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As she glanced up again, she realised there was someone right in front of her—not Ruth, but someone taller—entering the conservatory as she was exiting. They collided, and Joan stumbled back, narrowly avoiding a server with a tray of champagne glasses. She had the vague impression of something falling near her feet.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ a familiar voice said.
Joan’s breath stopped.
Aaron had been beautiful from afar, but this close he was devastating. The golden mask was a perfect mould around his eyes, and he and Joan were a matched set—Joan in a gold-and-black dress, and Aaron in the gold mask, black dinner suit, and black shirt. They could have come here together. His eyes were as striking as she’d remembered: the grey of the sky before a storm.
Those eyes lingered on her as Aaron slowly took the mask from his face.
Joan’s hand flew to her own face. To her horror, her fingers met bare skin. Her golden mask and the black gauze hiding her eyes lay on the ground. They’d fallen in the collision.
If you undo the massacre, you can’t ever meet me. You can’t ever trust me. Never let me close enough to see the colour of your eyes.
For a moment, everything seemed suspended: Aaron’s face was tight with shock; Joan was frozen.
‘Aaron,’ Joan heard herself say pleadingly.
The sound of her voice broke the spell. Aaron’s expression twisted into a loathing Joan had never seen from him.
‘Aaron, please,’ Joan said. You know me, she thought. But he didn’t. It didn’t matter that they’d saved each other’s lives. It didn’t matter that the last time he’d seen her, he’d taken her to his mother’s safe house. He’d told her that she’d meant something to him. He didn’t remember.
‘Security!’ Aaron shouted. ‘To me!’
And then everything was happening at once—a blur of bodies in black suits. A man’s hand caught Joan’s shoulder. And then her arms were being pulled back. She could hear Aaron’s voice, heavy with hatred and sounding more like his father than himself: ‘Take her! She’s an enemy of the Court!’
twenty-two
At Aaron’s gesture, Joan was dragged from the conservatory to the edge of the reflecting pool, where the formal hedge work started. Joan caught a flash of Ruth’s horrified face on a path ahead, Tom and Jamie on either side of her. Go, Joan signalled. Ruth shook her head, and Joan signalled again. Go.
Tom murmured into Ruth’s ear, and to Joan’s relief, he and Jamie bundled Ruth out of sight. Joan could only hope that no one had seen the four of them together. That the others would make it back to the boat.
Joan turned to Aaron. Alone among the guests, he and Joan were unmasked. As always, he was immaculate—not a golden hair out of place. This close, Joan could see the details of his suit: a delicate brocade of black on black. He still held his mask in one hand.
Joan was aware of her own dishevelled contrast. Her hair had loosened from its half-braided style in the struggle, and threads hung from her dress where beads had come off.
‘What did she do?’ one of the security team said. There were three of them, Joan saw now—all in black suits.
Aaron ignored the question. His eyes were fixed on Joan’s. And he might not know her anymore, but Joan knew him. She could read his expression, his body language. She knew exactly what he was remembering. He’d manifested the true Oliver power at the age of nine. As soon as he had, he’d been taken to view a man in an iron-barred cage. Aaron had told Joan about it, the horror of it still lingering with him after all those years: They shocked him with a cattle prod until he looked into my eyes. They told me that if I saw anyone like him again, I was to kill them. Or inform the Court if I couldn’t do it myself. I never saw anyone like him again. Until I saw you in the maze. Until I was close enough to see your eyes.
‘Just let me go,’ Joan begged Aaron now. ‘I know you don’t want this.’ The Court had commanded him to kill people like her, but Aaron wouldn’t want to be responsible for someone’s execution. And he could still release her. He could just say there’d been a mistake. No one had really noticed this yet. ‘Aaron—’
Aaron’s mouth twisted like when he’d called her that filth in Nick’s front garden. ‘Stop saying my name,’ he said, and Joan swallowed around the lump in her throat. Was she going to be able to hold it together? ‘I know my duty,’ he said, hard. His hand came up to touch his side. Under that pristine suit, there was a tattoo of a mermaid—Joan had glimpsed the outline once, under his wet shirt. Was the Oliver motto there too? Fidelis ad mortem—loyal unto death. He lifted his head to the minders behind Joan. ‘Fetch my father.’
‘No, please!’ Joan said. But one of the black-suited men broke away, jogging down the path to find Edmund. Joan took a deep breath, trying to get her emotions under control. Edmund had tried to kill Joan last time. Nick had saved her, but Nick wasn’t here now. Nick wasn’t even himself anymore.
‘What did she do?’ one of the team said again. ‘Did you catch her stealing something?’
‘Stealing?’ Aaron said with mild incredulity—as if catching a thief would have been far beneath him. ‘Give me her right wrist.’
Joan fought it, but one of the guards caught her elbow. Aaron tugged her glove, working at the fingertips and then sliding down the base until the first hint of gold showed on her arm.
One of the black-suited men gasped. ‘She’s a fugitive?’
And now they were drawing a crowd. Olivers were gathering in clusters nearby, staring at her and whispering. ‘Fugitive,’ Joan heard. ‘An enemy of the Court.’ Their masks ranged from exquisite to lavishly grotesque: a scaled snake head with tiny shining diamonds; Lucien, with that eyeless filigree.
Joan tried to back up, but the grip on her was too tight. ‘Aaron, please!’
‘Stop saying my name!’ he snapped. ‘Stop saying my name as if you know me!’ Joan flinched, and Aaron’s eyes widened as if taken aback by his own outburst. He ran a shaky hand through his blond hair.
