“Ah,” Ironwood said, saluting him with his glass. “And yet, I’ve regrets enough to paper the walls of this house.”
He finally looked at Nicholas, studying him in the room’s relative darkness. “From the moment you entered, I wondered why—I have always known there would be a when, but the why of it, that was the mystery. Because of your status when you lived in this house? Because your mother received Augustus’s unwanted attentions and was sold away? Because you felt slighted by the family? Because you broke our contract, and knew that this was the only way out of it? Or is it, Samuel, simply for the satisfaction?”
Nicholas knew by the gleam in the man’s eye, by the use of his birth name, that he’d laid out all of these strikes the way a chef would lay out his knives, debating which one was best to use to make a cut.
“Or…is it because you’ve come to take revenge for her?”
Nicholas swung the dagger around, tracking the man’s movements. Rather than go toward the chest of drawers or his bedside table, he went toward the trunk at the foot of his bed.
“No,” Nicholas said, knowing full well that he could be hiding a flintlock or rifle in it. “Take a step back.”
“Of course,” the man said, with mocking graciousness. “If you’ll retrieve the package inside. I have, after all, been keeping it for you.”
Nicholas recognized this bait for what it was, but he was disarmed by the man’s demeanor. Ironwood was never more truthful than when he was trying to inflict a mortal wound on another person’s heart.
Keeping his eye on Ironwood, keeping his dagger out, Nicholas bent to retrieve a flat parcel, wrapped in parchment and tied with string. It looked as if it had come a great distance, whether that was miles or years.
“Go on, open it,” Ironwood said, clasping his hands behind his back.
And, God help him, Nicholas did. He tore into the paper with one hand. Even before he saw the fabric—the sheer gömlek, the emerald chirka—he smelled jasmine; he smelled the soap-sweet scent of her skin.
And he smelled blood.
The feeling in his hands was gone. His pulse began to pound at his temples. So much blood, the fabric was stiff with it. It flaked off as he ran his fingers across the delicate embroidery, moving along the seams of the jacket until they snagged at the ragged hole at the shoulder, where she’d been shot.
“A guardian sent these to me weeks ago,” Ironwood said. “As proof of Etta Spencer’s death. Her father claimed her body, but I thought you might want the reminder of her personal effects.”
This is what remains….
Memory would fade from him, her footprints would be washed away—this was all he was to have of Etta Spencer now.
“You did this….” He breathed out, his gaze snapping up. “You—”
“Yes,” Ironwood said, his face drawn, as if—as if he cared. As if he felt sorry for this. Nicholas’s fury overwhelmed him, and he slashed out with the dagger, catching the man across the chest. Ironwood leaned back in time to avoid being gutted, but a gash of red extending from his shoulder to his hip began to ooze. Nicholas felt frantic, sloppy, like he was damn near to clawing his own face off to try to release the boiling anger and grief. He did not want to collapse onto his knees. He did not want to scream himself hoarse.
“All because you want one blasted thing, when you already have everything! You aren’t satisfied with the destruction you wrought; you need the tool that will make it complete,” Nicholas seethed, knowing full well that the man’s guards would be coming in, that they’d kill him where he stood. And yet, Ironwood didn’t move, didn’t taunt, didn’t defend himself.
Kill him—just finish him! his mind was bellowing, but he couldn’t move from that spot.
“What you feel now,” Ironwood said, “I have felt every day of my life, for forty years.”
“Don’t say another word,” Nicholas said. “You know nothing of me or what I feel. Nothing.”
“Don’t I?” Ironwood said carefully, glancing over at the portrait by his bedside. Minerva. His first wife. “I can see how badly you wish to stick that dagger in my heart, and I cannot blame you.”
“You don’t have a heart,” Nicholas snarled. “If you did, you never would have dragged Etta into any of this. She wouldn’t be—”
He couldn’t bring himself to finish, coward that he was.
“And if Rose Linden hadn’t betrayed us and hidden the astrolabe, if her parents hadn’t fought as hard as the rest of us to control the timeline, if our ancestors had never used the astrolabes to begin with—do you see how futile this line of reasoning is, Nicholas? We can live in the past, but we cannot dwell there,” Ironwood said. “What you cannot seem to grasp is that the astrolabe isn’t a tool of destruction, it is one of healing. It can right wrongs. Save lives.”
Save her.
He had not even considered that. How was it possible he had never once considered that by waiting out a year, he might travel back to the spot where she was to die, and save her, before the Ironwood men had a chance to reach her? That he could find a way to prevent Etta from being taken?
“You would risk,” Nicholas began, “orphaning countless travelers, shifting the timeline, for your own selfishness.”
“For love,” Ironwood corrected. “For her.”
There was nothing ironic in his tone, or even condescending. Nicholas shook his head in disbelief, his chest bursting at its seams with dark, humorless laughter. As if this man had any inkling of what that word entailed, the scale of it.