Passenger (Passenger #1) - Alexandra Bracken Page 0,105
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.
He spent another moment collecting his nerves before looking back down at the girl sleeping beside him. The air in his lungs and nose was tinged with the smell of roses, as though he’d spent hours with his face buried in her mass of unruly blond hair. Before he could think about why it was unwise, ruminate on what a blackguard he was for taking advantage of the girl in the darkness, he reached over and gently brushed that same hair back from her face.
In some ways, each time he looked at her, it was as if he was seeing her for the first time on the deck of the Ardent. The symptoms of this sickness were unmistakable: the sharp dive of his heart as it dropped, recovering a moment too late; the tightness in his chest; the way his fingers seemed to curl instinctively, as if wondering how it would feel to weave them in her hair. He knew lust—he’d been consumed by its burn too many times—but Nicholas knew the ways to appease it, how to avoid the tangle of attachment, to leave content and calm and ready to return to the ship.
As he’d held her last night, he had genuinely believed the result would be the same. Touching her would answer his lingering doubts about whether her skin could possibly be as soft as he imagined. Giving in to the pounding need in his head to comfort her would be acceptable, just this once, when they could not be seen or judged for it.…
Instead, each second he spent breathing her breath, running his hands along her face, fighting the temptation of her lips…it only fed the burn in his chest. He wanted to believe that he had done it because she’d needed comfort, or at least distraction. He wanted to believe it was because being a stranger to this time had left him feeling unsettled. He wanted to believe that their lives could have ended at any moment, and there had been only this one chance left.