Read Chapter 18: The List of Raids

The Rue des Archives was two streets over from the shop—close enough that Élise could hear the distant clatter of a German truck engine and feel the cold certainty of what waited inside the building's shadows. She spread the stolen list across her worktable, its edges curling where Antoine's fingers had gripped it too hard in the Ritz's gilded washroom.

"The raid is set for Saturday," she said, tracing the address with her fingertip. "Number fourteen. A room above a shuttered hatmaker's."

Antoine leaned over her shoulder, close enough that she smelled his cologne beneath the smoke and sweat of the party. "Brandt signed off on the order yesterday. They'll come at first light, when the street is quiet and the concierge is fetching bread."

"Then we have three nights." Élise looked up at him. "Marcel's runners are scattered since the raid at his place. The safe house on Rue des Archives is his last organized nest. If it falls, the entire network goes dormant."

"Do you know who's inside?"

"I know who's *supposed* to be inside." She'd delivered messages there herself—four middle-aged men and a woman who printed leaflets from a hidden press. "Two couriers came through this week with materials for the southern lines."

Antoine straightened, his jaw tight. "You can't reach Marcel in time. His usual drop points have gone cold since the arrests."

"You just gave me a gift, Antoine. Don't spoil it by telling me how to use it." Her voice came out harder than she intended, and she saw his mouth tighten at the edge.

He raised his hands, a gesture of surrender that felt too practiced. "I'm not telling you anything. I'm asking what you intend to do."

Élise reached past him and folded the list into thirds, sliding it into her skirt pocket. "I intend to empty that building before Saturday."

---

The courtyard stairs had been scrubbed twice since Jean's arrival, and though a faint reddish tint still clung to the mortar near the drainpipe, Élise no longer flinched when she walked past. Jean was awake when she came down, sitting on the pallet with his bandaged arm propped on his knee. His face had regained some color, and when he saw the folded paper in her hand, he was already standing.

"Marcel's safe house," she said without preamble. "Fourteen Rue des Archives. The list puts a Gestapo raid there in three nights."

Jean reached for the paper, then stopped himself, letting his hand fall. "Marcel wouldn't leave it that exposed. He rotated locations every two weeks."

"He did," Élise agreed. "But the courier routes don't rotate. The leak came from someone inside. If their informant knows the routes, they know the current drop point."

Jean was quiet for a moment. "Fournier knew the routes. He argued with the man he called 'Uncle' two hours before the raid—I told you that."

"You also told me Fournier died in the raid. Your verification of Antoine's story checks out." She said it as much to herself as to him. "Which leaves only one person who knew both the old safe house and this one."

"Gaspard."

"Gaspard owes me papers for my brother within forty-eight hours." A clock ticked somewhere in the shop above them, loud in her ears. "He's on the Gestapo's payroll now. He keeps me useful to them, and he keeps his own accounts balanced. But if he's feeding them the safe houses, I need to know whether the list he gave me three days ago was a kindness or a trap."

Jean frowned. "You're still going to meet him?"

"I don't have a choice." Élise crouched beside him, taking his good hand in hers. "But I won't let him walk me into a snare. You know the building on Rue des Archives. Can you get us in through the back?"

Jean's eyes flicked to the wound on his arm, and he seemed to measure the pain against the question. "The hatmaker's shop has a workroom window that opens onto a shared alley. The lock is cheap. I can open it even with one hand."

"Good." Élise stood. "We go tonight, before the watch changes at the German garrison."

---

Lise arrived twenty minutes after Élise sent word through the bakery boy—a shortcut she'd bought with leftover ration coupons and a broad smile. The girl knocked twice on the shop's back door and slipped in with a basket of mended collars as cover. She was sixteen, sharp-eyed, and quick, and Élise trusted her in ways she still didn't trust most adults.

"Number fourteen," Lise repeated, studying the address Élise had penciled on a scrap. "The hatmaker's. I know it. The old woman who runs the café across the street is a friend of my mother's."

"Can she be trusted to keep her mouth shut if she sees us go in?"

"She's deaf in one ear and speaks only when someone pays her." Lise pocketed the paper. "What do you need me to do?"

The plan came together in whispers over the shop's coal stove, three heads bent together as the winter dusk pressed against the windows. They would go at midnight, when the city's curfew left the streets to patrols and the hungry rats. Jean would open the back window; Élise would sweep the rooms for anything that could identify the network—letters, plates, shoe prints in the dust—while Lise kept watch from the café's second-story window and signaled if anyone approached.

"If we find people still inside," Élise said, "we bring them out through the alley and split them among three safe houses I can reach. If we find nothing—"

"You'll be glad you checked for nothing," Jean finished. "Better an empty night than a full coffin."

They moved through the blacked-out city in single file, hugging the walls where the shadows pooled deepest. A Wehrmacht patrol passed two streets over, their boots echoing sharp against the cobbles, and Élise pressed herself into a doorway until the sound faded. The lump of the folded list in her pocket felt heavier than paper should.

Fourteen Rue des Archives stood silent and dark, its shutters drawn tight over a ground-floor window that had once displayed hats in rose and gray. Jean's pick worked the lock on the alley door quickly, and they slipped inside to the smell of dust and last season's mothballs.

Nothing moved in the rooms above.

Élise climbed the narrow staircase with Jean close behind, her hand over the slit where her knife rested. The main room was bare—the printing press gone, the tables stripped, the crates that had once held leaflets reduced to splinters of kindling by the stove. She ran her fingers over the mantel, finding a ridge of dust that told her nothing had stood there in days.

"They're gone," she breathed. "Already moved."

Jean was studying the floor, his good hand touching a dark stain near the window. "Not gone. Look at this."

Élise crouched beside him. The stain was old—dried dark against the floorboards—but around it lay a scatter of glass shards that had been carefully swept into a corner. She lifted one between thumb and forefinger. It was thick, ridged, the kind of glass that came from a broken bottle.

Or a broken lantern.

"Someone searched this place," she said slowly. "Before you and I ever arrived."

Jean's face went pale in the dim light. "The raid's not Saturday. It's already happened."

The floor had creaked before either of them could move.

Élise spun toward the staircase as heavy footfalls sounded below—not the careful creep of a burglar, but the flat, booted stride of men who didn't care who heard them coming. Jean reached for her arm, pulling her toward the back window, but the alley below filled with shouts, and a figure filled the doorway at the bottom of the stairs.

German field gray. An officer's cap.

And behind him, the thin, familiar shape of Élise's blackmailer, emerging out of the dark like her conscience wearing a Gestapo uniform.

"Gaspard," she said. The name was a stone in her mouth.

He smiled, and there was nothing kind behind it. "Mademoiselle Dubois. Into every life, a little rain must fall."