Page 40 of Once a Villain
As a servant hurried up and opened the doors, Lucien tilted his head. “Where is your signet ring?” he said to Aaron.
Aaron took a moment too long to answer. “I... must have misplaced it.”
Lucien frowned, and Joan felt herself tensing out of nowhere—the smallest details here kept feeling like tests that could be passed or failed. “I shall have the house searched for it.”
“So... Aaron’s a serial killer here,” Ruth said when they were all crammed in the car, Jamie, Joan, and Ruth in the back withFrankie; Nick and Aaron at the front. “Loving this world.”
“I’m sure your counterpart’s a real peach,” Aaron said tightly. Ruth’s words didn’t usually cut him particularly deeply, but Joan could tell he was upset about what Lucien had said.
Joan glanced in the rearview mirror as Aaron pulled away. Lucien was watching them, still frowning. “Do you think he sensed something was off?”
“I should have known about the signet ring,” Aaron said. “My father used to wear one.”
“It wasn’t just that,” Ruth said. “It was how Joan and Nick are dressed—with their necks covered. And how they acted. Lucien kept looking at them like he was confused by them—like they were standing wrong, walking wrong.”
“Standingwrong?” Nick said.
“You don’t hold yourself like the other humans here,” Ruth said. “You’re not wary enough. Not scared enough.”
Joan swallowed. She’d felt pretty damn scared since they’d arrived here, and it had barely been a day. And if they didn’t fix this timeline, she’d be here for as long as they lived. Maybe after a few years here, she’d be cowed too.
Aaron’s gaze caught Joan’s in the rearview mirror as if she’d spoken aloud. His mouth was a flat line.
He turned from the hedge road into Richmond proper. In the daylight, it was starkly different from the version Joan knew. Rows of Georgian terraces were arrayed behind iron fences, elaborately decorated with gilded mermaids and fish. Oliver flags alternated with Court lions along the street.
Chiswick flitted past. Then Hammersmith. The shops of thehigh streets were artisan: cobblers and florists and seamstresses. No familiar brands. No billboards. The buildings ranged from distinctly Georgian to not quite Victorian in style.
“I can’t get a grip on this world,” Joan said.
Beside her, Ruth grunted. “It’s wrong,” she agreed.
“No, I mean—” Something had been nagging at Joan since she’d arrived here. “It doesn’t make sense. The buildings, the technology... This car is electric.” It was scentless and near silent. “And there are security cameras here. Video calls. Skyscrapers.”
“What are you talking about?” Ruth said. “Our world had all that.”
“Ourworld wasn’t ruled by monsters. Who invented this car? Why is that building”—Joan pointed—“still recognizably Georgian? Who designed all this stuff? The subjugated humans?” Joan doubtedthat. How could invention and design have remained so similar in a world where the humans who’d have done the inventing were so casually mistreated and killed?
“Huh.” The sound came from deep in Nick’s chest. He frowned at the view too, as disturbed now as Joan.
“I read thoseCrown Historybooks back at the inn,” Jamie said. “The Court’s official version of history here. According to them, Eleanor invented a lot of stuff herself.”
Joan rolled her eyes. “They used to say that about historical emperors.”Eleanor twisted the timeline beyond recognition, Gran had said.She created a world that was never supposed to exist.
To Joan, it seemed like Eleanor had willed this timeline intoexistence, ignoring the logical path of history. She’d created a Frankenstein’s monster of a world with technology and architecture that pleased her.
Joan found herself thinking of the tear from last night. With her next breath, she smelled a faint trace of decay. It wasn’t a real scent—she was sure of it. It was her monster sense telling her that something was wrong with this timeline. Couldn’t the people here feel it?
Execution Dock loomed out of the mist, on the stinking pebbled foreshore of the Thames. Joan felt like she’d stepped into the past. In her timeline, this site had fallen out of use in the early 1800s. Before that, though, it had been used for executions for four hundred years.
Her footsteps made sucking puddles as she walked by the lapping water with Aaron and Nick. Jamie and Ruth had already peeled away. The two of them would try to elicit some gossip from the crowd. They needed as much information as they could get about Eleanor, about the wolves.
The tide was rising. Ahead, there was scaffolding for hanging—or perhaps for gibbetting—but it seemed disused. Instead, two prisoners lay face down on concrete blocks, their hands and feet tied to heavy metal loops anchored in the concrete.
Joan shivered. She’d failed to save Ronan last night, and she felt a wave of urgency now. Whether these prisoners could help them to get to Eleanor or not, Joan and the others couldn’t let them die here. It would just be wrong.
Aaron surveyed the scene as they walked, his expressionas dangerous and authoritative as his counterpart’s. Their plan today was for him to lean on his position—to demand that the prisoners be brought to the Oliver house for further interrogation. And surely that would work. They’d seen last night just how powerful Aaron was in this timeline. Even the Court Guards had been afraid of him.
As they approached the prisoners, Joan was startled to recognize the red-haired man from yesterday—the one who’d run from the guards on the bridge. He knelt beside a woman with a bob of dark hair, her freckled features so like his that Joan guessed they were siblings.
