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his head in disdain. “And look what the cat dragged in. But I’m not the one under scrutiny here. Why did you feel you needed to knock me out?”
    I had already decided that sticking with half-truths was the best way to go. He wasn’t stupid, so there was no point in trying to pretend I wasn’t guilty of something . I just had to throw out a big, fat red herring so he wouldn’t figure out what, exactly, I was guilty of.
    “To rob you,” I told him truthfully.
    It may have been a trick of the light, but for a moment he looked a little sad at my admission. I pressed on. “Do you know how difficult life for the less privileged can be? As a duke you can have no real idea what it’s like to want, to go without.” I was ad-libbing now and less than thrilled with the results. Effective? Possibly. Way too revealing? Probably. Painful? Definitely.
    “So you’re a down-on-your-luck fortune-teller with an American, British and I don’t know what kind of accent, who decided to rob the Loony Duke. Is that it?”
    “Pretty much.”
    “All right, even if I believed that part, which I don’t, you were winning every game we played and had already won my watch and my purse. Why the laudanum? What were you going to do, take my clothes and leave me naked in the tent? Surely I would be found, and you would be hunted down. And you had already succeeded in robbing me. It makes no sense.”
    I pondered his remarks and opened my mouth to speak, only to have him save me the trouble.
    “Unless, of course, you wanted to steal something particular. Is that the case, Dorothy? Do I have something you want?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper.
    The blood rushed from my cheeks as I realized, more due to his tone than his words, that he knew. Dammit, he knew .
    It was showtime. Taking a deep breath I worked up some tears, satisfied as they scalded a path down my face. I let out a loud snuffle for good measure, “M-m-my br-br-brother lost a g-g-game of cards to you a fortnight ago. And w-w-when he did, he lost our father’s timepiece. It was a f-f-family heirloom and I n-needed to get it back,” I wailed between Oscar-worthy, body-racking sobs. Again, pretty close to the truth, way closer than I liked, but I was out of ideas. Maybe he’d feel sorry for me.
    “Bacon is your brother?” he asked, disbelief coloring his voice.
    “Yes.”
    “You look nothing alike. He is a flaming redhead.”
    “Well, he takes after our mother, you see. And she was a bit of a tramp, if you must know. So we’re only half brother and sister.”
    I began to sob anew, hoping he would feel guilty for forcing me to divulge another painful “family secret.”
    Unmoved, he barked, “Stop that, this instant.”
    I did.
    He stood, moving until he stood over the bed, peering down at me. “You’re a good actress, I’ll give you that.” He shook his head in disgust. “Must be hard on your lovers. How could they ever know when you’re telling the truth? Poor bastards.”
    “I have no lovers. There’s just me and Bacon. He’s all I have now, and I need to get back what you stole from him. Take the watch, take the money. I just need the timepiece. If you believe nothing else that I’ve told you, believe this—it is a matter of life and death.”
    That was as honest as I could possibly be without revealing the true nature of the TTM.
    “Now, that, I do believe. Let’s lay our cards on the table, shall we?” He reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a disassembled TTM and a pair of alternate perception goggles. My TTM and my APGs.
    Bile rose to burn my throat. He’d already gone through my bag, and now we were sunk. He had it all, and Bacon and I had no way to get any of it back. The wormhole would be closing within the next forty-eight hours and we would be stuck here, possibly forever. Not to mention, the duke had all the pieces to my TTM including the mercury pin, and once he compared it to Bacon’s, he would easily be able to reverse