His stomach rioted. He raised his hand, pressing his fist against his mouth. Time travel. Bloody impossible, bloody unmerciful, bloody befuddling time travel.
Why had he ever accepted Ironwood’s job? Why hadn’t he just listened to Hall when he’d advised Nicholas to steer as far away from the family as he was able? Why hadn’t the sea been enough for him? He never should have allowed himself to be drawn back into this web. It was only ever going to catch him, wrap around his throat until it strangled him.
But it wouldn’t have stopped Ironwood.
He still would have stolen Etta out of her time. She would have been sent on the search alone. Nothing, and no one, was ever going to stop Ironwood until he had the astrolabe, and everything he’d ever desired.
“She’s not here,” he rasped out, trying to grasp the meaning of those words.
Li Min nodded.
“She…” Nicholas forced himself to say, “…was most likely never here at all.”
Sophia looked away. Pride warred with humiliation in him, before both were sunk by a devastation that left him breathless. It stole the years of experience he’d collected in steeling himself to the world, took even that small measure of dignity he’d eked out from his existence. And what was left inside him was that same pain he’d felt as a child, alone in the dark cupboard of the Ironwood house in New York, waiting for some signal of when he was allowed to step outside of it.
“Thank you,” he told Li Min. “I apologize…I am…not myself…I do believe…”
“Will you find her mother, then, to tell her?” Li Min asked. “This Rose Linden?”
“No. I’m almost certain she already knows,” Nicholas said. Perhaps that was, in the end, why she had never come.
“If she’d taken her revenge we’d know by now,” Sophia said. “That bit of news would travel quickly in our circle.”
A light shone from down the hallway, marking the path of someone coming toward them. Sophia took his limp arm and pulled him toward the door they had stopped outside of. On instinct, he tried to drag his feet, as if another search might turn up a different result. Li Min lifted a candle from the wall and opened the door, then latched it behind them.
Nicholas knew the Pietà the moment he saw it, though it caught him off guard to find it in such a small side chapel. The Carrara marble was flawless, glowing like warm moonlight. The Virgin Mary, her face too young to be holding the body of an adult son, was a mysterious contradiction of sweetness and grief.
Love. Sacrifice. Release. An endless, eternal story—no, this traveler war wasn’t anything so pure. This was a story of revenge. Of families who’d warred so long that no one could remember who’d instigated the fights in the first place. An Ironwood had killed Lindens, and a Linden had caused the death of Ironwood heirs, and so the Ironwoods claimed the life of the Linden heir. The awful symmetry of it all did not stop with only those two families. There must have been hundreds, thousands of stories like it over the years. It was a cycle that he himself had been caught in.
Staring at the woman’s serene stone face, with Sophia and Li Min whispering behind him, Nicholas felt as still and quiet as if he’d become the eye of a hurricane. In the candlelight, it was so very easy to imagine Mrs. Hall’s face, warmed by the fireplace as she read to him and Chase from the Bible, as she did every night. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God….
But God had had His chance to pass judgment on the evil that lived in Cyrus Ironwood’s heart, and had failed to act. Nicholas, for the first time in his life, questioned His judgment, because it was neither true, nor righteous, nor acceptable.
It’s left to me.
“I require a path,” he said. “Back to 1776.”
Li Min and Sophia ceased their conversation.
“Look, Carter,” Sophia began. “I know how you feel—”
“Do you now?” he said coldly. “How would you feel, then, to know that Julian survived his fall and wasn’t ever lost to you or any of us?”
He was surprised how easily the words flowed out of him after being held inside for so long. Some part of him recognized how unfeeling it was to drop it on Sophia’s head like an anchor, but Nicholas found himself beyond caring. If anything, he felt his hurt should be catching. There was more than enough to be shared by the parties present.
Sophia turned toward him, her lips parting.
“I was mistaken in how I interpreted that moment on the cliff. Rose Linden was the one to correct my misunderstanding. He was orphaned by a timeline shift, and never returned to us. I apologize for not telling you sooner,” he said, his bloody guilt getting the better of him, her single dark eye burning with the intensity of its gaze. “Initially, before you told me the truth of your heart, I thought if you knew he might be alive, you’d want to find him and restore your engagement. Find forgiveness with Ironwood. And then it was only a matter of not wanting you to be distracted.”
That earned him a hard fist to the cheek, blowing him sideways.
“What I always wanted was respect!” she growled out. “Shame on me for thinking I might have found some of that in your regard. Shame on me for ever being so stupid.”
“You’re not—”
“I nearly got myself killed helping you—not because I owe it to you, but because I want to find the men who attacked me. I want to take from them what they took from me, and even our score. I want Grandfather’s rule to crumble, I want to watch it pulverized to dust, and see everything he loves ripped away from him,” Sophia seethed. “Why would I ever search out someone who abandoned me? Someone who had no regard for any of us, who ran because he’s too much of a damn coward to stand up to his family!”