Passenger (Passenger, #1)(52)

“Tell me why I’m here,” she said coldly.

“Why do you think you’re here?” he asked, cocking one thin silver brow. A lion, staring down a common house cat.

“I think your plan is to hold me hostage,” she said. “To get back at my mom.”

Cyrus let out a deep laugh. “Do you? How would you feel if it was quite the opposite?”

Etta’s gaze shot back toward him, disbelief twining with terror as the old man retrieved a small, glossy photograph from the front pocket of his silk robe. Her dread was so paralyzing, she almost couldn’t lift an arm to take it from him.

Her mother’s face, partially obscured by a gag, glared back at her. If she’d looked frightened, rather than furious, some part of Etta might have been able to believe it was someone else they’d found to impersonate her. But no—Rose was still wearing the dress she’d worn at the Met. The room around her was dark, but Etta recognized their living room all the same. An arm reached into the photo with a copy of the New York Times, dated the day after the concert.

All she could see was Alice’s face as her eyes slid shut that last time.

All she could feel was Alice’s blood as it dried on her hands.

“Because of her, you owe this family—our kind—a debt,” the old man said. “And you will do exactly as I say, or she will take her last breath and you will never, ever leave this godforsaken time.”





THE SHOCK SNAPPED, LEAVING ONLY a pool of anger in the pit of her stomach. Etta lunged toward Cyrus, only to be caught around the waist by Nicholas and hauled backward, still struggling. “You bastard—!”

“Miss Spencer—” Nicholas’s arms tightened, trying to hold her still. “Etta!”

At the pleading note in his tone, she stopped struggling, sagging against the tight band of his arms. Cyrus stood, studying her face more closely as he circled around them.

“I thought, actually, that you might be an Ironwood—that Augustus had made another folly—but I see now I’m wrong. You don’t bear our stamp at all. Who is your father?”

“As if I’d ever tell you,” she snarled back.

He gave a dismissive wave, moving to a trunk near the bed. “It hardly matters, seeing as it’s clearly not Ironwood, Jacaranda, or Hemlock.”

Sophia had said there were three other families who could travel, Linden included. But she and Nicholas had both also said that the other families were gone now, or had been forcibly merged into the Ironwood clan.

“Your mother was the last living traveler of the Linden line, until we learned of you.”

Cyrus found what he was looking for in the depths of the trunk and pulled it out. He held it out for her to take, and only then did Nicholas release his hold on her.

It was a small leather-bound book, embossed with the initials RCL and a gorgeous golden tree. Etta found her eyes tracing the shape of it over and over, the slight curve of the trunk, the branches that stretched and twined until they disappeared into the heavy, full body of leaves. The roots of the gold tree were similarly interwoven, the thin lines weaving in and out of each other’s paths.

“You don’t recognize it, do you?” Ironwood said, clearly amused by this. “Your mother and her grandfather, Benjamin Linden, were so blasted proud of their heritage. It’s your family’s sigil.”

“Each house has a tree sigil,” Nicholas said quietly when she looked up for confirmation. He nodded at the chest, its lid emblazoned with a magnificent, strong-armed tree, its thick branches so low that they seemed to rise directly from the ground.

Her grandfather. Her mother had told her she’d been raised by her grandfather. So then…everything wasn’t a lie? Just a carefully crafted truth?

“We crossed paths with Rose, sightseeing in Renaissance Italy—it seemed quite the happy accident at the time, as her grandfather had recently passed, and she found herself alone,” he continued, something accusing in his gaze. “I’d made the necessary arrangements to bring her into our family, to marry Augustus and rescue her from a life alone, but your mother disappeared seventeen years ago, and we’ve been searching for her ever since.”

Her hands clenched around the book until she couldn’t resist opening it. She flipped the cover open, scanning the neat notations—all in her mother’s handwriting. It felt like opening a random door and finding her waiting there.

Victorian London. Rome in the fifth century. Egypt in the early twentieth. There must have been a hundred different places listed, all with small journal entries, like Saw the Queen as she and the Prince rode past us on their way to Buckingham Palace and The camel nearly ate Gus’s hair, ripped it from his scalp like grass and My God, if I never see another big-bellied man wrapped in a toga…

“Travelers keep journals,” Nicholas explained in a low voice, “noting the times and dates of when they move through the passages, to avoid crossing paths with themselves by accident.”

Etta nodded, her fingers pressed tight against the leather, but her mind spun. What did that mean, crossing paths with yourself? Why would they need to avoid it?

“Stand up straight, child—you’ll give yourself a hunchback before you’re even an adult. My God.”

Instead, Etta began to pace.

Her mother went missing? Or ran away?