Page 82 of The City of Stardust

CHAPTER

Forty

THE NEXT DAY, Violet follows Gabriel to the study, her stomach knotted with dread. Outside, the sky is a formless grey, winter gathering its grip on the weather. Rain pounds the windows, and the house is plagued with a series of leaks, old wounds giving way to the incongruous symphony of water plinking into buckets. Gabriel has been suspiciously quiet since she returned; though she has no way of proving it, she suspects he’s sneaking off to Fidelis. To do what, she has no idea. As far as she’s concerned, there’s nothing else theycando.

She’d been summoning the courage to talk to him—tell him what an absolute fool she’s been—but he beats her to it, knocking on her door at an eye-wateringly early hour.

“Come on, kiddo. Got some things to discuss.”

In the hallway, Gabriel pauses at the length of Everly portraits and sighs. They had always seemed so abstractly sorrowful to her, but now, in the full knowledge of their impending doom, Violet sees courage, defiance, resignation. Not that it mattered, in the end, what face they wore.

“So many Everlys,” Gabriel says. “Never had a bloody chance, did they.”

Violet knows he’s thinking about Ambrose. What could Ambrose have been, without the weight of a curse and an abandoned child?Happier, she thinks bitterly.

And who would she have become? There’s no portrait of her to stand in her stead, nothing to remind future Everlys of the dangersthat await them. Then she remembers there won’t be future Everlys, and she turns away.

As soon as the study doors swing shut, Violet expects Gabriel to berate her—or worse, glare in disapproving silence. Instead, he sits behind the desk, the leather chair creaking under his weight. He looks defeated, strangely vulnerable without his sunglasses or his usual sardonic smile.

“The game is up, kiddo,” he says heavily. “So the question is, what do you want to do?”

She tilts her head, puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

“There are still a couple of options left. May not look like much, but…” He spreads his hands out on the table. “They’re there.”

Gabriel opens a drawer and pulls out fake passports, birth certificates, driving licences.

“Ambrose and I can’t leave. It would be too obvious. But you can still run.”

Violet pulls a passport towards her and opens it. Her photo is on the identity page, butEmma Blytheis listed as the name, with another birthday and town of birth. The next passport is Spanish; same photograph, but different name again.

“There’s an expert forger on Skye,” he says. “He can get you just about anything you ask for. And he owed me some favours, so I asked.”

Violet looks at the passports again, evidence of lives that she’s never lived. She can see it unfolding before her, though. Travelling from city to city, never staying in one place for too long. She could go anywhere.

“If I wanted to run…” she says.

“You would never be able to come back,” Gabriel warns. “Penelope would catch you. And she would know we helped.” He runs his hand through his hair, his gaze straying to the window. “It wouldn’t be an easy life. If you decide you want children or a family, or even just a permanent home… Well, you’ve seen how that’s turned out.”

The imagined life vanishes instantly. Travel and freedom, yes—but not true freedom. Always with one eye over her shoulder, waitingfor Penelope or one of her allies to find her. No attachments, no friends. And it would never stop. She’d never be able to come home.

“It wouldn’t be much of a life,” Violet says.

“But it would beliving.”

She fiddles with the birth certificates, checking the different names. None of them stamped with Everly.

Gabriel continues, counting off other options he’s considered. Crossing over to Fidelis, though the city’s too small to stay hidden for long; eking out an existence in a designated safe house…

But Violet tunes out, thinking furiously.

Her mother would run. Her motherdidrun.

Violet picks up the passports again. She thinks of the lives she might live, the women she could be. Then she sets them down.

“There aren’t really any other options, are there?” she says.

“I’m afraid not, kiddo.”

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