Passion

“Mr. Grigori—” Mrs. Holcombe was practically shouting his name.

Silently, Daniel cursed her, pretending he was out of earshot, which only made her call more loudly. “But that’s a dressmaker’s, Mr. Grigori!” she shouted, cupping her hands over her mouth.

Daniel was already inside. The glass door of the shop slammed behind him, the bell that was tied to the hinge ringing. He could hide here, at least for a few minutes, in the hopes that Cam hadn’t seen him or heard Mrs. Holcombe’s shrill voice.

The shop was quiet and smelled of lavender. Well-heeled shoes had worn down its wooden floors, and the shelves along the walls were stacked to the ceiling with bolts of colorful fabrics. Daniel lowered the lace curtain over the window so he’d be less visible from the street. When he turned, he caught a glimpse in the mirror of another person in the shop.

He swallowed a moan of surprised relief.

He’d found her.

Luce was trying on a long white muslin dress. Its high neck fastened with a yellow ribbon, bringing out the incredible hazel of her eyes. Her hair was tied back to one side, clipped with a beaded floral pin. She kept fidgeting with the way the sleeves fell on her shoulders as she stood, examining herself from as many angles as she could in the mirror. Daniel adored all of them.

He wanted to stand there, admiring her forever, but then he remembered himself. He strode toward her and grabbed her by the arm.

“This has gone on long enough.” Even as he spoke, Daniel felt overcome by the delicious feel of her skin against his hand. The last time he’d touched her was the night he thought he’d lost her to the Outcasts. “Do you have any idea what a scare you gave me? You’re not safe here on your own,” he said.

Luce didn’t start arguing with Daniel, as he’d expected. Instead, she screamed and slapped him smartly across the face.

Because she wasn’t Luce. She was Lucinda.

And, what was worse, they hadn’t even met yet in this lifetime. She must have just come back from London with her family. She and Daniel must have been about to meet at the Constances’ summer solstice party.

He could see all of that now as the shock registered on Lucinda’s face.

“What day is this?” he asked desperately.

She would think he was insane. Across the room, he had been too love-struck to note the difference between the girl he’d already lost and the girl he had to save.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. This was exactly why he was so terrible as an Anachronism. He got completely lost in the smallest of things. One touch of her skin. One look into her deep hazel eyes. One whiff of the scented powder along her hairline. One shared breath in the cramped space of this tiny shop.

Lucinda winced as she looked at his cheek. In the mirror, it was bright red where she’d slapped him. Her eyes traveled to meet his—and his heart felt like it was caving in. Her pink lips parted and her head cocked slightly to the right. She was looking at him like a woman deep in love.

No.

There was a way it was supposed to happen. A way it had to happen. They were not supposed to meet until the party. As much as Daniel cursed their fate, he would not disrupt the lives she’d lived before. They were what kept her coming back to him.

He tried to look as uninterested and scowly as possible. Crossing his arms over his chest, shifting his weight to create more space between them, keeping his eyes everywhere but where they wanted to be. On her.

“I’m sorry,” Lucinda said, pressing her hands over her heart. “I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never done anything like that.…”

Daniel wasn’t going to argue with her now, though she’d slapped him so many times over the years that Arriane kept a tally in a little spiral notebook marked You’re Fresh.

“My mistake,” he said quickly. “I—I thought you were someone else.” He’d already interfered with the past too much, first with Lucia in Milan, and now here. He began to back away.

“Wait.” She reached for him. Her eyes were lovely hazel orbs of light pulling him back. “I feel almost as if we do know one another, though I can’t quite remember—”

“I don’t think so, I’m afraid.”

He’d made it to the door by then, and was parting the curtain on the window to see if Cam was still outside. He was.

Cam’s back was to the shop, and he was making animated gestures, telling some fabricated story in which he was surely the hero. He could turn around at the slightest provocation. Then Daniel would be caught.

“Please, sir—stop.” Lucinda hurried toward Daniel. “Who are you? I think I know you. Please. Wait.”

He’d have to take his chances on the street. He could not stay here with Lucinda. Not when she was acting like this. Not when she was falling in love with the wrong version of himself. He’d lived this life before, and this was not how it had happened. So he had to flee.

It killed Daniel to ignore her, to go away from Lucinda when everything in his soul was telling him to turn around and fly right back to the sound of her voice, to the embrace of her arms and the warmth of her lips, to the spellbinding power of her love.

He yanked the shop door open and fled down the street, running at the sunset, running for all he was worth. He did not care at all what it looked like to anyone else in town. He was running out the fire in his wings.

SEVEN SOLSTICE

HELSTON, ENGLAND • JUNE 21, 1854

Łuce’s hands were scalded and splotchy and tender to the bone.

Since she’d arrived at the Constances’ estate in Helston three days before, she’d done little more than wash an endless pile of dishes. She worked from sunrise to sunset, scrubbing plates and bowls and gravy boats and whole armies of silverware, until, at the end of the day, her new boss, Miss McGovern, laid out supper for the kitchen staff: a sad platter of cold meat, dry hunks of cheese, and a few hard rolls. Each night, after dinner, Luce would fall into a dreamless, timeless sleep on the attic cot she shared with Henrietta, her fellow kitchen maid, a bucktoothed, straw-haired, bosomy girl who’d come to Helston from Penzance.

The sheer amount of work was astonishing.

How could one household dirty enough dishes to keep two girls working twelve hours straight? But the bins of food-caked plates kept arriving, and Miss McGovern kept her beady eyes fixed on Luce’s washbasin. By Wednesday, everyone at the estate was buzzing about the solstice party that evening, but to Luce, it only meant more dishes. She stared down at the tin tub of scuzzy water, full of loathing.

“This is not what I had in mind,” she muttered to Bill, who was hovering, always, on the rim of the cupboard next to her washtub. She still wasn’t used to being the only one in the kitchen who could see him. It made her nervous every time he hovered over other members of the staff, making dirty jokes that only Luce could hear and no one—besides Bill—ever laughed at.

“You children of the millennium have absolutely no work ethic,” he said. “Keep your voice down, by the way.”

Luce unclenched her jaw. “If scrubbing this disgusting soup tureen had anything to do with understanding my past, my work ethic would make your head spin. But this is pointless.” She waved a cast iron skillet in Bill’s face. Its handle was slick with pork grease. “Not to mention nauseating.”

Luce knew her frustration didn’t have anything to do with the dishes. She probably sounded like a brat. But she’d barely been above ground since she’d started working here. She hadn’t seen Helston Daniel once since that first glimpse in the garden, and she had no idea where her past self was. She was lonely and listless and depressed in a way she hadn’t been since those awful early days at Sword & Cross, before she’d had Daniel, before she’d had anyone she could truly count on.

She’d abandoned Daniel, Miles and Shelby, Arriane and Gabbe, Callie, and her parents—all for what? To be a scullery maid? No, to unravel this curse, something she didn’t even know whether she was capable of doing. So Bill