Page 35 of Once a Villain (Only a Monster #3)

Joan paced the Olivers’ formal garden. It had rained all night, and the sky was splotchy and gray. Water dripped from the

carved hedges: mermaids, swordfish, and spiraled shells. Joan’s head was still heavy with exhaustion. She took a deep breath

of cold air, forcing herself to think. “If Jamie’s theory is right—that Eleanor will have to be close to the killings—”

“I’m right,” Jamie said solidly.

Joan nodded. “Then we need to learn everything we can about the colosseum. We need a map of the building. Blueprints.” It

was possible that they’d crack the cipher in time and figure out how the counterparts would have accessed Eleanor, but they

couldn’t rely on that. They had to form a plan of their own.

“The Court doesn’t leave blueprints lying around.” Tom was on a heavy stone bench, Frankie beside him, both seeming unconcerned

about the wet seat. Jamie had an umbrella stem in his gloved hand, and Sylvie was tucked safely against his chest. There wasn’t

a drop of water on him, or on Sylvie’s black fur.

“We’ll have to scout it out, then,” Joan said. “We’ll need to make a map ourselves.” The two-week timeframe ahead of them

was feeling tighter and tighter.

“It won’t be easy to get in,” Tom said. “Security at the colosseum is excellent. The families take the gladiator matches seriously—they’re paranoid about their fighters being sabotaged. It’s near impossible to get into the colosseum unless you work there.”

“Nick’s counterpart escaped,” Ruth pointed out. “Security can’t be as tight as all that.”

“He’s the only person who’s ever escaped,” Tom said. “And no one knows how he did it.”

Joan looked at Nick now. He was standing just outside the door of the conservatory. Not for the first time, she was aware

of the muscled heft of him. It couldn’t have been easy for his counterpart to sneak out of the gladiator pens.

She bit her lip. “I could infiltrate as a worker.” To Aaron, she said, “You could assign me to work with the Oliver gladiators.

If you can get me in, I’ll scout out the building.” It would take maybe three of their precious days, Joan guessed, to make

her way through the whole building. But it would be worth it.

Aaron’s expression said exactly what he thought of that. “Next suggestion,” he said flatly.

“It’s worth the time! And I’d be overlooked as a human!”

“You’d be outside my protection!”

“You know... ,” Tom said, interrupting Joan’s next argument, “it’s actually not a bad idea.” He held up a hand as Aaron

protested. “We don’t have to go in ourselves—there’s someone who used to work at the arena. Someone who’d trust Nick.”

Nick tilted his head in question.

“Your brother,” Tom said.

“My brother ?”

“Are you talking about Robbie?” Joan saw him now in her mind’s eye, a miniature version of Nick with huge brown eyes behind glasses, a mess of black hair. “He’s just a little boy. A six-year-old.”

“No, this is an older one,” Tom said. “Sandy blond, about thirteen...”

“ Finn? ” Nick said. Joan’s chest tightened at the look on his face. He half turned, as if he instinctively wanted to get to his brother

now, to protect him. “What would he know of the arena?”

“He used to squire for your counterpart,” Tom said. “He’s been all over the colosseum—except the battleground itself.” He

hesitated, seeing Nick’s face. “He’s being trained for battle,” he admitted. “It’ll be a few years before he’s old enough

to fight, but people are anticipating it already. There are rumors that he’s been very good in training.”

“No,” Nick said. “ No. I would never let my brothers anywhere near the arena. None of them.”

A strange expression crossed Tom’s face—Joan was beginning to associate that look with their cultural differences. “Your counterpart

didn’t allow it,” Tom said slowly. “He didn’t have a choice. His family lives on Oliver territory. When the Olivers ordered him into the

arena, he fought in the arena. When they ordered his brother to squire, the boy squired.”

Nick turned deliberately to Aaron, his expression dangerous.

“Well, I didn’t send them in there,” Aaron said, taking a defensive step back. “My counterpart was helping humans. Remember?”

“Edmund Oliver made Nick’s counterpart a gladiator,” Tom said. “He had an eye for potential champions.” At their blank faces, his brow creased. “All the families compete in the arena via their vassals. All the heads of family look for suitable fighters to represent them.”

“Really,” Nick said flatly.

“Except for the Hathaways—we’re not interested in team sports,” Tom said. He was still looking at them all as if they were

alien to him. “In any case, Aaron deposed Edmund last year—around the time Nick escaped the arena.”

Aaron opened his mouth and then closed it again. Joan could see how much he wanted to probe Tom about what had happened with

his father.

“I’ll speak to my brother, then,” Nick said. His mouth twisted, and Joan saw him realize he’d have to feign being his counterpart.

He’d have to lie to his brother.

“I’m coming with you,” Joan said. There was no way she’d let him do that alone. Nick opened his mouth to argue, as Aaron had,but

he must have been dissuaded by Joan’s expression, because he closed his mouth again and nodded.

“Just the two of you,” Tom said. “Humans here have a nose for monsters. They’re as good at picking them out as Olivers are.

And no one in that house is going to talk with a monster around.”

Joan and Nick set out later that morning with memorized directions to a neighborhood north of Covent Garden. Under the gray

sky, Covent Garden was dreary. It was raining again, and the sun was an insipid streak behind clouds.

Nick was a solid presence beside Joan as they walked.

She was glad for the chance to be alone with him, even in these strange circumstances.

They’d never been on a first date; they hadn’t even kissed in this timeline, and yet here they were—walking through Covent Garden together the morning after saying I love you , in some strange parody of how things might have been.

Nick clearly felt it too. “Not quite how I imagined taking you home to meet the family,” he said wryly.

“I’ve met Mary,” she reminded him. “And Robbie and Alice.”

His smile turned real and sad. “That’s right. I’d almost forgotten. The day we met. The day I found your phone....”

Joan reached for his hand, and he clasped back. She wished so much that they really were simply strolling around together,

that they could just be together, that they could properly talk. But the focus had to be on this task ahead, she knew.

Nick’s hand tightened around hers as they turned the next corner. Covent Garden felt dangerous even in the daytime. Most of

the buildings were vacant, their dark paint peeling and windows boarded up. Joan stepped carefully over a spray of broken

glass.

Up ahead, a cheap-looking bottle shop was the only place open. A few men leaned on the wall outside it, drinking and watching

Joan and Nick approach. They were all monsters—lacking pendants,but also lacking Nick’s muscled bulk.

Nick’s hand shifted from Joan’s grasp to rest protectively on the small of her back. At the same time, he moved to put himself

between her and the men up ahead.

Joan suppressed the urge to tuck her pendant under the bodice of her dress. Tom had told them to keep the pendants visible.

Humans have to give fifty years to the monsters of their territory , he’d reminded them. That can be fifty years of labor or life—or a combination of both .

So we only have to worry about Olivers taking life from us? Joan had said. Since we’re supposedly from Oliver territory....

In theory , Tom had agreed. In practice, though, no one polices that. Any monster can and will take time from you—unless your pendant says you’re ranked

high enough to be labor-only.

And where do these two rank? Aaron had said, frowning.

Tom had swiped a hand over his mouth, half covering that strange expression from earlier. Nick was valuable when he was the gladiator, but he’s supposed to be dead, and so is Joan. They’re unregistered and unranked.

Fair game to anyone, I suppose.

Now the men sized Joan and Nick up with something between contempt and an open hunger that made Joan’s skin crawl. She wasn’t even sure if it was a

hunger to steal life, or to dominate and crush. Whatever it was, it made her increase her pace, head down. She was desperately

glad that Nick was here with her.

It hit her anew that this was their first time out in the world outside of Aaron’s protection. She felt almost sick with fear.

How did the humans of this world make it through daily life, feeling like this all the time?

“Is this what it feels like to be catcalled?” Nick murmured to her when they were out of earshot.

“Well...” Sort of. “If the catcallers were vampires....”

Nick made a sound at the back of his throat that Joan guessed was amusement but sounded more like a growl. And Joan had the strange feeling that he would have almost welcomed a confrontation from those guys—the chance to put them down. That he would have preferred that to scurrying away like this.

She imagined his counterpart, born and raised here, trained in the arena and forced to fight. He would have chafed so much

against this world.

Farther north, the paving ended and the streets became sticky mud. This was what Jamie had called the human end of town . Here, the buildings weren’t laid out in any kind of plan but dumped in a jumble, taking whatever open ground they could

find. Together, they were a mess of crumbling brick walls and gaping windows, patched with boards and flapping rags. Birds

nested in slumped roofs, and chimneys puffed dark smoke, thickening the air to acrid soup.

Joan was reminded of the rookeries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the slums of London had been so miserable

and crowded that plagues had started here. She squelched in mud as she walked—at least she hoped it was mud. She could imagine