Read Chapter 11: The Cousin's Last Words

The cousin’s lips moved, a wet whisper barely audible above the murmur of panicked auction-goers scattering like startled pigeons. Julien pressed his ear to the man’s mouth, ignoring the copper tang of blood pooling on the stone floor.

“Find… the missing archivist…” Théo’s breath hitched, a rattle building in his chest. “She holds the key.”

“Key to what?” Julien demanded, gripping his cousin’s collar. The crest ring on his own finger grew warm, almost accusatory. “Théo—stay with me. Who did this? Who killed you?”

But Théo’s eyes had already lost focus, staring past Julien at something only the dying could see. His final exhale carried a single word, so faint Julien almost missed it: “Axle.”

Then nothing.

Romy materialized at Julien’s shoulder, her silver-sequined jacket catching the dim light of the catacomb’s chandeliers. “We need to move. The auction house guards are sealing the exits—they’ll blame the outsiders for this.”

Julien’s hand trembled as he closed Théo’s eyelids. His cousin. A man he’d never met until an hour ago, dead because he’d tried to tell Julien the truth. The poisoned dart had come from nowhere—no shooter visible, no silhouette against the glowing stalactites. Just death, delivered with precision while Julien watched, helpless.

“The archivist,” Julien said, standing. “Claire Delacroix. Théo said she’s hidden, not missing. And now he says she holds the key.”

“Key to the Watchmaker’s identity?” Romy asked.

“Or to what the Watchmaker wants.” Julien pulled the photocopied logbook page from his inner pocket—the page Romy had surreptitiously copied from the Section 13 archives before their unauthorized retrieval of the 1874 file. The page listed pre-Section 13 acquisitions, including a grimoire with a notation in Étienne Moreau’s handwriting: *Guardian’s duty, not appetite.*

“What are you doing?” Romy watched as Julien pressed his thumb against the page’s edge.

“The Moreau bloodline has certain… inheritances.” Julien squeezed his eyes shut, recalling the latent talent his mother had called a “family quirk”—the ability to see through illusions. But there was another gift, one he’d only discovered when the watch began pulling eastward. A direction sense, but not for cardinal points. For *intentions.*

He focused on Claire Delacroix. The archivist who’d vanished three weeks ago. The woman whose disappearance had triggered the Section 13 investigation that brought Julien in—or rather, the investigation that someone had manufactured to bring him in.

The photocopied page grew warm. Ink shifted, rearranging itself into a crude map—streets and alleys sketched in lines that looked like handwriting. A single X marked a location in the 19th arrondissement.

“That’s not standard tracking magic,” Romy said, her voice carrying a wary edge. “What did you just do?”

“Honestly?” Julien pocketed the page. “I don’t fully know. The watch has been… teaching me. Or the bloodline has. Ever since I put on the ring.”

He looked down at the crest ring on his finger. The Moreau family emblem—a key crossed with a mirror, surrounded by laurel leaves. When he’d first touched it, the ring had felt cold, foreign. Now it seemed to pulse with a warmth that matched his own heartbeat.

“Your cousin said the archivist holds the key,” Romy said slowly. “But that ring is literally a key. What if Claire isn’t holding a literal key—what if she’s *guarding* something that only a Moreau can unlock?”

Julien’s jaw tightened. “Then we need to find her before whoever killed Théo does.”

They emerged from the catacombs through a service entrance in the 10th, blinking against the gray Parisian dawn. The photocopied map had grown more defined since they’d surfaced, ink lines now crisp as an architect’s drawing. The X marked an industrial block near the Canal Saint-Martin, in the shadow of the new Philharmonie.

“That area’s mostly abandoned warehouses,” Romy said, hailing a taxi. “Perfect place to hide someone who should have disappeared.”

The taxi dropped them two blocks from their destination, at Julien’s insistence. “If the watch is pulling this direction, something’s been tracking us since the catacombs. Better we approach on foot.”

The warehouse squatted behind a chain-link fence crowned with rusted barbed wire. Its windows were boarded, but Julien noticed the boards weren’t nailed—they were hinged. Easy access for those who knew the way.

Romy produced a lockpick from an inner pocket of her jacket. “I’ll go first. If there’s a trap, my reflexes are faster than yours.”

“And if there’s an illusion, mine are better.” Julien pushed past her, shoulder-checking the door. It swung open without resistance.

Inside, the warehouse was a cathedral of dust and shadows. Light filtered through cracks in the corrugated steel roof, painting long stripes across a floor littered with debris. And everywhere—on every surface, hanging from every beam—were mirrors.

Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. All sizes, from hand mirrors to full-length cheval glasses. All broken.

Julien stepped closer to the nearest one. The glass was shattered, but not randomly—the cracks radiated outward from a single point, like a spiderweb frozen mid-expansion. Etched into the frame in fine script was a date: *12 March 1874.*

The same date as the murder the Section 13 file had called the “Vampire of the Opera.”

“Romy.” His voice came out hoarse. “The dates.”

She was already moving among the mirrors, reading the inscriptions. “3 July 1889. 21 November 1901. 17 August 1916…” Her voice faded. “Julien. These are all Moreau dates.”

He looked down at the mirror nearest his feet. This one had a different inscription—not a date, but a name. *Armand Moreau.* Julien’s great-uncle, the man who’d raised him after his parents died. The man who’d never spoken a word about the family’s hidden history.

A sound. Quick, sharp, and gone. Julien spun toward the far end of the warehouse, where a cluster of mirrors hung from a steel beam like a chandelier of glass flowers.

Something moved in their reflection.

Not their reflection. *A different reflection.* A room behind a room, a space that shouldn’t exist beyond the glass. Through the fractured surfaces, Julien saw a figure—a woman, bound at the wrists, her dark hair tangled over a face he recognized from Claire Delacroix’s personnel file.

She was alive.

And behind her, monstrous in the fractured reflection, stood a man. Seven feet tall, skin the color of old newspaper, with eyes that were simply darker patches of shadow. He was holding Claire by the arm, his grip casual, like a farmer leading livestock to slaughter.

“Claire!” Julien lunged forward.

The mirrors caught his shout, echoed it a hundred times over, threw it back at him from every angle. The monstrous man’s head swiveled toward the sound. His mouth opened—too wide, impossibly wide—and he smiled.

Then he stepped backward. Into the mirror. Pulling Claire with him.

The image rippled like disturbed water, then stilled. When Julien reached the spot, he found only a broken mirror face, empty of any reflection beyond his own frantic expression.

Except—one shard hadn’t fallen like the others. It lay at his feet, angled upward, catching light that didn’t exist in the dim warehouse. On impulse, Julien snatched it up.

The shard cut his palm, deep and clean. Blood welled up, dark crimson against his skin.

And the shard *drank* it.

Light swelled from within the glass, brilliant and white, flooding the warehouse until Julien had to squeeze his eyes shut. When he opened them, the shard was no longer a shard. It was smooth, intact, a small hand mirror with a silver frame. The crest on its back matched the ring on his finger.

In its surface, he didn’t see himself.

He saw his mother. Alive. Speaking words he couldn’t hear. Her eyes wild with urgency, her hands pressed flat against the glass from the other side. And behind her, a workshop filled with gears and pendulums and ticking clocks.

*The Watchmaker’s name is in the blood.* Étienne’s ghost hadn’t meant the Brotherhood. He’d meant the blood of the woman who’d raised Julien, the mother whose death certificate had been falsified. The mother who wasn’t dead at all.

Julien pocketed the mirror, blood still weeping from his palm.

“We need to find Claire,” Romy said, eyeing the wound. “Before that thing takes her somewhere we can’t follow.”

Julien shook his head, staring at the mirror in his pocket.

“We need to find my mother.”