calmly prepared herself to betray him, and the Loyal League, and the North.
She wasn’t sure what to do next.
Henry and his superiors had explained that she was to find Confederate forces and pass on information, to find telegraph stations if she could. All she had managed since her first and only letter to Henry letting him know she’d made contact and was being taken to a Loyal League meeting was this clumsy, misshapen braid with a note tucked inside. She couldn’t bring herself to think of the reality of handing off her information to Confederate forces now, after everything she’d seen since leaving Palatka. After the last few days with Daniel and the other detectives.
She hadn’t thought this through at all. She’d agreed to do it because she hadn’t wanted to disappoint Papi or Henry, but now she didn’t want to disappoint Daniel, either. More surprisingly, she didn’t want to disappoint herself.
She was hopelessly lost, stumbling deeper into her own emotional labyrinth the more she tried to understand just how she’d ended up in this situation. Her efforts to win Henry over had cost her father his freedom, and her efforts to free her father could cost people like Daniel his life—and people like her, too. She was coming to understand both her place in this country and her own inner geography better; she was recharting the map of herself now that she could go out and explore its surrounding terrain. But her new knowledge didn’t change much in the end. If she didn’t send any dispatches, she would lose her father and Henry both. She could deal with the latter, though that had once been unthinkable, but the former . . . she couldn’t lose Papi.
She’d been so silly, thinking that love was some pure thing. Doing what was right by her heart could rip her to pieces and cost her her very soul.
There was a brief spark; then the tinder caught light. Daniel leaned over the flame of their camp fire to stoke it, the dim orange glow capturing the curve of his cheekbone and the breadth of his nose.
She had seen that face up close, had felt the weight of him when he’d thrown himself over her, protecting her with his own body when the pook turtle had come under fire. She’d known the weight of Henry’s body on hers as he’d taken his pleasure—Daniel had been trying to give her his life. It didn’t help that after they’d come through the attack alive, after her jangled nerves had settled, she’d been unable to stop her mind from wandering back to that moment beneath him on the floor of the pilot house. It had changed something for her.
When she’d gone to Henry for assistance, his first response had been to convince her to put herself in harm’s way. His second had been to caress her face, her neck—she’d thought he was offering comfort, until one hand had moved to her shoulder and pressed her back toward the tree while his other hand moved to his belt. He’d said he wanted to make love to her one more time, and he hadn’t cared that she’d been too overcome with grief to want the same. She’d held on to the tree as he rutted on her and muttered how much he loved her into her nape. She’d always assumed that’s what love was, when you got down to it—giving yourself over to someone’s desires in the hopes they would perhaps care about yours.
Daniel had looked into her eyes when he’d lain on top of her, bullets peppering the iron walls, and in his gaze she’d found what she’d been searching for when she’d run to Henry that night that had changed her life.
Strength. Worry for her well-being. Determination to protect her.
It wasn’t love, but it had pinned her as much as his body had, with the added weight of the knowledge that she was in the midst of betraying him.
She was a fool.
“Thank you. Again.” Her words were so low that they were almost eaten by the crackling of the fire, but he seemed to hear her.
He sat back on his heels beside the fire. “No need for it. Again.”
“Were you telling the truth earlier?” she asked suddenly. “About having no woman?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” he replied tersely.
“Sorry for prodding.” She felt odd, like a leaf picked up by the wind and buffeted about. She wasn’t used to talking about what she was truly thinking. But something about the dark Mississippi night, and about Daniel, allowed her to. “I was just thinking about love. How I was always told that it was the only thing that could protect me.” She sucked in a breath as she realized that awful truth. That was what Mami had taught her, with her lessons in how to make herself pleasing. That if you got the right man to love you, you wouldn’t have to worry about anything else. Love hadn’t saved Mami, though, and now Janeta was beginning to think of her mother’s raving and wonder if perhaps love was what had pushed her to her doom.
She sighed. “Does anyone really love? Is everyone just acting out what society wants of them, or using it to get what they want from society?”
Daniel glanced at her. His mouth was pulled into a frown.
“I can’t answer that. No heart, remember? Those seem like questions better suited for your intended, anyhow.” He poked at the fire. “Don’t worry, I haven’t gotten any ideas about you. You don’t have to warn me away with discussions on the nature of love.”
Heat flushed to her cheeks—embarrassment and anger. “That’s not why I asked.” She thought of Daniel’s cynicism about Henry’s intentions to marry her. She thought of Henry being part of the Sons of the Confederacy, and how he had sent her out into the world to please a group that would apparently sooner kill someone like her than see her stay free. “And he’s not my intended.”
“How fickle of you.”
“I’m not the fickle one,” she said. “Foolish, perhaps, for believing his talk of our future but ignoring his present actions.”
Her sinuses burned as they always did when she held back her tears. All the little worries about Henry that she’d pushed to the back of her mind now seemed to press at her eyes, and she blinked away tears.
“Ah, that’s right. ‘Wanted to marry.’” Daniel threw his twig into the fire. “Could his reticence on marriage have been because he didn’t want you to join the 4L?”
She laughed, not bothering to smooth the edge of resentment in her tone. “No, he was all too happy for me to serve. My success would be a success for him after all.”
“Hm. So he pushed you to become a detective?”
She nodded, feeling ashamed. “He told me it was how I could help my father. But I’m starting to think that it’s not a coincidence that it benefits him, too.”
“That’s the way of it, then. Love will make you do outrageous things.” Daniel’s expression didn’t change, but his voice was a little softer when he spoke again. “Do you wish that he’d asked you to stay instead?”
The pain in her sinuses was joined by a roughening of her throat. She wouldn’t cry.
“I wish many things, Cumberland. But mostly I wish I had considered why he could so easily pack me off. Being away from him has helped me to start seeing some things more clearly, though, and the view is not lovely.” She shook her head. “I believe that sometimes a man sees something he wants and covets it, whether it be property or a woman or prestige. Some men don’t see a difference among the three. They do anything they can to get them. A means to an end—is that the saying? For something that helps you get what you want?”
She glanced at him and he nodded.
“I think maybe I was the means and had confused myself for the end. And maybe I had done the same with him. Women want things, too, you know.” She sighed and laughed again, trying to lighten the mood. “I am sorry. I should keep these thoughts to myself and not bother you with them.”
She’d always known, on some level, that Henry had whispered exactly what she wanted to hear. She’d told herself that he did it for the same reason she did—to please her so that she would like him. She hadn’t considered more nefarious reasons for his manipulation.
Daniel sighed. “I had
a woman I loved my whole life. My best friend since I was a child.” He found another twig, picked it up, and snapped it. “She wanted to help the Union and I told her it wasn’t her place.”
Janeta wrinkled her nose. “Did you say those words to her? ‘Not your place’? Dios mío. And now you have no woman.”
“And no heart.” He grimaced. “She’s the most decorated detective the Loyal League has, though. And she’s married to another man.”
Janeta thought of things she’d overheard. Burns, was the name that had been whispered. Something about setting fire to a house and a stolen Confederate warship. A heroine whose story would be told long after the war, if the world was just—of course Daniel had loved someone like that. Someone who could do such things wouldn’t worry about pleasing others.
“You must hate this man,” she whispered.
“Wrong to hate the man who helped free you,” he said. “But I managed. I managed for a good long while because it doesn’t take much work to hate. But I’ve been thinking, despite trying not to think.” He sighed. “I loved Ellen, but perhaps she was my means to an end, as you put it. A shortcut to the comfort and happiness I felt I deserved—that I coveted. I’d built a future for us in my head, when she’d already told me she had her own plans and they didn’t include me. You’ve given me something to think on, Sanchez.”
Something clicked for Janeta then.
“You didn’t want her to join, but you are here. Why?”
“Well, when I was rescued I was offered a way to get vengeance. And I think part of me wanted to show her that I could do this, too. That I could make a difference, too.”
“So you know what it feels like, doing this thing because it was the desire of the one you thought you loved.”
“In a way, I guess. But now I do it for me and my own reasons. And you should only stay if you really believe in why you’re doing it, too.” He stretched and then looked at her across the fire. “We should try to sleep.”
She didn’t want him to go to sleep; if he slept, then she would have to try to pass her information. Not for Henry. But for Papi, whom she’d gotten into this mess because of her infatuation with Henry. Henry had manipulated her for her body, but right now he was the only hope she had of freeing her father, however tenuous. Papi shouldn’t have to pay for her mistakes.
