Bright and Broken Things

by Ryan Graudin

Genres: Fantasy; Historical Fantasy; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Set among the glittering parties and Egyptology craze of 1920s London, a young scholar learns he may be the key to uncovering an ancient Egyptian artifact coveted by a powerful cabal of magicians in this enthralling adventure from the author of Enchanted Lies of Céleste Artois.

Ezra Bright has returned to London after serving in World War I but, like many surviving soldiers, he’s haunted—by the horrors of the front lines, the loss of his adoptive brother and the strange magic flickering at the edge of his vision. Desperate to outrun his past, Ezra falls into a dazzling new world of socialites known for their elaborate costume parties and spralling scavenger hunts.
 
But these Bright Young Things are hungry. And none more than Celia, a disgraced heiress, who warns Ezra that these parties are only a glittering façade for a secret society of magicians. For centuries, the Order, at the behest of its mysterious leader, has plundered magical relics. Their ultimate prize lies buried in Egypt, and unlocking it requires ancient magic—one Celia believes Ezra alone possesses.
 
When a note in his room is mistaken for the opening clue of a scavenger hunt, Ezra and his friends are launched into high stakes race across Egypt. As secrets are unearthed and the dead refuse to stay buried, Ezra must confront the truth of his heritage—and the full cost of his power—before the Order claims it first.

Release date: September 22, 2026

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 480

Sample

Ezra Bright had fallen asleep on the face of an angel.

The act was neither as wondrous nor as blasphemous as it sounded—seeing as the celestial being was a drawing on a very old page. Still Ezra couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty as he wiped the sleep from his eyes. His advisor back at Oxford would consider using a medieval-era manuscript as a pillow to be sacrilege. The angel itself didn’t seem too miffed. It stared back with a placid expression, halo shining almost as brightly as it had when the monk scribe first applied the gilding four hundred years ago.

Thank God he hadn’t drooled.

Ezra was usually far more careful with books. He’d been in their debt from the moment his mother had first started reading to him by the light of an oil lamp. Not the shiny brass contraptions that sunburnt British men toted around in the Valley of the Kings, but a humble ceramic pot that was much more fit for lighting desert tombs. He was fairly certain his mother had used the lamp for such a purpose, once he was safely tucked in bed and serenaded by the Nile’s lullaby. There were nights when he’d awoken for a glass of water, only to find there was no one to bring it to him. Mornings when his mother’s shoes were filled with the sort of fine sand that you could only find beyond the streets of Luxor.

He’d always meant to ask her why she’d been wandering out into the desert. Was it to see the stars? Was it to loot some of the tombs the aamus hadn’t discovered yet? (This was what Ezra’s mother called the foreigners when it was just them—when she felt free to speak her mind, and her first language.) Secret treasure might explain the steady flow of money that kept a young woman and her fatherless child in such a fancy flat, so close to the river. It would also explain the antiquities that turned up around the house—scarabs carved out of amethyst and turquoise and lapis lazuli, amulets engraved with the Eye of Horus, jars that held kohl, jars that kept… other things.

Sometimes, at night, whenever his mother was gone, the boy imagined he could hear the jeweled bugs scuttling outside his bedroom door. This might’ve delighted him if it had only been the insects, but sometimes his mother brought home mummified cats, and the prospect of them prowling around the parlor with their wrappings slowly falling away was enough to keep the child under his covers. He thought of the bedtime stories his mother had read him—tales where men could use their magic to lasso sunbeams or steal secrets from the forked tongues of serpents or trade bodies with more majestic beasts. Where death could be swindled as easily as an aamu at the market.

The boy knew these tales backward and forward. He sometimes had dreams where he was the main character, sprouting hawk wings and soaring out over the blue-green tapestry of the Nile Delta. Where he caught falling stars in his hands and turned them into jewels. Where he cried every single tear in his body and collected them in a shallow bowl, until their reflection started to show the future. Where he was never afraid, because he knew the worst could never happen. He knew The End.

When Ezra grew older, after Ezra became Ezra, he realized that no one else he’d met—Egyptian, English, or otherwise—had heard of these tales. Whenever he recounted them, the response was always a curiously twisted face. It made something inside Ezra twist too. It prompted him to search every single bookshop in London, even the barrows lining the curbside of Shoreditch High Street, in hopes that he might stumble across a copy of the book his mother had read to him. Alas, he could not remember the title. He could barely remember the cover, only that the stories had fit quite precisely in his mother’s brown hands. That image felt far too small for his memories of the stories within. It felt too small for his mother too.

He couldn’t remember her face—at least, not as clearly as the inked angel he was currently staring at. Ezra blinked and rubbed his eyes again. His surroundings settled into place. He wasn’t at the paper-besieged desk inside his flat, nor was he in some forgotten corner of the Ashmolean. This museum was far larger. A glance at his wristwatch told Ezra it was well past midnight. Not that London took any heed of this. Sounds of life growled outside the British Museum’s windows: Automobiles rattled down cobblestone streets, and jazz bands made the night a little less dark.

Ezra carefully closed the book, peeling off his gloves and collecting the notes he’d accrued earlier in the evening. He really should get back to the boardinghouse. He couldn’t spend the rest of the night at the British Museum. It was essential that Ezra stayed in their good graces—the collections here were beyond the scope of what he could’ve imagined when he proposed his doctoral dissertation to Professor Blythe. I want to search for wings was how he’d first worded it. This, of course, had gotten a rise out of his advisor’s incredibly bushy eyebrows.

“Then I suggest walking down to the Department of Zoology. There are several ornithologists who’d be happy to show you drawers of dead birds—”

“Not bird wings.” Ezra felt his heart pounding the way it had in the trenches. The way it had when he’d seen an… Don’t say angel, he thought. Don’t give him any reason to discredit you. “It’s just that, in all the cultures of antiquity, there’s a common thread of symbolism. Winged beings show up in almost every mythology—there are Valkyries in Norse lore and Harpies in Greek. German swan maidens, the peri from Persia, the genies from Assyria. I could list at least ten more examples off the top of my head.”

“It’s called a motif, Mr. Bright. Humanity’s fascination with flight is nothing new. Even in this modern age, we gawp at the war’s fighter aces.” The professor had glanced at the bold sky outside his office window—made even bluer for its odd panes of stained glass—and sighed. “So you propose to map out our evolutionary obsession with flying into the sun?”

Ezra had looked out the window too. He could taste that childhood dream on his tongue: the one where he’d spread his wings across the desert and grabbed sunlight with his bare palms. His own hands had started to grow sweaty, but he folded them calmly over his lap.

“Icarus can’t be the only one,” he’d said. “I’d like to dig deeper to find more comparable myths—and yes, I’d like to map out the spread of these stories throughout history. I’d like to see where they meet and diverge.”

I want to know if there’s any truth to them.

“You’re a very intelligent young man, Mr. Bright. I daresay you’d be here at the college even without your connections to the Ellingtons, but I believe this idea sounds a bit… unwieldy. Do you propose to dive into every known mythology on earth? To what end? If I were you, I’d narrow my focus to mythologies I’m more familiar with: Egyptian, obviously.” Ezra got the impression it wasn’t his undergraduate degree Professor Blythe was referring to, but more outward characteristics. Lashes so dark and long that flappers sometimes asked what kind of mascara he used. A strong, straight nose. Skin that browned easily under too much sun. “Perhaps you could compare the Greek and Egyptian pantheons. They were neighbors and trading partners after all, so there’s merit to the idea that they would’ve shared myths as well.”

Everything inside Ezra wanted to flinch at this, wanted to point out that Egypt could stand on its own, as a subject of scholarly study. He didn’t need a Western pantheon to legitimize his ancestors’ gods.

But he did need Blythe’s blessing.

So he shook his head and tightened his sweating hands. “Give me three months to come up with a proper proposal, sir.”

Professor Blythe had sighed again. “Normally, my answer would be no, Ezra, but I’d be lying to say I wasn’t curious about this potential compendium of angels.”

Ezra exhaled. He hadn’t said the word. It felt like that counted for something. “Thank you—”

“Don’t thank me yet. You have two months to convince me that your idea has legs. Much less wings,” the professor said with a little laugh. “Try not to fly too far into the sun, Mr. Bright.”

Ezra had gone to London by train. While a normal visitor might have ridden in a double-decker bus around Piccadilly Circus or gaped through the crested gates at Buckingham Palace, he’d spent the past three weeks searching the British Museum’s archives for wings. There were plenty to be found. They graced Byzantine rings, Ethiopian paintings, talismans from ancient Rome, Greek vases, Renaissance artwork, triptychs and tiles and tokens and textiles. Ezra could hardly turn around in the exhibition halls without spotting a winged god.

He’d tried his damnedest to catalog it all.

He’d gone through five fountain pens, ten notebooks, and two pairs of gloves.

Twenty-one days in and he’d only touched a fraction of the museum’s collection.

Ezra made his way to the building’s main doors. Locked! Of course. He’d encountered this problem before, but the night watchman who usually pulled the skeleton keys from his belt was nowhere to be seen. Making the rounds with his torch, probably. Ezra wondered whether he should wait. The only alternative was to go searching. He didn’t particularly relish the thought. There was something haunting about this place… something about the way everything was entombed in glass.

For protection, the museum curators claimed.

Ezra wasn’t so sure. On the surface, he knew they meant well. But there was so much that didn’t make the information plaques accompanying each piece. The scarabs of his youth—so stony, so still—sat beneath perfect lighting and etched labels. Reduced to specimens. Every time Ezra passed their case, his throat tightened.

Something felt trapped.

And not just the relics.

These feelings grew even worse with the statues of the pharaohs. There was no glass around them, no, but both Ramesses II and Amenhotep III looked lost. Their granite bodies had been brutalized by hammers, wrenched from their temples by the order of British diplomats and sailed across a strange sea. Ezra couldn’t help drawing comparisons, when he stood in these kings’ shadows. How he too had made that voyage, as a scant six-year-old aboard the HMS Euphemia. More than once he’d vomited the contents of his stomach over the ship’s rails while Lord Blackwood patted him on the back and offered him sips of some special tea. As if that could soften the blow of being taken.

Thomas Ellington hadn’t used a chisel to remove Ezra from Egypt.

But still, something inside him had cracked.

Small, precise fractures.

Little pieces lost.

He never quite fit with his surroundings. He was not an Ellington, though he lived in their house. Fellow students at Oxford were constantly trying to greet him in Italian or Greek, guessing thanks to a complexion that wasn’t quite white or brown enough to anchor Ezra to either side of his parentage. Even this museum was a cruel reminder that his Egyptian-ness was allowed here only as a relic. Something to be cataloged and gaped at. Ezra hated being gaped at. So he’d gotten good at putting up his own glass walls: smiling through Professor Blythe’s judgmental lectures and flappers who complimented him on his command of English.

For protection.

But the cracks still appeared, sometimes.

BANG!

Every muscle in Ezra’s body seized as he looked around the entry hall. His hand moved to the Webley pistol he’d kept tucked in the back of his waistband since France. (Habits from hell die hard.)

The sound wasn’t a gunshot, though. It sounded as if a brass sign had gotten knocked over onto the museum floor. That wouldn’t have been the night watchman, Ezra thought, the hairs on the back of his neck bristling. Nor did he suppose it was a twenty-ton granite pharaoh.

A thief, then?

Ezra kept his pistol drawn, aimed at the floor, as he scanned the dark galleries. Adrenaline sang through his veins, bringing the rooms into sharper relief. Molded white ceilings and glass cases refracted the moonlight. Two massive, winged lions from Assyria flanked the hall. Beyond them, columns ribbed out into the Egyptian gallery.

He heard whispers rising from the ancient stones, so soft that for a moment he wondered if it wasn’t the statues themselves.

The hairs on the back of his neck felt electric.

His finger was a feather against the trigger.

“Shhhhhh!”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be touching those, Minnie!” This next whisper was soft—feminine. “What if you get cursed?”

A giggle echoed through the gallery. “Curses aren’t real!”

“That’s exactly what someone who was about to get cursed would say! Haven’t you read The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb?”

“That’s fiction, Rose. It means the author made it all up!”

“What about Lord Carnarvon? Hm? He was real enough, and look at what happened to him after he opened King Tut’s tomb! He dropped dead of a mosquito bite.”

“Yes, a mosquito bite,” Minnie replied dryly. “Not a vengeful mummy’s curse.”

“King Tut could have cursed the mosquito!”

“I think you’ve been listening to too many of Hugo Pratt’s stories. He’s pulling your leg, Rose.”

A third voice broke in. “Would you two be quiet? I’m trying to concentrate on these hieroglyphics.”

Ezra crept deeper into the Egyptian gallery. He paused by good ole Ramesses II and peered around the display to see several young women by a stone sarcophagus. His first thought, when he saw them, was not thieves, but birds. Each wore an outfit assembled with an outrageous number of feathers. A slender brunette leaned against the coffin with an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips—covered in peacock plumage. Minnie. This was according to Rose, who was dressed in flamingo pink and continuing to chastise her friend by name. On the far side of the gallery stood a young woman dressed in striking black feathers, which had been arranged with wires to resemble a pair of wings. Ezra might have moved to study them more closely, if not for the fourth intruder.

She was crouched by the sarcophagus with a magnifying glass held up to her eye. Her dress was covered in white feathers, lending her neck a swanny look as she craned close to examine the symbols etched on the dark stone. Very few men in the world could read hieroglyphics. And even fewer women…

It was her.

Impossibly her.

There were over seven million people in this seething mass of a city, and Ezra had stumbled straight into the one person he’d gone to great lengths to avoid. This absurdity tugged a small laugh out of him.

On the coffin, Minnie straightened. The cigarette in her mouth went limp. “What was that?”

“The curse!” Rose’s arms flapped wildly, swatting Minnie from the sarcophagus. “Get off before you wake up the rest of the gallery’s mummies, Minnie!”

“There are no mummies in this room,” Ezra said as he stepped out from behind the pillar. “They’re on the second floor, and their knees would crumble to dust if they tried taking the stairs. You’re quite safe!”

He realized, too late, that he was holding a gun as he said this.

Minnie let out a scream.

Her cigarette tumbled to the floor. Rose dove there too—ducking behind the coffin. The young woman wearing the white feathers looked up at this commotion, still holding her magnifying glass to her eye. Its glass warped her round face. There was so much there that Ezra did not recognize. Lipstick, for one thing. Makeup had been caked over her freckles, and her long blond hair had been cut to match the drastic line of her jaw. This style made her look far older, though that also could’ve been due to the eight years that had passed since they’d crossed paths.

“Ezra?” A green eye blinked. The magnifying glass lowered, so he could see every spectrum of emotion on her face. The joy, the disbelief, the hurt. “Is that—Is it really you?”

He wondered if he should have stayed behind the column.

But it was too late now.

“Hello, Biz.” This was a pet name, from their childhood. Ezra wasn’t sure it still matched the young woman in front of him. “Or do you go by Elizabeth now?”

“Only in the daily papers,” she replied with a half-hearted curtsy. “What in the world are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same of you.” Apart from the ungodly hour, the women weren’t exactly dressed for a museum promenade. Now that Biz had turned, he could see that there was a splat of mud dripping down the side of her shift.

Biz followed his stare and scowled at the dirt. “Damn! I just had this dress done… If you must know, my friends and I are on a treasure hunt—”

“I’m sorry, Biz.” The explanation was cut off by Rose, who’d peeked back out from behind the sarcophagus. “But do you mean to say you know the mad gentleman who’s wielding a gun at us?”

“I’m not mad,” Ezra said, a little too sharply. His voice cracked at the last word. Something cold coiled down his spine as he switched on the safety and returned the weapon to his waistband.

“Neither would I call Ezra Bright a gentleman,” Biz said, in that teasing way of hers. “He is, however, many other things. A scholar. An adventurer. A war hero. Do you know, he used to help us hunt treasure back at Thornhill? He was usually the first to solve Father’s riddles, but he always made George and me think the clues through to the end. It was infuriating!”

George. This name was a punch to the gut. The cold feeling kept throttling Ezra’s spine. He could feel the weight of the pharaoh above him—and even though he knew there was no threat that the statue would come crashing down, Ezra still wanted to run. I shouldn’t be here. George. George should have survived instead. But there was no going back, not to the war, not to Thornhill, not to those sand-strewn lullabies of his childhood.

Ezra shifted his satchel of books on his shoulder. “Did Lord Blackwood send you here?” he asked.

Biz brushed more dirt from her dress. “No,” she said. “Haven’t you been reading the papers?”

“Treasure hunts are all the rage with the Bright Young Things these days!” Minnie explained, twirling that demolished cigarette between her fingers. “We follow clues all over London! The press loves it! Especially when we end up racing cars or climbing Cleopatra’s Needle!”

“Or breaking into museums?” Ezra couldn’t help but add.

“Nothing was broken,” Biz answered breezily, holding up a familiar set of keys. “I simply bribed Walter to grant us access.”

Ezra wasn’t entirely surprised. The Ellington name had always had the power to open doors—in Cairo, in Oxford, even in the thick of war. It was one of the reasons he was allowed in the galleries after hours. But there was a big difference between watching Lord Blackwood wield his influence and watching Elizabeth “Biz” Ellington do the same. She seemed too young for that sort of thing—even at twenty. She didn’t have her father’s gravitas.

All she had was a muddy dress and a flock of eager followers.

“Where did your other friend run off to?” Ezra glanced at the opposite side of the gallery, where he’d seen the woman with the wire wings. There was only darkness in her place. “We don’t want her to get cursed by one of the upstairs mummies.”

Rose and Minnie exchanged a glance, while Biz’s expression tightened. Ezra bit the inside of his cheek, hard. A mistake. There had only ever been the three women. “I thought I counted four of you… Never mind. Trick of the shadows.”

Shadows liked to trick Ezra—they’d been slippery all his life. But he knew they weren’t really to blame for the woman with the black-feathered wings. She’d sprung straight from his mind. Doctors called such things a hallucination: a more sanitized term for madness. After the war, they’d chalked it up to shell shock. Of course you’d start seeing ghosts if you spent that much time around death…

This might have made Ezra feel better, but the visions had been happening long before he went off to fight. He’d been seeing strange things his entire life… What other child would be so petrified that a mummified cat might jump into their bed? Though, in the war, ghosts weren’t all he saw. His battlefields had been filled with angels and demons, with flaming swords and undying flowers. With men’s memories swimming inside puddles of their blood. George’s had been the worst—leaking out of his broken skull, alongside fragments of bone and brain. Ezra had stood over him in shock, watching his own face swirling through the red. Not just a reflection, but glimpses of them together as boys, gallivanting around Thornhill.

So much more than glass had cracked…

He’d lost himself then.

He’d let the madness wash over him.

They’d called Ezra a hero when he awoke, surrounded by oh so many more bodies. Their memories shimmered around him. George was still there. Still dead.

He tried not to think of this as he watched Biz, but it was difficult. So much of her brother was in her face—magnified as she held the looking glass out to him. “Here! Maybe you can help. The clue we found at Tower Bridge said we needed to count the sun’s eyes on death’s darkest stone, then pace yourself in the most false direction.”

Ezra frowned. English was technically his third language, but he spoke it without an accent. It was rare that he questioned his fluency, but Biz’s riddle had thrown him for a loop. It wasn’t as elegant as the clues Lord Blackwood used to roll up in the napkins of their Saturday breakfast—maps and codices that sent the children sprawling across the estate for a day.

“Sounds like a lot of nonsense, no?” Minnie piped up. “The sun doesn’t have eyes!”

“The sun is an eye in Egyptian mythology,” Biz informed her friend. “It was believed to be the eye of the sun god Ra!”

Ezra knelt in front of the sarcophagus. “I don’t think you’ll find the Eye of Ra on a coffin… It’s not associated with funerary art.”

Biz crouched next to him, reaching out to trace some of the sarcophagus’s symbols. Her nail was painted bright red, the same shocking shade as her lips. It looked a little bit too much like blood for Ezra’s taste.

“That’s what I was wondering,” she said. “Do you think the clue writer meant the Eye of Horus instead? It would be an easy enough mistake.”

“Why’s that?” Rose asked.

“The symbols look similar, but they’re inversed,” Ezra explained. “Ra’s eye appears as a right wedjat. Horus’s eye is on the left and it’s the one that tends to appear on sarcophagi—they were placed there to allow the dead to keep watch.”

Rose’s cheeks pinkened as she regarded the sarcophagus. “So there’s, like, ghosts seeing us through this coffin?”

“Of course not!” scoffed Minnie. “It’s all superstitious mumbo jumbo. People didn’t know any better back then. They didn’t have newspapers or scientists or modern medicine. Our society is way more enlightened—”

“And yet we still can’t seem to figure out how the ancient Egyptians managed to build the pyramids,” Biz grunted.

“Eyes of Horus were usually depicted on coffins in pairs,” Ezra went on. “Especially during the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom—ah, yes. See? Here.” He pointed to the carving. “And here.”

Biz stood quickly. “That means I’ll have to take two paces in the ‘most false direction.’ If north is true, I’m guess that means south.”

South led back the way Ezra had come, toward the rugged rear of Ramesses II. Someone had wedged a small scroll where the hieroglyphs on the pharaoh’s spine broke off. Biz wasted no time scrambling up to grab it.

Be careful! The words crested Ezra’s throat—he wasn’t sure if they were more for the socialite or the statue’s sake. In either case, there wasn’t much point. Enough damage had already been done by dynamite. The stone’s sacred inscriptions had long been split, and Biz had already managed to pluck the paper from this crack.

“Oh goody!” Rose clapped her hands together as Biz unrolled the clue. “What does this one say?”

“Tyger, tyger, burning bright, find the king of the jungle’s light. If not a king, then a regent he. If not a jungle, then a menagerie.”

“A zoo!” exclaimed Minnie. “The zoo at Regent’s Park has tigers, doesn’t it? That’s where the next clue must be!”

Ezra snorted. “You can’t seriously be considering breaking into the zoo.”

“We have to follow the clue,” Biz declared as she rerolled the tiny scroll.

“By walking into a sleeping tiger’s lair?” Ezra raised his eyebrows. “Jungle cats aren’t nearly as nice as night guards. They don’t take bribes.”

Lord Blackwood’s daughter didn’t look the least bit intimidated. In fact, it seemed to Ezra that she could grow claws of her own as she crossed her arms under the moonlight. “I’m not going to run away when things get difficult,” she said pointedly. “If you’re so worried about me getting mauled, then perhaps you should join us.”

“Oh yes!” Rose brightened. “Bring your gun!”

Ezra was suddenly very aware of the pistol tucked in his waistband. Many men who’d come back from the war had kept their guns close. Under pillows. In the back of bedside drawers. In hidden holsters. As if they hadn’t made this world safe enough, even after all that fighting.

He supposed the Webley would stop a tiger if things at Regent’s Park got out of hand.

But who will stop you?

The whisper in his head was as dark as the coffin. Ezra clenched the strap of his satchel and tried to push the thought away. This never entirely worked. How could it? The darkness was him, just as much as the want of wings. No matter how many books he buried himself in, no matter how many angels he tried to find, or how much metaphorical glass he used to contain himself, Ezra’s madness always broke through. He couldn’t afford to have another… episode. Not here, in front of these women. It was why Lord Blackwood had banished him from Thornhill in the first place.

Stay away.

You’re not safe.

“I don’t know, Elizabeth. I’m not feeling too well.” He pulled the pistol from his belt. “Why don’t you take my gun instead—”

“Nonsense!” Minnie’s cry sounded a little too similar to a peacock. “We’re more likely to end up shooting ourselves in the foot than slaying a tiger. We need you, Mr. Bright. Especially if you’re as good at these games as Biz claims!” The brunette fished a ruby-studded cigarette case from her clutch and offered Ezra its contents. “Here! Have one! They’re good for your health! A quick drag and you’ll be right as rain!”

The cigarettes were lined up in a neat little row, reminding Ezra of infantry. He’d smoked quite a bit during the war, mostly because everything else was on fire.

“No, thank you,” he told Minnie.

Biz grabbed the gun, checking the safety before stuffing it into her own clutch. “Suit yourself.”

“Oh, don’t be like that!” her friend scolded, then looked back at Ezra. “She misses you terribly, you know! Not a week goes by when we don’t hear about some strange misadventure from Thornhill. The capsized rowboat, the litter of kittens you saved from that farmer’s sack, the ancient queen you told her was sleeping in the old oak tree…”

Tales from another life. So many of his memories at Thornhill had taken on a gilded edge, like the countless books of its library. But Ezra knew that if he handled them too much, without gloves, the shine would peel back. Become soaked in George’s blood.

“If Ezra wishes to leave, he should leave.” There was a cold note to Biz’s voice as she tucked her hair behind her ears.

I don’t wish that, Ezra wanted to say. I never did.

“Minnie’s right,” Rose broke in. “Think about it—what are the odds that you two would cross paths in a museum after midnight? This is fate! You can’t just walk away from each other now!”

He could.

He had.

Even though Ezra had handed over his pistol, he felt heavier than ever. His satchel might as well have been stone. Biz, on the other hand, was starting to look less stiff. Color came back to her cheeks. There was a glimmer in her eyes. Green like the bottles that studded the mud of the Thames at low tide.

He could see George there—in the color and the hurt. He could see himself too: that smallest sliver of belonging. A shard that shoved straight through his heart. Emerald eyes didn’t make Ezra an Ellington, but George and Biz had still treated him like a brother. He’d missed that.

Missed them.

“I suppose a quick visit to the zoo wouldn’t do any harm,” he said.

Rose did a little dance around the coffin. “Not if you’re with us!”

“That’s the spirit!” Minnie pulled out a fresh cigarette and wedged it between her lips.

To Ezra’s surprise, Biz took one too. He wondered what Lord Blackwood thought of his precious daughter smoking—not to mention the shingled hair and the hemline that rose well above her knees. Yes, she was chasing tigers, but she wasn’t a child anymore. That much was clear as she pulled a matchbook from her clutch. She left the pistol cradled against its velvet lining, only meeting Ezra’s eyes after she struck her match and brought the flame to her newest vice.

“Right, then.” Her words slipped out with a ribbon