Passenger (Passenger, #1)(60)

“No,” Etta whispered, closing her eyes at the image. Not him. The thought ate away at her picture of him, dissolving it completely. He was her anchor here, the one reliable person who she could count on for the truth, for decency. She couldn’t let Sophia take that away from her, too; not until she’d heard Nicholas’s side of this. “No way.…”

“And you know what the truly sad thing is, Etta?” Sophia whispered. “If he’d asked, if he’d put his case forward, Grandfather would have considered it. I know he would have. Because being born a bastard in this family is still preferable to being born a girl.”

“Leave, Sophia,” Etta urged. “Run away if you have to—if there’s really nothing you can do to fix things in this family, get out the way my mom did, and start over!”

It was a long while before the answer drifted back to her.

“If I’m not an Ironwood, then I am no one,” Sophia said in a thin voice. “And I have nothing.”

“That’s not true,” Etta said, shocked by the defeat in the girl’s voice.

But only the passage answered back, in a rolling murmur, a growling whisper of lies—one that spoke of freedom, of discovery, of reclaiming what was lost, but delivered only a cage of lies and disappointment.





NICHOLAS CAST HIS GAZE TOWARD the fire, watching the dance of light. He’d felt the weight of Etta’s eyes on him, but had kept still until the door shut behind her, and he heard the wet rattle of Cyrus’s breath as he moved toward the bedside table to light a candle. Nicholas watched the steady movement of his fingers as they ran over the gold frame of a small, oval-shaped portrait he’d seen many times before.

His first wife, Minerva. Not his second, the sorry shrew of a woman who’d borne him two sons and died in the process of giving him yet another. Not Augustus, nor Virgil, whom he clearly had no desire to honor even in memory—not even Julian, who’d done everything the man had ever asked of him, superbly and without question. A love match by all accounts, and with another traveler.

For Cyrus, there was only Minerva, with her golden hair, green eyes, and uncommon beauty—a true Helen of Troy. When they’d wed, Cyrus had been at the center of a conspiracy to control the travelers’ fates.

He had hidden her, but it had not saved her in the end. And when Cyrus’s rival, Roman Jacaranda, murdered the woman, the four families had been flung into all-out war, and the last vestiges of the man’s humanity were torn away. Julian had told him stories of the old man’s vengeful rampage, harrowing tales of how he’d outmaneuvered all of his enemies, until he alone had become the Grand Master, ruling over all of their descendants.

None of it would bring Minerva back. His rivals had been strategic, choosing a rare year to which no passage led, so that Cyrus could not return to her hiding place and intervene. He could not travel to the years leading up to it to wait out the days, not without crossing paths with himself; nor could he warn anyone, or even himself, in sufficient time without altering his future control of the other families.

And, Nicholas thought, that was really all one had to know about the man. He wouldn’t shatter the sanctity of his rules, and he would not compromise his position or riches, not even for a woman whose memory continued to haunt him. Cyrus Ironwood’s heart had hardened into flint, capable only of being sparked into fiery anger. It allowed him to scheme without mercy—to steal a young woman from her home, thrust her into a decades-long search that amounted to little more than madness.

“You cannot be serious with this request,” Nicholas ground out. Fighting the urge to clench his jaw, he added, “She could lose her life. You’re asking her to take a number of enormous risks, with only your word that she’ll be returned to her home.”

Etta of the twenty-first century. Etta of the distant, unforeseeable future. Etta with the pirate heart. This astrolabe had already cost three lives, and now he was demanding that she sacrifice hers, as well?

Cyrus eyed him. “Has she proven herself to be spectacularly unsuited to this task? She has the motivation and the means to see this through, and she won’t run the risk of crossing paths with herself, unlike almost every other traveler. I hardly require more, beyond her discretion about our family, and that is easily maintained by notifying the guardians across time to watch for her appearances, to note her arrivals and departures through the passages.”

Etta would think she was working independently, none the wiser that the old man was like the mythical Argus, eyes scattered across the whole body of time. Would it be better or worse, he wondered, for Rose to have used other uncharted and unknown passages aside from the one across the road in the Royal Artillery Park? She would be able to travel without the interference of guardians stationed nearby to watch the passages, but if something were to happen—if she were to become hurt, or worse—who could help her?

“This is a task for your family—”

“Our family,” Cyrus corrected.

This was a man who had hit him across the face so many times when he was a child that Nicholas had learned to listen for his voice and avoid his path entirely. Of course, the spineless sop had never raised a hand to Augustus, his monster of a son, even as he terrorized everyone around him with his maliciousness.

“Julian was all you had in life, and, still, you sent him to his death—”