Read Chapter 27: The Hunt Continues

The cellar smelled of wet stone and old wine. Somewhere above, boots scraped against floorboards as Rochefort’s men dragged the mews apart, searching for something Lefebvre had already sent into the sky.

L’Oiseau sat against the far wall, wrists bound behind her, her dark eyes tracking the single lantern that hung from a rusted hook. Lefebvre watched the flame sway with each footfall overhead. His own bonds bit into his skin—rope, not iron. Sloppy work. Rochefort’s men were eager, not thorough.

“Your shoulder,” L’Oiseau said quietly.

Lefebvre looked down. The wound from the chase had soaked through his coat sleeve, a dark bloom spreading toward his elbow. Clumsy escape through the mews window had torn it open again. He pressed his bound hands against the gash. Pain flared.

“It’s shallow,” he said.

“It’s bleeding like a fountain.”

“I’ve had worse.”

She made a sound low in her throat—not quite a laugh, not quite a curse. “You’re a terrible liar, Captain. For an intelligence officer, you’d think you’d improve.”

He shifted against the damp wall. The cellar had one door, heavy oak, bolted from the outside. A single grated window sat high above them, too small for even a child to crawl through. They had been thrown down here after the capture, Rochefort’s parting words still ringing: *“Your pigeon friend will find no roost here.”*

Rochefort didn’t know about the letter. Lefebvre pressed his jacket against his ribs, feeling the folded paper still tucked in the lining. Henry’s draft, his initials, the damning date. If Rochefort had known what Lefebvre carried, he would have taken it.

“Give me your hands,” L’Oiseau said.

He looked over. She had shuffled closer while he’d been counting their options, her back to him so that her bound wrists were within reach.

“What are you planning?”

“A woman should keep some secrets.”

He hesitated only an instant, then turned, offering his own bound hands to hers. Her fingers were small and quick, working at the knots with a familiarity that suggested she’d done this before. In another life, perhaps, she’d learned locks and ropes in places he didn’t want to imagine.

“The locket,” she said.

“What about it?”

“I saw it fall in the chase. The chain snapped.” A pause. Her fingers found a knot, worked it. “The clasp is still on you.”

Lefebvre felt his chest. His jacket lining had been ripped in the struggle, and something cold and thin pressed against his ribs—not the letter. He reached inside and pulled out the broken chain. The locket itself was gone, lost somewhere in the mews or the courtyard, but the chain’s end piece was a narrow strip of metal, bent at the elbow.

He passed it backward to her as best he could. Her fingers closed around it.

“The lock on this door,” she said, “is a Chubb. Old model. The deadbolt will turn counterclockwise.” She held the chain between her thumb and forefinger, testing its strength. “The shackles, on the other hand…”

“You can pick them?”

“I can loosen them.” She pressed the metal strip against his wrists, scraping the knot’s interior. “Enough to slip free—if you have the patience not to tear them off before I say.”

Boots stopped overhead. A man’s voice—Rochefort’s, muffled by the floorboards.

“The pigeon loft was empty. Where did they send it?”

“I told you, the birds had already flown. We found the mews but the cage doors were unlatched.”

“Then search the grounds. If it landed within a mile, find it.”

A second voice—hesitant. “Sir, the cloud bank’s thick. Pigeons don’t fly straight in weather like this. It could have come down anywhere between here and Paris.”

“Then it’s findable. Move.”

The footsteps spread, fading into other rooms. Lefebvre heard a door slam. They had minutes, perhaps less, before Rochefort returned to check on his prisoners.

L’Oiseau’s fingers slipped and cursed. The chain end dropped, clinking against the floor. Lefebvre instinctively tried to turn to help, and felt something give. The rope around his wrists shifted—looser, suddenly. He flexed his fingers and drew one hand free of the loop.

“You’re out,” she said. “Good.”

He pulled the second hand free, then tore at her bonds. The knot was different—tighter, layered, a proper sailor’s hitch—but with two hands working, it yielded. They rose together.

The door was a few yards away in the murk. Lefebvre crossed to it, pressing his ear against the wood. Silence in the corridor beyond. He looked back at L’Oiseau, who was now working the chain end into the lock’s keyhole.

“I said old Chubb,” she murmured, eyes narrowed in concentration. “I didn’t say it’d be easy.”

He listened to the soft *tick-tick* of metal against tumblers. Above, the house groaned. Wind rattled a window somewhere. He could taste rain in the air.

“What will you do when we’re out?” she asked, still not looking up.

“Get to Rochefort.”

“Kill him?”

“If I have to.”

She stopped moving the chain. Turned to look at him, the lantern light catching her profile. “You’re not built for that, Captain. I’ve seen murderers. You’re not one.”

“He’s endangered everything. The letter is gone. If I can’t stop him from reporting back to the General Staff, none of this matters.”

“You think he’ll tell them about the letter?”

“I think he’ll tell them I had something. He’ll put the entire country’s intelligence apparatus on the hunt for a piece of paper he’s only heard about secondhand.” Lefebvre leaned against the door, pressing his shoulder to the wood to ease the throb. “But if he’s dead, the only person who knows what was in the mews is in this cellar with me.”

She studied him. In the dim light her face was unreadable, a mask he’d grown accustomed to but never learned to see through.

“And the other men?” she asked.

“They follow orders. Without Rochefort, they scatter.”

She turned back to the lock. The chain scraped and clicked, and with a final sharp turn, something inside gave way. The deadbolt slid back with a heavy clunk.

The door swung outward. A torch sputtered in a bracket along the stone corridor, throwing long shadows.

They moved together, L’Oiseau leading, Lefebvre pressing close. The corridor sloped upward toward the kitchen, and he could smell woodsmoke and cold game. Men’s voices rumbled somewhere ahead, low and conversational. Not Rochefort.

L’Oiseau paused at a bend in the corridor, pressing herself flat against the wall. She held up three fingers, then pointed through a small gap where the wall stones had shifted with age. Lefebvre peered through. Three men stood in the kitchen, one with his back to them, two playing cards at the table. A fourth man sat apart, cleaning a rifle. Each had a pistol at his hip.

Lefebvre counted the ways this could fail.

“The garden door,” L’Oiseau whispered. “East side. I saw it from the mews. It opens onto the vineyard.”

“They’re between us and it.”

She gave him a look—a flicker of something that might have been amusement. “Then we make them move.”

She pulled the chain end from her pocket—still bent, still thin—and flicked it across the floor into the kitchen. It skittered along the flagstones, ringing like a dropped key.

All four men turned toward the sound.

L’Oiseau was already moving, silent and low, slipping past the kitchen threshold into the darkness of the adjoining pantry while every head was turned. Lefebvre followed, pressing himself against a shelf of jars that rattled softly, drowning the sound of his boots on stone.

One of the men laughed. “Cat got a rat.”

“Check the cellar,” the rifleman said, not joking.

Lefebvre heard a chair scrape. Boots crossed toward the cellar door. In the pantry, Lefebvre pressed himself flat as a crack of lantern light swung past the open doorway. A man grunted when he found the door hanging open.

“They’re out!”

The cry went up. Lefebvre grabbed L’Oiseau’s sleeve and pulled her through the pantry’s far end into a narrow service corridor. Behind them, chairs slammed and pistols sparked. A shot clipped the stone arch above their heads, showering dust.

They ran.

The corridor twisted, then opened into a larger hall with high windows, moonlight flooding across the flagstones. The garden door stood at its far end, blocked by a wine rack that had been pulled across it—Rochefort’s men had prepared for escape.

Lefebvre looked at the rack, counted its weight, then looked at L’Oiseau.

“Together,” she said.

They threw themselves against it just as Rochefort appeared in the hall’s opposite doorway, pistol raised, his face contorted with recognition and fury.

“Stop them!”

The wine rack groaned but slid forward—an inch, then a foot. Lefebvre’s wounded arm buckled; pain lanced through him, white and sharp. He bit through the soft tissue of his cheek to keep from shouting.

L’Oiseau drove her shoulder into the rack again, and on that second push it tipped, crashing forward, bottles exploding in a spray of dark wine across the stone and into the garden.

Rochefort fired. The shot went wide, clipping the doorframe. Then the rack was between them, a wall of shattered wood and glass, and L’Oiseau had grabbed Lefebvre’s jacket and pulled him over the wreckage and out into the night air.

The vineyard was a slope of shadows. They ran down it, boots slipping on wet earth, the wind whipping through the vines. Behind them Rochefort’s voice, thick with rage, and the thunder of his boots.

“He’s alone,” Lefebvre gasped. “He’s kept his men at the front.”

“You want to turn around?”

“No choice. If he reaches the road, he’ll meet them before we can climb the other side.”

L’Oiseau’s stride faltered. She looked back, then at Lefebvre, and in that glance he saw calculation, not hesitation. She made a decision.

They stopped at the treeline’s edge. Rochefort was thirty yards behind them, still coming, his breath ragged, the pistol held low.

“Captain,” he called. “You’ve run far enough.”

Lefebvre put himself between L’Oiseau and the man. “It ends here.”

“You think your letter will reach anyone? The bird will die in the storm, or the message will be lost. You’ve accomplished nothing.”

“You don’t believe that. That’s why you’re chasing me.”

Rochefort’s smile was thin. He raised the pistol, aimed, stepped forward.

“Then let me give you a proper burial at least.”

He fired. The shot tore through Lefebvre’s upper arm, the same arm already bleeding, and spun him half around. The world tilted. He hit the ground hard, shoulder-first into the wet grass, taste of earth and iron flooding his mouth.

Rochefort advanced, boots crunching on leaves. He stopped a few feet away, looked down, and pointed the pistol at Lefebvre’s forehead.

“I’d ask you to pass my regards to Picquart,” he said, “but he’s already dead in everything but name.”

L’Oiseau moved.

Not fast—just quiet. She appeared at Rochefort’s side, and in her hand was the chain end, still bent, still sharp. She drove it into the soft flesh below his jaw, where neck meets ear. Once. Hard.

Rochefort’s eyes flew wide. He made a sound like a wire snapping, staggered sideways, and fired again—blind, into the ground. The pistol fell from his hand, skittering away into the vines. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his neck, blood threading black between his fingers. He tried to speak, but only air came.

Then his arms gave way and he pitched forward, face-down, and did not move.

L’Oiseau stood over him, breathing hard, the chain end dripping. She looked down at Rochefort, then at Lefebvre, and in the silence he heard himself say, “You were wrong.”

She turned.

“About me not being built for killing,” he said, pressing his hand hard against his arm. “Neither were you.”

She let the chain fall. It landed beside Rochefort’s hand on the wet grass, gleaming faintly in the moon.

“I had practice,” she said.

She crouched and pulled Lefebvre to his feet. His arm sent shards of pain through his chest, but he stood. Behind them, the château’s windows blazed as Rochefort’s men realized their master was gone. Ahead, the treeline opened into a shallow valley. A road ran along its floor, pale in the dark.

“The train station is four miles east,” L’Oiseau said. “We cross the river, cut through the fields, and we can make the night mail to Paris.”

“And if his men find our trail?”

She looked back once at Rochefort’s body, still and crumpled in the moonlight.

“They’ll be looking for survivors,” she said. “Not fugitives.” She began walking, and after a moment Lefebvre followed, one hand pressed against his wound, the letter safe against his heart.