Read Chapter 13: Lucien's Leverage

The private dining room at Le Paradis smelled of beeswax and stale cigar smoke, the morning light cutting pale rectangles across the damask tablecloth. Lucien had ordered coffee and small cakes, arranged like an offering. Evie had not touched either.

He sat across from her, his ring-heavy fingers laced over his chest, watching her the way a cat watches a bird that has landed just outside its reach.

“You look tired,” he said. “The late hours at Chez Nous are treating you well, I hope.”

“Well enough.”

“Good. The crowds are growing. Word travels.” He poured himself more coffee, taking his time. “You and the pianist have found an audience. Small, but curious. That is the first step.”

Evie waited. She had learned that Lucien never opened with what he actually wanted.

He set down the pot and folded his hands again. “I have a friend. A very wealthy friend. Married, unfortunately, but generous with his entertainments.” A thin smile. “He hosts a gathering next Thursday at his home in Neuilly. A quiet affair. Forty, perhaps fifty guests. He has asked me to provide musical entertainment that is… distinctive.”

“Distinctive.”

“You,” Lucien said, “and your music. The jazz singing. The French piano. It is novel. It is Parisian.” He gestured vaguely at the room around them, the gilded mirrors, the velvet banquettes. “My friend pays handsomely for novelty, Mademoiselle Hart. Five hundred francs for a single evening. Perhaps more, if the performance pleases him.”

Five hundred francs. The exact amount of her debt. Evie felt the number settle in her stomach like a stone.

She kept her voice even. “And what would be required of me, exactly?”

“To sing. To charm. To be memorable.” Lucien’s smile widened a fraction. “My friend appreciates artists who understand their role in the evening. He does not want a concert so much as an atmosphere. You would circulate. Speak with his guests. Let them feel they have encountered something… authentic.”

“Authentic.”

“The American who sings like smoke and sorrow.” He said it as though reading from a poster. “It is a performance, of course. But all of Paris is a performance. You of all people should understand that.”

Evie thought of the conversation she’d had with Julien in the courtyard of his family’s home, the warnings he had given her about Lucien’s designs. She thought of the debt collector, Aubanel, his flat eyes and his month’s deadline.

“And if I refuse?”

Lucien’s expression did not change, but something in the room tightened anyway. A curtain stilled. The coffee steam curled and died.

“Then you refuse,” he said lightly. “Chez Nous will continue as it has. You and the pianist will build your little following. Perhaps in a year, two, you will be able to support yourselves.” He picked up a cake, examined it, set it down. “But I should tell you that my friend is also an investor in Chez Nous. He has been generous with its operating costs. If his personal request were declined, he might reconsider that generosity. And the club is still young. Profitable, but fragile.”

The threat sat between them, unhurried and unadorned.

Evie’s throat felt dry. “You are telling me that my refusal would cost me the stage I already have.”

“I am telling you that Paris is a city of connections,” Lucien said. “And that I have been generous in making mine available to you. I hope you will see that generosity met with equal measure.” He stood, smoothing his waistcoat. “Think it over. You have until tomorrow evening.”

He left the cakes uneaten.

---

She found Julien in the back room at Chez Nous, bent over the piano, scribbling notations on a scrap of sheet music with a pencil stub. The afternoon light was thin through the high windows, dust motes hanging in the air. He looked up when she entered, and his face did the thing it always did when he saw her—opened, softened, became younger.

“How did it go?”

Evie closed the door behind her. She leaned against it for a moment, letting the wood hold her up.

“He has made his offer,” she said. “Five hundred francs for one evening. A private party in Neuilly.”

Julien set down his pencil. “And?”

“And he has made it clear that refusing it would put Chez Nous at risk. His friend is an investor.” She pushed off the door and walked to the chair near the piano, sinking into it. “He called it a performance. But it will not be music he is buying.”

Julien was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “You cannot do it.”

“I cannot afford not to.”

“Evie—”

“There is something I have not told you.” The words came out before she could stop them, and she felt the weight of keeping it lift slightly, then press down again, heavier for being spoken. “The letter. The one that came to my boarding house. It was not an invitation to perform. It was a demand.”

Julien’s face went still. “What demand?”

“A debt,” Evie said. “Five hundred francs. For my passage from New York. Someone paid for my anonymity, my escape, and now they want repayment. Within the month.” She looked down at her hands, the raw edges of her nails. “A man came. Aubanel. He gave me the terms. If I do not pay, there will be consequences. He did not specify what they were.”

Julien’s voice was low. “Why did you not tell me this before?”

“Because I knew what you would say.” She met his eyes. “You would offer to pay. With your family’s money. And I cannot take it, Julien. I cannot owe you that.”

“It is not a matter of owing,” he said, rising from the piano bench. His hands moved in the air, searching for words. “It is five hundred francs. My family has more than that in silver they never use. I could——”

“No.” She said it firmly, though something in her chest cracked at the sight of his eagerness, his sincerity. “Your family already disapproves of me. Of us. If you paid my debts, they would never let you forget it. And neither would I.”

“So instead you will let Lucien own you.” Julien’s voice rose, then dropped, his jaw tight. “You will sing for his rich friend, smile for his guests, let them touch your hand and hear your voice and call you their little discovery. You will give him exactly what he wants—control over you, over your career, over the music we are making together.”

“And what would you have me do?” Evie stood, meeting his height, her voice sharp. “Tell Aubanel I cannot pay? See what he does to me? To my sister’s name, whatever is left of it? Go to the police and explain that I fled New York under a scandal I still do not fully understand?”

“No.” Julien ran a hand through his hair, pacing the narrow space between piano and wall. “No, I would have you let me help you. As your partner. As your…” He stopped, turned to face her. “As your friend. Is that not worth something?”

“It is worth everything,” Evie said, and the rawness in her own voice surprised her. “Which is why I cannot spend it on this. You have already given me music. You have given me a stage. You have given me a reason to believe my voice might matter here. I will not take your family’s money and make you choose between me and them. That is not a price I am willing to ask you to pay.”

Julien stared at her. The silence stretched, filled with the weighted things that remained unsaid between them—the interrupted moment in the otherwise empty hours, the warmth of his hand on hers, the melodies they had woven together in the late afternoons.

“Then what will you do?” he asked quietly.

Evie looked past him, out the window, where the rooftops of Paris spread in a grey-blue haze. Somewhere out there, Lucien was counting his victories. Somewhere, Aubanel was waiting with his ledger. And somewhere, perhaps still in this city, Lily was alive, was breathing, was possible.

“I will do what I have always done,” she said. “I will survive. I will sing. And I will find another way.”

Julien’s jaw worked. “And if I ask you to trust me?”

“I do trust you.” She stepped closer, close enough to see the flecks of green in his eyes, the tension in the set of his shoulders. “I trust you with my songs. With my secrets. With the truth that I have not told anyone else about the debt. But I cannot trust you with my choices, Julien. I need to make my own way. Even if that way is imperfect.”

He exhaled slowly. Some of the stiffness left his frame, replaced by something quieter, more resigned.

“Then let me help you find another way,” he said. “Not with money. With music.”

Evie frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The salon circuit,” Julien said. “Lucien is not the only door into it. I have connections—my mother’s friends, the old Parisian families. They hold musical evenings, the kind where a pianist and a singer might be paid well for a private performance. It would not be five hundred francs all at once, perhaps. But it could be close.” He paused. “And it would not come with strings attached to Lucien.”

Evie studied him. The set of his jaw, the earnest light in his eyes. He believed it. He genuinely believed he could save her from this without having to choose between his family and his music.

“You would ask your mother’s friends for favors,” she said slowly. “The same circles that urged you to abandon jazz and return to the concert hall.”

“I would ask them to hear you,” Julien said simply. “To hear us. And if they hear us, they will understand.”

Something loosened in Evie’s chest, just slightly. Not enough to breathe easy, but enough to feel the possibility of air.

“You have until tomorrow evening to answer Lucien,” she said. “And I have a month to find five hundred francs.”

“Then let us use the time we have.”

He crossed back to the piano and lifted his hands to the keys. The first notes of their unfinished composition rose into the dusty light of the room, tentative and searching. Evie closed her eyes and let the melody find her, let it wrap around the fear in her ribs and hold it still.

When she opened her mouth to sing, it was not a surrender. It was a question she was still learning to ask.