Page 93 of The City of Stardust

How stupid he’s been, to place his anger, his resentment, on Violet.

“Let me help you,” he offers.

Deliberately, she straightens up, ignoring his outstretched hand. “No.”

His hand falls to his side. Of course. He can’t blame her.

It takes twice as long to reach her room, on the highest floor of the house. At each landing, Violet has to stop, shaking out her sore limbs to try and find some relief before continuing. But he doesn’t offer his hand again, and she doesn’t ask for it. Silence stretches painfully between them. There’s so much he wants to tell her. How wonderful it is to see her, despite this awful moment and all that’s happened before it. How amazing she’d been to face down Penelope like that, braver than any scholar he knows. How very, very sorry he is—for everything. But any apology now, come far too late, would just be self-serving.

He barely deserves to look at her. So he doesn’t.

Finally, Violet reaches the top of the house. She opens the door to a shabby attic room that nevertheless exudes a lived-in warmth. He only had a glimpse at it before she climbed back through her window, but even in that glimpse he knew exactly whose bedroom he was standing in. Stacks of books everywhere, but also faded maps pinned to the walls with clumsy travel routes marked in red, illustrations of Victorian fairies torn from magazines, reams of notes in Violet’s own handwriting, scattered around the room in haphazard fashion. Crowding the shelf above her desk is a group of dolls in homemade costumes: fairy, knight, princess.

He wonders what his childhood would look like to her, if he had enough remnants of it to decorate a bedroom.

Violet listens outside her door, then nods to herself and shuts it. “You wanted to know why Penelope is after me. After all of the Everlys, really.”

Aleksander looks down at his hands. “Yes.”

He’s long wondered what his part in all of this has become. And if Violet tells him, then maybe he can finally understand the damage he has wrought.

“Once upon a time,” she says very softly, “there was a clever man.”

CHAPTER

Forty-Five

ALEKSANDER SITS DOWNon Violet’s bed, his eyes anywhere but her.

He really didn’t know. After all this time, Violet thought he would at least have picked up on the hints that Penelope might have dropped, or that she herself had. But when she relays the story to him, of Ever Everly and his devil’s pact, she notes how still and silent he is, absorbing every word. And this time, there’s a great deal more of it than Ambrose’s fairy tale she’d reeled off so long ago in the café.

Did she know, leaning across the table from him, where they would end up?

“So, it’s real. We’re cursed,” she finishes, a bit lamely.

If you could call one woman’s immortal vendetta on an entire family a curse.

The longer he doesn’t say anything, the more nervous she gets.

“Aleksander?” she asks.

He finally looks up. “Thank you for telling me.”

He doesn’t say,you could have told me before.She has no reason to feel guilty, not after Prague, but she still feels a twinge of guilt nonetheless. It’s a terrible secret to keep from someone. And then fury sweeps her away, as she recalls the way he’d hesitated with the sword in his hands, even though Violet had been inches away from oblivion, right in front of him. Even with the truthright there, he’d hesitated.

Yet he came back for her, too.

His gaze shifts past her to a glint of silver on her windowsill. “You kept the bird,” he says, surprised.

She glances away from him, instead rummaging through her drawers for a non-bloody jumper. She tugs off her shirt, revealing an unstained camisole beneath. Out of the corner of her eye, she notices that Aleksander suddenly becomes very interested in the books on the floor. Her skin burns with the memory of his hands.

She searches for a shirt and flings it at him with what might be considered excessive hostility.

“It used to be Ambrose’s,” she says curtly. “It should fit.”

Aleksander looks at it, then at her for a long moment, his expression curiously blank. Then something in his eyes shifts, and he starts to unbutton his shirt. Immediately, she turns away, allowing him the same courtesy he gave her.

She doesn’t mean to glance at the mirror, reflecting the hard lines of Aleksander’s torso, the endless glide of skin from the top of his shoulder to the snug indent of his hip. She doesn’t mean to see the swell and dip of his lower back, whichshouldbe a smooth expanse of muscle. She doesn’t mean to see the scars.

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