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“Well, have you ever considered that they weren't all dangerous?” I stopped walking, forcing him to turn and face me. “That some of them were just people trying to survive? That systematic erasure based on what someone can do rather than what they've done is⁠—”

“Necessary.” But he sounded less certain than he had a moment ago. “You make it sound like everything I've been taught is a lie?”

“Well, I don't know yet.” I let out a breath that clouded in the cold air. “But history doesn't lie Mr. Hawthorne. People do.” I started walking again, this time with more purpose. I needed distance from the conversation. From this man and an argument neither of us would win.

“This is pointless,” he said finally. “We're walking in circles, having the same conversation in different words.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

He looked toward the garden gate, then back at me. Something shifted in his expression—calculation giving way to impulse.

“A proper walk. Through Oxford.” He saw my expression and continued before I could object. “With proper supervision, of course. But you need to acclimate to this world if you're going to pass as Adeline's cousin. And I—” He paused. “I need to see how you react to it. Whether your claims hold up under scrutiny.”

Translation, he wanted to test me. See if I'd slip up, reveal myself as a Weaver or a fraud or whatever he suspected I might be.

But it also meant getting out of this house. Seeing more of 1892 Oxford than just this garden and that guest room.

“Fine,” I said.

“Come on.” He moved toward the gate. “And Miss Whitmore? Try to relax. You look like a caged animal plotting her next move.”

“That's because I am one.”

“Perhaps. But you'll need to hide it better than this when we're in public.”

“I'll do my best.”

Oxford's streets were nothing like the Oxford I knew. The buildings were similar—that same honey-colored stone, those same narrow lanes and hidden courtyards. But everything else was wrong. The smell hit me first—coal smoke and horse manure and something else, something organic and slightly rotten that I couldn't quite identify. No car exhaust. No coffee shops or chain stores. Just small shops with hand-painted signs and windows displaying goods I didn't recognize.

I tried to walk normally, to not gawk like a tourist. But it was impossible. Every detail pulled at my attention. Lamplighters extinguishing the last gas lamps while milk carts jingle past. A chimney sweep called out his services from the corner, his soot-blackened cap tilted at a jaunty angle.

For a moment, the historian in me studied every detail—the cut of his jacket, the brass fittings on the cart wheels, the particular cadence of his call. Then despair crashed over me like a physical blow. I was studying my cage, not conducting research. This wasn't an academic exercise—this was my life now.

August walked beside me, his hand occasionally touching my elbow to guide me around obstacles or other pedestrians. Each touch was brief, impersonal. But I was hyperaware of them anyway.

The warmth of his fingers through the fabric of my dress. The way his hand fit naturally at my elbow, as if he'd done this a thousand times before. The scent of him, clean and masculine, that hit me every time he leaned close to murmur a direction.

I hated that I noticed. Hated that even as my mind catalogued historical details, part of me was intensely aware of the man beside me. The set of his shoulders. The way his jaw tensed when someone jostled too close. The controlled grace in every movement.

He was beautiful. And dangerous. And responsible for hunting people like the ones I'd spent three years trying to prove disappeared.

“Your thoughts are elsewhere,” August said evenly.

“I'm mourning.” The admission slipped out before I could stop it. I turned to find him studying me with unexpected gentleness. “Everything I was, everyone I loved—they are gone. Or rather, I am gone from them.”

“Not gone,” he said, a careful pause. “Perhaps just displaced.”

“Is there a difference?”

He didn’t answer me right away. The silence stretched, heavy and brittle. Just when I thought he wouldn’t speak at all, he says, “Displacement leaves a door open. That’s more than most get.”

Something in his tone made me wonder if he was speaking from experience. But before I could ask, a commotion erupted ahead.

Two constables dragged a woman across the street, her wrists bound with iron shackles. She was young dressed in rags that might have once been a decent dress. The crowd that had gathered jeered with the casual cruelty of the righteous.

“Weaver scum!” someone shouted from a doorway.

A young man—barely more than a boy—spat in her direction.