Page 83 of Once a Villain
His hands folded over hers where she was clutching at the bars, and he leaned his head against the cage as if needing to be closer to her. “I’m the only one who can kill her. And Ican. I can do this. But not if you’re up there with me. I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else but protecting you.”
She felt a tear fall. “I don’t want you to be alone.”
“We’ll be together soon,” Nick said hoarsely. “We’ll take the timeline back, and then we’ll have all the time in the world together. After this.”
Then hedidkiss her—through the bars, urgently and passionately, as if he wanted to do nothing else. Joan kissed him back just as desperately. As she’d wanted to kiss him in the garden.
Joan couldn’t breathe—she didn’t want to. She didn’t want anything but to feel the slide of his mouth against hers. She could hear her own soft sounds as the kiss sent sparks through her whole body. Could hear his uneven breaths in response.
“I love you,” she whispered against his lips.
A sound tore from his throat, and he deepened the kiss for just a moment before shifting, reluctantly, back. He didn’t take his dark eyes off her as he stepped onto the platform and pulled the lever to make it rise. “I loveyou,” he said.
He tugged on a metal mask to conceal his face, and then he was gone, sealed from view by the platform.
Twenty-Four
Joan wanted to scream. Instead, she pulled the pins from her hair, trying to still her shaking hands. Nick had known she’d be able to pick the lock—but not fast enough to stop him.
She got the lock open and shoved through the cage door, then dove toward the panel, trying to call back the platform. But Nick had jammed it somehow. The controls wouldn’t move. Joan slammed her hand down, frustrated and sick to her soul. She could still feel his mouth on hers, as if he were still here.
She needed to see what was going on.
She scrambled up to the ground level above. The first chamber with a view showed a nightmare. Against a backdrop of scaled-down skyscrapers and gray London streets, dozens of gladiators and prisoners were fighting for their lives with swords and spears and axes. People were strewn on the ground, some dead, some groaning in agony.
The crowd was a roar, the noise drowning out screams of pain when weapons struck flesh.
Joan put a hand over her mouth. Where was Nick? He should have been right here—he couldn’t have landed more than a few paces away. Was he already dead? She felt like she was going to be sick.
No,there— Relief flooded her. He was darting between buildings, trying to get closer to the imperial box, about a hundredyards away. He ducked a thrown knife, picked it up, and then he was out of sight behind one of the skyscrapers.
As Joan looked, iron spikes shot up from the ground, thick as fence posts, the tips lethally sharp. The gladiatorthey’d seen earlier—Bull—was caught in the foot. He swore and then cried out as the spike retracted into the ground, pulling flesh with it.
Joan squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, trying not to picture Nick being stabbed like that. Shehadto know, though. She opened her eyes, searching desperately again.
She spotted him running back toward the wounded Bull. He’d found a piece of cloth—someone’s shirt, Joan guessed. He wrapped the gladiator’s foot with quick, sure movements, seeming unafraid that the man might kill him. Joan didn’t know why he was so confident of that. Plenty of gladiators were killing gladiators. When he was done, he shoved the man into one of the buildings, steadying the knife in the man’s hand.
Okay?Joan saw him say.
There was no helping the other people who’d been skewered. Most of them had been injured already, had been lying on the street when the spikes had come up.
As Joan thought that, she realized the crowd’s attention was shifting, and so were the sounds. One by one, heads were tilting up.
Above, the tear in the timeline had grown. A short time ago, it had been the size of a football. Now it filled about a third of the visible sky, the wide mouth of it like the jaws of a snarling animal. And inside... Joan shuddered. Inside the tear, the shadows of the void writhed.
More screams sounded—not from the fighters now, but thecrowd itself. The audience was terrified.
The fighters had stopped too. Everyone was staring up at the sky. The people on the battleground were all human, and couldn’t sense what the monsters in the crowd could sense. But the horror of the tear—and the shadows inside it—was undeniable.
Joancould feel it—the unnatural wrongness of the exposed void, the endless emptiness that lay beyond the timeline. For a dizzying moment, she could almost sense a strange hunger from the shadows. As if something might crawl out of the tear, eager to consume them all.
Whispers and cries flew across the stadium as people tried to make sense of what was happening.
Eleanor stood then, hushing the crowd. She raised her hands to the sky. The sheen of her shield vanished, and Joan knew that the real battle of the day was about to begin.The battle between Eleanor and the timeline.
And itwasa battle. Joan could feel the sheer force of Eleanor’s will, the weight of her new godlike power, as Eleanor fought the impossible might of the timeline, dragging it toward her like someone roping a wild horse. In return, the great beast wrenched back, fighting its leash, refusing to be caged. Eleanor might have wounded it, but it was still strong enough to fight.
As Eleanor’s beautiful face contorted with effort, her full attention on the battle, Joan saw movement in the arena.
