Read Chapter 19: The Pocket Watch's Secret

The pocket watch was heavier than it should have been.

Julien felt it the moment he lifted it from his coat, the weight distributed wrong, the casing shifting under his thumb as if something inside had come loose. He'd barely slept. The image of Marchand's face rippling in the café mirror had kept him up, and the watch—his mother's watch, the one she'd left behind—had been a talisman he'd turned over and over in the dark.

Now, in the gray morning light of his apartment, he pressed the winding mechanism and heard a click that wasn't the crown.

The back of the casing swung open on a hinge he'd never noticed.

Inside, nested in black velvet, lay a tiny glass vial stoppered with wax. Dark flakes crusted its interior. Beside it, a folded slip of paper, yellowed at the edges.

Julien set the watch on the table. He didn't touch the vial. He unfolded the note.

*To end the curse, break the bloodline link—or embrace it.*

His mother's handwriting. He recognized the slant, the way her *t*'s crossed high and late, from the letters she'd sent him as a child before she'd disappeared entirely.

Blood. Dried blood. *His* blood, possibly. Or hers. Or the blood of every Moreau who'd come before.

He stared at the vial. A fail-safe. That's what this was. His mother had known the ritual's clock was ticking. She'd left him a choice, encoded in a child's toy he'd carried for twenty years without knowing what it held.

The phone buzzed. Romy. He let it ring through to voicemail.

He'd been avoiding her since the discovery in the warehouse—not because of what they'd found, but because of what she'd said afterward. The lie. The careful omission she'd fed him about his mother's file, the one he'd only caught because the grimoire had shown him a page that contradicted it.

He pocketed the watch, the vial, the note, and walked.

---

The Archives annex smelled of dust and old paper, the way it always did. Romy sat at the far table, her laptop open, a stack of Section 13 files fanned around her like a hand of cards.

"You ignored my calls," she said without looking up.

"I had something to check."

She looked at him then. Her eyes went to his coat pocket. "What did you find?"

Julien pulled out the chair across from her and sat. He placed the watch on the table between them. The open casing showed the empty velvet bed—he'd removed the vial and note, tucked them into his inner pocket.

Romy leaned forward. Her expression shifted—not surprise. Recognition.

"You knew about this," Julien said. It wasn't a question.

"I knew there was something in the watch. I didn't know what."

"But you knew the watch mattered." He kept his voice level. "You knew enough to read my mother's file and decide what I should see in it. You told me she was dead. You showed me a death certificate."

Romy's jaw tightened. She closed her laptop, folded her hands on top of it.

"The death certificate was real," she said. "The date was wrong."

"Because she's alive. Because she's been alive since 1974, sitting in a chapel, holding a seal that should have killed her decades ago."

"Julien—"

"You altered a Section 13 file. A sealed one. That's not a parking ticket, Romy. That's prison. That's a Watcher visit." He thought of the mirror behind the parlor's bar, the way it had *moved*. "Unless someone ordered you to."

The silence stretched.

When Romy spoke, her voice was smaller than he'd ever heard it. "I was assigned to you. Not as a partner—as a protector."

"Assigned by who?"

"Verne. Before your transfer went through. He pulled your file, read the lineage notes, and put me on your detail. He told me you didn't know what you were, and that if you found out too soon, you'd do something reckless."

"Like hunt the man who killed my partner?"

"Like walk into a binding ritual unarmed." Romy shook her head. "He thought the truth would come in stages. The grimoire. The history. The choice. He didn't want you blindsided by all of it at once."

Julien laughed—a short, hollow sound. "He gave me a dagger and told me to decide which side of the family I serve. That doesn't sound like staged pacing to me."

"He wanted you ready before the solstice."

"Six weeks."

"Six weeks to become what the ritual needs you to be." Romy met his eyes. "Or to reject it. He doesn't know which you'll choose. Neither do I."

Julien pulled the vial from his pocket. Held it up between two fingers. The dried blood inside caught the fluorescent light.

"Your mother's file didn't mention this," he said.

"No. It didn't." Romy's gaze fixed on the vial. "What is it?"

"A fail-safe." He read the note aloud, watched her face for a reaction that would tell him she'd known. "To end the curse, break the bloodline link—or embrace it."

Her brow furrowed. She hadn't known. That much was genuine.

"Bloodline," she said slowly. "The ritual requires a pureblood descendant to seal the entity. The grimoire says the binding takes the guardian's life. But what if the blood isn't for the seal?"

Julien turned the vial. "What if it's for breaking it?"

"The curse—"

"Is tied to the name. The name is tied to the blood. If the line ends—" He stopped. The thought landed like a physical blow. "If the line ends, there's no Moreau left to bind. The entity starves. The curse dies with the family."

Romy's face went pale. "Julien. That's not a fail-safe. That's a death warrant."

"It's a choice." He heard his mother's voice in the words, the way she'd always phrased things as doors, not traps. "Either I become the guardian and die sealing it, or I end the line and the curse dies with me."

"And if you end the line—"

"There's no more curse." He put the vial back in his pocket. "And no more Moreaus."

Romy was shaking her head. "You can't just—your mother is still in that chapel. If you break the bloodline link, what happens to her?"

Julien hadn't thought of that. The vial had felt like an answer, clean and terrible. But it opened a question he couldn't answer: what did breaking the link do to a guardian still holding a seal?

She was alive because the binding was incomplete. Because the curse was still active. If he severed it—

He pulled out his phone. Opened the message from his mother's mirror link. The words he'd memorized in the warehouse: *Don't come for me until the seal is ready.*

"What if 'ready' doesn't mean completed?" he said quietly. "What if it means broken?"

Romy stared at him. "You're talking about racing the solstice to end the ritual before Marchand can force it."

"Marchand has insider knowledge. He knows the binding needs a Moreau. He's been funding the preparation for months, and the payments stopped this month because the ritual is already in motion." Julien stood. "If I'm going to stop him, I can't do it from behind a desk. I can't do it waiting for an internal review that's going to gut my investigation anyway."

"The review is at fourteen hundred."

"I know."

"You can't just skip it, Julien. Verne is the only thing standing between you and a suspension, and if you don't show—"

"Then Verne's plan to stage the truth fails." Julien pocketed the watch. "Maybe that's what he wants. Maybe he's been nudging me toward exactly this moment—the vial, the choice, the desperation that makes me act before I'm ready."

Romy was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "You think he's using you."

"I think everyone's been using me." Julien looked at her—his partner, his protector, his liar. "The question is whether you're still on my side or his."

Romy stood. She reached into her coat and pulled out a folded document, creased and worn. She slid it across the table.

"Marchand's last known address," she said. "I pulled it before I came in. It's current as of last night."

Julien unfolded it. An apartment in the eleventh, near the cemetery. He looked up at her.

"Why?"

"Because I was ordered to protect you." Romy's voice hardened. "That order didn't say I had to keep you safe *from* the truth. Just from dying before you could find it."

Julien folded the document, tucked it beside the vial.

The internal review clock was ticking. The solstice clock was ticking. Marchand was out there, and his mother was in the chapel, and the vial in his pocket held the answer to a question no one had dared ask.

He looked at Romy.

"One more thing," he said. "The note. It said 'embrace it.' What do you think that means?"

Romy shook her head slowly. "I don't know. But I think your mother is telling you that the curse can be used. Not just endured. Weaponized."

The word hung between them.

Weaponized.

Julien thought of the dagger Verne had given him. The watch his mother had left him. The blood in his veins that the ritual wanted to consume.

Maybe he wouldn't be the sacrifice.

Maybe he could be the knife.