Read Chapter 31: The Truth of Jules

The smell hit them first—a thick, rotting sweetness that clung to the back of the throat. Élise pressed her sleeve to her mouth and followed Henri’s weak torchlight down the slick stone steps, her nun’s habit dragging through several inches of black water. Above them, the distant thud of boots on the catacomb galleries had faded to a rhythmic pulse, then to nothing. The soldiers had stopped at the iron grate. For now.

“Here,” Henri rasped, collapsing against a curved brick wall where the tunnel opened into a wider culvert. His hand shook as he set the torch in a rusted bracket. “The sewer line. It runs beneath the Rue de Vaugirard. They’ll expect us to go deeper into the bones, not up into the muck.”

Élise knelt beside him, tearing a strip from her nun’s hem. His arm was bloody from the grate’s rusted teeth, the gash deep enough that she could see the pale slick of tendon beneath. “Hold still.”

He winced as she bound it tight. “Your hands are cold.”

“Your blood is hot.” She tied the knot with a sharp tug, making him gasp. “There. You’ll live.”

“You have a nurse’s efficiency.” He tried to smile, but his lips were cracked and pale. The fever had not broken—she could feel the heat radiating off his skin like a brazier left too long burning. “Remind me never to get shot where you can reach me.”

“Then don’t get shot at all.” She pressed her palm to his forehead and frowned. “Henri, we need to move. They’ll double back.”

He nodded, but his gaze drifted past her to the dark water running at their feet. The torchlight caught his face in sharp angles—the hollows beneath his cheekbones, the fever-glazed look in his eyes. He swallowed hard, and she recognized the expression. It was the look of a man trying to gather the strength to say something difficult.

“Élise.” His voice was low. “Before your father’s men caught us—in the hospital, you said—you tried to tell me something. About your brother. Jules.”

She felt the words land in her stomach like cold stones. She had been waiting for this. She had been dreading it.

“I need to know the truth,” he continued, his voice rough. “Not the version I was told. Not the version your father fed me to make me trust him. The truth. Because if I’m going to die in this sewer, I want to know what I’m dying for.”

She looked away. The brick walls glistened with moisture. Somewhere far above them, Paris was waking to another day of blood and barricades. And here, in the dark, she was going to tell the one secret her father had killed to keep.

“Jules was not a spy for Versailles.”

Henri’s eyes sharpened. “Your father said he was a hero of the Communard cause.”—He left the sentence hanging.

“That was the lie.” Élise’s voice was barely above a whisper. “The story my father tells—that Jules passed Versailles positions to the Commune, that he died with a message on his lips—that is a fiction. Jules was our father’s agent. His courier. But the messages he carried were for Versailles, not against them.”

Henri stared at her. The torch flickered and hissed. A rat paddled past them, unconcerned.

“Jules was a spy,” she forced herself to say. “A true spy. He reported Communard movements to General Vinoy’s staff. He attended the tactical meetings at the Hôtel de Ville and memorized the lists of who planned what and when. And then he was caught, by the Communards, with a note in his boot naming three artillery barricades along the Ternes.”

The silence between them stretched taut. Henri’s hand found her wrist, not hard, but firm enough that she had to look at him.

“Your father told me Jules died a martyr,” he said slowly. “That he was shot by Versailles troops while carrying word of an ambush.”

“Because my father wanted to believe it.” She pulled her wrist free. “Because if Jules had been a martyr of the Commune, then my father could grieve him publicly, wear mourning in the Tenth, be seen as a father of the revolution. But Jules was what he was. And when the Communards found the note, they didn’t shoot him. They gave him to their own interrogators. They broke his fingers, one by one, until he told them everything.”

She heard her own voice go flat, clinical, as if she were reciting a lesson to a classroom of children. “He died confessing. He gave them the names of every Versailles contact he had. Including our father’s.”

Henri’s jaw tightened. “Then your father had been working for the Commune.”

“He was a Communard for twenty years before the Commune had a name.” Élise let out a bitter laugh. “He printed pamphlets under Louis-Napoléon. He lost his teaching post for refusing to say prayers for the empire. He believed in all of it—the workers, the barricades, the red flags. But when the Versailles army broke into the city in the Bloody Week, they captured his wife, my mother, and threatened to shoot her on the spot. They promised him his life if he turned.”

She paused, letting the weight of it settle into the wet air between them.

“He turned. He gave them everything Jules had given the Communards—reversed. All the positions, all the plans, all the names. In exchange, he was allowed to lead the raids himself, to prove his loyalty. That’s how he climbed so fast in Versailles’s service. That’s why he wears that uniform. Every rank he has is bought with information Jules traded for his broken fingers.”

A long moment passed. Above them, the faint rumble of distant cannon rolled through the earth—the Versailles guns were shelling the eastern arrondissements again. Henri let out a breath he seemed to have been holding.

“And you,” he said quietly. “Where do you stand in this? Your father raised you on his new faith. But you came to my hospital with bandages and tincture. You risked your life to free me. So which story is yours?”

Élise pulled her knees up to her chest, the nun’s habit bunching around her like a shroud. “All I have is the one I made for myself.” She looked at him directly. “I saved you because you are not your uniform. Because when you held my hand at the barricade outside the rue Saint-Jacques, you taught me that a man could wear a gun and still flinch at someone else’s pain. And because, cousin, you are the only family I have left who is not a liar.”

Henri’s face went pale at the word. *Cousin.* It sat between them now, a third presence in the tunnel. “So it’s true. Your father was telling the truth.”

“He told you the truth about that,” she said softly. “He told you I was the orphaned daughter of his brother, killed at the siege of 1870. And you are the grandson—the heir—of the man who killed him.” She swallowed hard. “Our blood is the same blood. Two branches of the same family, divided by a barricade.”

Henri closed his eyes. When he opened them again, there was something new in his expression—not anger, not revulsion, but a strange and wondering grief.

“Then both our fathers are enemies of everything I was taught to love,” he said. “And both our mothers are dead because of it.” He reached out and took her hand, his palm hot with fever. “Then we are not a betrayal of our families, Élise. We are their only honest children.”

She felt tears prick her eyes and blinked them away. “We’re not safe yet. The dawn transfer—Sister Angélique’s plan—if we don’t get to the river, none of it matters.”

Henri’s grip tightened. “Then let’s stop sitting in filth and find a way to the Left Bank.” He got to his feet, swaying, then steadied himself against the wall. “There’s a channel near the old wharves. We can make it to the Seine before dawn if we don’t stop.”

Élise rose and took his arm. As they moved deeper into the sewer, she heard it—a faint metallic click behind them, not a rat. She turned her head, listening.

Nothing.

But she had heard that sound before, in the convent courtyard an hour ago. It was the sound of a revolver being cocked, and it was coming from the dark behind them.

“Henri,” she whispered, his name a breath. “There’s something back there.”

He did not look back. He only pulled her faster into the black.