Read Chapter 32: The Crossing of the Seine

The tunnel let them out into a night that smelled of rain and cordite. Élise blinked against the sudden openness, the stars thin as pinpricks through the smoke that hung over Paris like a shroud. Behind them, the distant clatter of boots on stone echoed out of the sewer mouth—still there, still coming.

“Which way?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. Henri leaned against the brick arch, his breathing ragged, one hand pressed to the stained bandage at his side. She caught his wrist before he could sag. “Henri. Which way?”

He raised his head, eyes glassy but sharp enough to find the river. The Seine glinted a quarter mile off, black and silver between the burned shells of buildings. “The Pont Neuf is manned. The Pont Royal too.” He coughed—a wet sound that made her stomach turn. “We need a boat.”

They moved along the quay, keeping to the shadows of warehouses and coal heaps. Twice they dropped flat as patrol lanterns swung across the cobbles. On the second drop, Henri’s breath hitched and he nearly cried out; she clamped her palm over his mouth until the lantern passed. His skin was furnace-hot beneath her hand.

“You’re burning,” she whispered.

“Then I’m pleasant company.” He tried a smile, and the blood that had seeped through his lips made it terrible.

They found the boat twenty yards past the Pont des Arts—a flat-bottomed skiff tied to a rusted ring, half sunk, the only one left that wasn’t burned or smashed. Élise tugged the knot loose and Henri staggered in, nearly capsizing them. The water sloshed icily around their ankles.

“Row,” he said, collapsing in the bow. “I can’t—the arm.”

She grabbed the oars, blistered palms screaming, and pushed off. The current caught them, swung the skiff wide into open water. For a moment, there was only the creak of oarlocks and the whisper of the river moving past. The far bank was dark, quiet—almost peaceful.

Then the flash came from the bridge.

“Get down!” Henri’s shout tore through the night just as the report of the rifle cracked across the water. The bullet skipped off the surface two feet from the bow. A second shot slapped into the stern, splintering wood.

Élise threw herself flat, the oars dragging. “They saw us!”

“They saw a boat,” Henri growled. He pushed himself up, reached past her, grabbed one oar with his good hand. His wounded arm hung useless at his side, blood streaking his sleeve. “Right bank’s crawling with them. We go left. Pull!”

She found the second oar and they drove together, ragged and desperate, as more shots tore over their heads. A bullet took a chunk of the gunwale with a sound like a hammer on wet wood. Henri grunted, his face contorting as the strain tore at his side, but he didn’t stop. Neither did she.

The third shot found him.

It was a sound she would replay for the rest of her life: a wet, meaty thud, and Henri’s body jerking as if struck from behind by a giant’s hand. His hand flew off the oar. He gasped, a short sharp sound, more surprise than pain, and fell back against the bow.

“Henri!” She lunged halfway out of her seat, boat rocking dangerously.

“Arm,” he managed, teeth gritted. “Not—not the chest. Arm.”

She saw it then, in the sliver of moonlight: the dark bloom spreading on his left sleeve, high on the bicep. Another wound to match the ones he already carried. He was turning to water before her eyes.

A bullet clipped the water three feet away. She shoved herself back to the oars and pulled with everything she had left, arms screaming, chest burning. The far bank slid toward them, closer, closer—a wall of old stone buildings, laundry lines, shuttered windows. A house. A tenement.

The skiff ground against the mud. Élise jumped out, boots sinking, and hauled Henri over her shoulder. He was not light, and he was not able, but she dragged him through the shallows and up a slimy stone stair to a back lane that stank of dead fish and sewage.

The shots had stopped. They had reached the Left Bank unseen, or the marksmen had lost the angle. She didn’t care. She only pulled him forward, step by brutal step, until she found a door—a mean, unpainted door in a sunless courtyard, with a faded chalk mark on its frame that she knew.

The mark of the Barricades.

She hammered the knocker twice, then a pause, then thrice.

The door cracked open. A woman’s face, scarred, middle-aged, peered out. Her eyes went to Henri, then to Élise, and she spat.

“You’re Moreau’s girl.”

“I’m a Communard,” Élise said. The words tasted like truth. “And he’s a prisoner of Versailles. A Comte. He needs a doctor. And you need what he knows before he bleeds out comatose.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. Behind her, the dark of the hall filled with shapes—men, rifles, a child clutching a broken broomstick.

“You bring a Comte into my house,” the woman said slowly, “and you ask for a doctor?”

“I ask for justice,” Élise said. “The kind you got when the Versaillese took this house. The kind we get together.”

Somewhere in the house, a baby began to cry. Henri stirred, lifted his head with enormous effort, and looked at the woman directly.

“My father,” he said, his voice cracking, “commands the artillery at Montmartre. I know the positions of every Versaillese battery within ten miles of this river. If you help me live, that knowledge becomes yours.”

The woman stared at him for a long moment. Then she reached out and yanked them both inside, slamming the door behind them.

The hall was small and close, full of the breath of a dozen strangers. The woman gestured at a cot near the stove. “Put him there. I’ll fetch the nurse—but if you’re lying, if he bleeds out before dawn, you’ll be out on the street with him before the sun touches the rooftops.”

“He won’t bleed out,” Élise said. She eased Henri onto the cot, and his hand found hers, squeezed weakly.

“Élise,” he rasped. “They shot me. Two Now.”

“And you’re still alive.”

“That’s twice they failed.” He tried a smile, then grimaced. “Your father doesn’t fail three times.”

The words hung in the air like frost. Élise knelt beside the cot, still holding his hand, and looked around the room at the faces watching her—workers, women, children, wounded men with fire in their eyes. This house was a fortress of the defeated, and she had just dragged the enemy’s son into its heart.

But Henri was not the enemy. Not anymore. And if her father sent soldiers to finish the job, they would find this house full of people who had already decided to die twice.

She looked down at Henri’s face, pale and beautiful and failing, and made herself a promise she had no idea how to keep: He would not die here. Not tonight. Not ever, if she had to burn Paris down to stop it.