Reborn as the Villainess's Doomed Maid, I Keep Getting Caught by Her Knight Brother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Loose Bolt
Tilda wakes in a doomed maid's body in the carriage house with a spanner in her hand, tightens the bolt she was meant to loosen, and is pinned against the carriage by the villainess's cold knight brother.
The last thing Mio Hayashi remembered was the 11:52 train out of Yokohama and the sentence she had been reading on her phone.
"Her maid, who had forged the letter at her order, was hanged beside her."
That was all the maid got.
One line, in chapter thirty-eight of The Saint's Rose Crown, and Mio had been so angry about it that she missed her stop.
Now she was standing in the dark with something cold and heavy in her right hand.
She looked down.
It was a spanner, an iron one, as long as her forearm, and it was fitted around a bolt as big as her thumb.
The bolt belonged to a carriage axle.
The carriage was white and gold, and it stood in a stone shed lit by one hanging lantern.
Her hand was black with grease to the wrist.
She was wearing a grey dress with a white apron, and when she lifted her other hand to her face, the fingers were short and strong, with a pen callus on the second one.
These were not her hands.
Mio had never held a spanner in her life.
But her fingers knew exactly how far the bolt had been turned, and they knew it was three turns from falling out.
A cold sweat ran down her back.
She knew this carriage.
Verena Sevrin had lent it to the Saint for the royal hunt, as a peace offering, in chapter nine.
On the morning of the hunt the axle bolt came loose on the road, the carriage tipped, and the Saint broke her arm.
Everyone knew who had lent the carriage.
It was the first of the three crimes the court would hang the villainess for, and it was also the night before it happened.
"No," Mio said, out loud, in a voice that was higher than her own. "No, no, no."
The maid's body was named Tilda Quill.
She remembered that from the novel too, from one sentence about a loyal girl with black hair.
Tilda was about to be hanged, and she had apparently started loosening the bolt before Mio arrived to stop her.
There was no time to be afraid.
Mio set the spanner on the bolt and leaned all her weight on it.
It turned.
Her arms, which were small, did it as if they had done it a thousand times.
One turn.
Two.
She hauled on the third turn until the bolt was tight and her shoulder burned.
Then she checked it with her thumb, the way a stranger's hands told her to.
Then she checked the other bolts.
"Good," she whispered. "Good, good, please be good."
The lantern light on the wall changed.
Somebody had stepped into the doorway behind her.
The body knew when it was being watched.
Mio turned around with the spanner in both hands.
A man stood in the doorway.
He was very tall, taller than the door frame seemed to allow, and he wore a long black coat with silver on the collar and black leather gloves.
His hair was cropped close and so pale under the lantern.
A scar ran through his left eyebrow.
His eyes were grey, and they had gone entirely still.
She knew him, too.
Caspian Sevrin, twenty-seven, Marquess of Sevrin and Commander of the Queen's Knights.
In the novel he was the villainess's cold brother, who stood at her side at the Midwinter Trial and did not say one word as they put the rope around her neck.
He had been described in the book as a man who had never smiled.
He was not smiling now.
"Put it down," he said.
His voice was low and even, and it carried no heat at all.
"My lord," Mio said. "I can explain."
"Put it down."
She put it down.
It rang on the stone floor, and he did not look at it.
He looked at her, and then at the bolt, and then at her hands, and then at her face.
Then he crossed the shed in three strides.
She had been braced for a blow.
Instead his gloved hand closed around her wrist, not hard, only completely, and he lifted her arm and set it against the carriage above her head.
He caught the other wrist and put it beside the first.
Her back met the cold white door of the carriage.
He leaned in, close enough that she felt the heat of his body through her thin dress, and one of his thighs came between hers and stopped there, hard and warm, against the apron.
She stopped breathing.
He smelled of cold air and lamp oil and steel, with something clean underneath.
"You have grease on your hands," Caspian said.
"Yes."
"You have a spanner."
"Yes, my lord."
"In the carriage that my sister is lending to the Saint tomorrow."
"Yes."
"Your wrists are shaking," he said. "Your pulse is not."
He had her pinned with one hand now, and with the other he reached down and turned her chin up to look at him.
His thumb rested on the corner of her mouth.
It stayed a heartbeat longer than it needed to.
Mio felt it everywhere.
She was twenty-six years old, and she had last been touched like this by a man who had left her on a Tuesday.
Her mouth went dry.
"I checked the bolt," she said. "It was loose. I tightened it."
"You tightened it."
"All of them."
He looked at the axle for a long moment.
Then he looked at the bolt she had just closed, and the tool she had dropped, and the lantern.
Something moved behind his eyes.
It might have been suspicion, or it might have been something much more dangerous.
"I have been in the Queen's service for nine years," Caspian said slowly. "I have caught thieves, poisoners, and one man who tried to steal the royal horses by dressing as a horse."
His grip stayed warm and firm on her wrists.
"You are the first saboteur I have ever met who tightens things."
Mio swallowed.
"Maybe I'm not a saboteur."
"Then you will tell me what you are." He let her wrists go and stepped back, and the cold rushed in where he had been. "Study. Now."
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