He tried his best to smile. “Though I sincerely doubt they believed you, you attempted to keep my pretense to maintain our plan, even in the face of great emotional turmoil. Ma’am, I regret to inform you that you now have honor in spades.”
She pulled a hideous face. “Ugh. Is that why I feel so terrible? Take it back, it’s awful.”
Nicholas shook his head ruefully. “Can you not see it, though? How your situation might align with—”
“I don’t want to hear this—”
“How it might align with Li Min’s?” he pressed on. “She kept up a pretense on behalf of another that only served to keep Etta safe and alive. This whole situation might have taken a different direction, certainly, but it wouldn’t have changed the manner of the deal I made with the Belladonna. Nothing but Ironwood’s death or her mercy will take the ring off, and neither will ever come to pass. At least now…at least now something good might come of it.”
She rubbed at her forehead. “I don’t really want logic right now, Carter. I mostly want murder.”
“Will you settle for an end to this?” he asked. “It’s all I can offer at the moment.”
“How can this not change anything for you?” Sophia asked, that same pleading note bleeding back into her words. “Why can’t you be selfish like the rest of us?”
Etta’s alive.
Julian is safe.
Li Min is gone.
All of these facts should have tilted the earth itself, upended him. But it changed…nothing.
It was better if Etta did not know about the ring, about the bargain, about his choice. She would fight him every single step of the way, and he couldn’t risk being taken off that path now, not when he was so close to seeing everything through.
But the weight of that, knowing he was intentionally keeping her in the dark yet again, felt as though it might crush his entire chest. He had to fight for his next breath.
“I’m…” He tried to give a name to the quiet storm inside of him, but the moment he grasped what it was, it slipped away again, and all that was left was weariness.
Resignation.
He felt now like he was taking on water, moving forward sluggishly, toward an inevitable end. The thought of Etta breathing, fighting, filled the dark sky of his thoughts with stars. If he stretched out on his back, closed his eyes, he could imagine himself back on the deck of that ship. He would be able to see those stars falling once more, arcing down in one last flare of brilliance. It was seared upon his memory as she was.
Whatever would come the next night, Etta was still in possession of her life. He was unspeakably grateful, even as he knew once more the fear of his heart lying vulnerable outside of himself. She would continue on without him, blazing through the darkness in her way. If he could not give her back her own future, he could make a life for her that was safe, free from the retribution and strife between their families. He would end this cycle, wash the blood away.
But, oh, he was a coward, because he found himself seizing on that thin hope that Sophia was right, and Etta had been turned away from this task. It was harder to die than he imagined it would be, and desperately humbling. He did not want her to see him like this, no more than he wanted her in harm’s way should things come to blows.
He did not think he could survive a final farewell.
The single power that time travel truly held over them was regret. If he could simply move back through the weeks, sift through the days, to arrive at that moment in the Belladonna’s shop, of course he would have steered as far away from it as he could. But hindsight had given him something undeniably precious: insight. Into Sophia, into himself, and into their bitter, beautiful world. All he had ever wanted to do was travel, seek out those horizons; and he had, hadn’t he? He had gone farther in these weeks than the limits of his own imagination.
“If we must act quickly, and there is no time tomorrow,” he told Sophia, “I would like to say that I am proud to have fought beside you. I would never again presume to tell you how you ought to live your life; I would only say, as your friend, that there’s no pain more acute than words left unsaid, and business which can never be concluded—”
She reached forward, pressing her hand against his mouth to silence him. Nicholas started to tug it away, exasperated, but in the next moment he heard it, too. Footsteps. A curt knock on the door.
“Everything okay in there, Carter?”
The Ironwood men didn’t defer to him so much as guard him. Watch him. Judge him. He had seen the looks flying around the table, after Ironwood’s proclamation declaring him heir during their last—and, please, God, final—family meeting.
“Fine,” Nicholas called back. “Reciting…my prayers.”
“Whatever you say,” the man—Owen—grumbled. “Just keep it down, will you? If you wake him up, it’ll be the end of all of us.”
Too right.
Nicholas waited until the footsteps receded before turning back to Sophia, but she was already at the window, unlatching it. A slap of wind and rain struck him across the temple.
Right. The damned tree.
“You’ll break your neck,” he said, trying to stand. “Wait for the rain to settle. I’d rather not have to explain the presence of your broken body in the morning.”
Sophia’s lips curled ever so slightly upward. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
She sat on the window ledge, swinging one leg over, then the next. Her gaze roved over the tree’s shaking limbs, the rivers of rainwater washing the street below clean.