The clattering of the attack from above faded as he rested his forehead against hers, his thumb lightly stroking a bruise on her cheek. She traced his face—the straight nose, the high, proud cheekbones, the full curve of his lips. His hand caught her there, taking it in his own; he pressed a hard, almost despairing kiss to it.
But when she tilted her face up, half-desperate with longing, her blood racing, Nicholas pulled back; and although Etta could feel him beside her, his heart pounding, his ragged breath, it was as if he had disappeared into the thundering dark.
THE BATTLE EXPLODED AROUND HIM with a ferocity that left him gasping.
Nicholas had kept an eye on the horizon to the west, where steel clouds had begun to swirl as if God himself was stirring the pot. The skies around him were cast in shades of darkness that left his guts coiled in anticipation. He turned, poised to begin the process of readying the ship to weather the storm, and—
The crew was gone.
Every last one of them.
Chase’s name tore out of his throat as he ran toward the bow of the ship, the sound of his footsteps lost to the shrieking winds. The sails snapped and fluttered above him in warning. A movement caught his eye—there was someone on his ship after all. His back was turned, but there was no mistaking the dark curls rising on each brutal breeze, the steady stance, the hands clasped behind his back.
“Julian?” he called. But—by God, how was he alive? Had he survived the fall? They needed to get back to port, back to New York—
The other ship appeared like a ghost, gliding through the misty, shadowed waters around them. He had less than a moment to suck in a shocked breath before she fired a broadside.
Nicholas felt the ship tear apart beneath him as if it were his own skin, his own bones shattered into a thousand jagged fragments.
“Julian!” he screamed as the fire and debris exploded around him, trapping him in a blaze of suffocating fire, a swarm of splinters. And all the while, the cannonade never slowed, never stopped. The intensity burned the hair from his face, left him with nothing but scalding white behind his eyelids. He let out a hoarse cry as he was knocked off his feet; the ship dipped sharply to the right, a terrifying slant that could only mean one thing—she was taking on water, and he would drown. Blind, burned, alone.
And then, the silence.
It was the suddenness of it that finally woke Nicholas from heavy, dream-laced sleep, dragging him up by the scruff of his neck into awareness. Exhaustion clung to his mind like a barnacle, unable to let logic in. Pure, unyielding panic rushed in like a sweeping wave, forcing him to roll away from the soft warmth he’d been curled around. The white tiles—the hundreds of brown, blue, red, black lumps of blankets around him—people—
Nicholas sat straight up, pressing his back into the wall behind him. He scrubbed his fists against his eyes, trying to slow the embarrassing way his heart was pounding in his chest.
You know where you are.
He did.
London. Twentieth century. War.
This was a…transportation tunnel. For a…“train.” The Underground.
Nicholas blew out a sigh, wiping the crust of sleep from his eyes. The overhead lights flickered like candle flames dancing in the breeze. He cocked his head, listening to the strange sound they produced—somewhere between a hum and a frantic clicking, like the cicadas in the southern colonies.
Electricity. It had been so long since he’d had the privilege of it, and even when he had, he had never seen the abundance of this era. Julian had been the one to introduce him to it, the one who’d chuckled as Nicholas investigated his first lightbulb. Nicholas had managed to push the memory of his half brother to the very edge of his thoughts for years, where the regret could not infect his hope for the future. But traveling and Julian were inexorably tied together. Julian was the sole reason he’d gone through the passages at all. At first he’d thought that he was there to ensure that Ironwood’s remaining rivals could not touch him—that he was a protector, a role in which he could take immense pride. In actuality, he’d found himself attending to his brother’s clothing, doing the washing and mending as if he were a valet. He saw to Julian’s mercurial needs and managed his wild, swinging moods. Even as a traveler, he had been a servant. A slave to Ironwood’s will.
I don’t need a protector, the girl had said. I need a partner.
The past few hours had proven that she did, in fact, need a protector; but…partner. That was something he had never thought to hope for.