Read Chapter 1: A Body in the Seine

The fog was thick enough to taste, river-damp and coal-bitter, clinging to the back of my throat as I pushed through the crowd on the Pont de Sully. The gendarmes had strung a hasty cordon of rope along the quay, and beyond it, a cluster of oil lamps threw sickly light across the water where the recovery boat was pulling something dark and heavy toward the stone steps.

“Mademoiselle Delacroix.” Inspector Renaud appeared at my elbow, his mustache bristling with irritation. “You were not summoned.”

“I was not informed, either,” I said, not bothering to look at him. My gaze fixed on the shape being hauled onto the landing. It was a woman, from the length of the hair that trailed behind her like wet silk, tangled and dark. “But the night desk at Le Figaro has ears in the Prefecture. They pay better than yours does.”

Renaud grunted. He was a decent man, for all that he hated journalists, which made him nearly unique in the Parisian police. “She was in the water less than an hour. A boatman spotted her caught on a piling near the Île Saint-Louis.” He paused, lowering his voice. “Her hands were bound behind her back. There are marks.”

I stepped closer, close enough to see the gendarme roll her onto the pallet. Her face was pale, drained even beyond the pallor of drowning, and her dress—a deep violet silk, expensive, the kind a woman bought on the Rue de la Paix—clung to her limbs like a second skin. She was young. Perhaps twenty-two. Her eyes were open, dark and fixed on nothing, and there was a small puncture wound at the curve of her throat that the lamplight caught and made glisten.

“Not the first,” I said quietly.

Renaud’s jaw tightened. “No.”

“And the symbol?”

He looked at me sharply. “You know about the symbol?”

I didn’t answer. I moved past the cordon before he could protest, crouching beside the pallet. The gendarme made a noise of objection, but Renaud waved him off. He knew I would get my look regardless, and it was less trouble to let me have it than to fight me for it.

I pressed the edge of her sleeve back. The mark was branded into the soft skin of her inner forearm, small but unmistakable: a crescent moon cradling a star, the points fine and sharp as a needle. I had seen it three times before, burned into the flesh of other young women who had turned up in the Seine or vanished from their beds for weeks before washing ashore. And I had seen it once more, embossed in gold on a wax seal, at the bottom of an invitation I had obtained—through means I would not describe in polite company—to the estate of the Marquise de Montfort.

The Marquise had not left her mansion on the Rue de Grenelle in over a decade, but her seal was known. Her mark was distinctive. And four of her maids, all young, all vanished from her service within the last two years, had been found as this one was found.

“Camille.” Renaud’s voice was low, warning. “You cannot print that.”

“Why not?” I rose, brushing dust from my gloves. “Because the family holds shares in the papers that would rather not see their names soiled? Because the Marquise is a figure of venerable mystery, beloved of the society pages?”

“Because you have no proof,” he said. “You have a mark. You have a coincidence of employment. You have nothing that would stand up to a defense lawyer paid in Montfort gold.”

I looked down at the dead woman. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she were about to speak. I had the absurd thought that if I leaned closer, she might whisper a name.

“What was her name?” I asked.

“Marguerite Lenoir,” Renaud said. “She was a ladies’ maid. She left her position two weeks ago, and her family reported her missing three days before she was found.”

“A ladies’ maid for whom?”

Renaud’s silence was answer enough.

I pulled a small notebook from the pocket of my coat—a battered thing, leather-bound, full of names and places and the dates of all the disappearances I had tracked since the first one, nearly a year ago. I wrote down the name, the location of the recovery, the time. I did not write the mark. I had drawn it too many times already in its pages.

“You should be careful,” Renaud said as I pocketed the notebook. “The last journalist who spent this much time asking questions about the Montfort household was found floating beneath the Pont Neuf with his throat cut.”

“He was a man,” I said. “Perhaps they think better of women.”

Renaud shook his head. “They do not think better. They make exceptions for perversity.”

I left him by the water. The mist was thickening, swallowing the lamps, turning the river into a black mirror that drank the light. I did not run. Running would have looked like fear, and I had learned long ago that a woman who moves with purpose is rarely questioned, while a woman who runs is pursued.

At the office of Le Figaro, the night editor, a skeletal man named Bousquet who smoked thin cigarettes and never seemed to blink, read my copy with his face completely expressionless. The gas lamps hissed overhead. Paris was silent beyond the windows, muffled in the fog.

“You mention the Marquise by name,” he said at last.

“I do.”

“You accuse her of murdering her servants.”

“I state that four of her former maids were found dead bearing a mark associated with her house,” I corrected. “The conclusion is the reader’s to draw.”

Bousquet took a long drag of his cigarette. The smoke curled up around his face. “The reader will draw it in ink, and then her lawyers will draw our finances into the gutter.”

“Then print it without my name,” I said. “Let the lawyers come after the anonymous author.”

He looked at me with something approaching respect. It was a rare expression on his face. “You truly don’t care, do you?”

“I care about the four women who are dead,” I said. “I care about the fifth who will die if I stop. Print it.”

He picked up the stub of his pen and scratched a single word at the top of my copy. *Approved.*

I did not wait to watch him set it. I went down the stairs, through the cold marble lobby, and out into the night. The streets were nearly empty now, the last carriages rattling homeward, the café lights going dim one by one.

I was halfway down the Rue de Richelieu when I heard the footsteps.

I did not turn. I adjusted my pace, not quite faster, listening. The footsteps matched mine, equidistant, unhurried. A man’s stride, heavier than a woman’s shoes. I reached into my coat and wrapped my fingers around the small Derringer I kept there, hidden in a pocket tailored for exactly this purpose.

At the corner of the Avenue de l’Opéra, the footsteps stopped.

I turned, ready for the attack.

There was nobody there.

The fog had thickened into a near wall, and the glow of the streetlamps barely penetrated it. I stood still for a long moment, listening to my own heart beat against my ribs. Then I saw it: a folded square of paper, weighted with a small stone, sitting on the pavement beside the iron grate of a tree basin.

I knelt and picked it up. On the envelope, in an elegant, spidery hand, was my name.

*Mademoiselle Camille Delacroix.*

My skin prickled. I opened it, my fingers clumsy and cold.

The message was brief, written on heavy vellum the color of champagne. A single line, trailed off into a flourish of script:

*You have the right of it. But the mark is not worn by those who kill. Come to the Hôtel de Montfort this Thursday evening, and you will see which of us is the hunter—and which is the prey.*

There was no signature. Only a seal pressed into the wax, the same crescent and star I had seen burned into a dead woman’s arm.

I stood at the corner for a long time, the letter in my hand, the fog curling around my ankles like a living thing. I could have gone home. I could have burned it, let the whole matter lie in the river with Marguerite Lenoir and the three before her.

But I have never been good at letting things lie.

I folded the letter, placed it in my inner pocket, and walked home through the wet dark, composing in my head the response I would send by return post—a note declining the invitation, phrased with deference.

And then I would hire a dressmaker, because I had no intention of declining anything.

Thursday evening was four days away. That was little time to prepare to meet a man who had, if the society archives were to be believed, looked exactly the same in a photograph from 1871 as he did in one taken last spring.

I intended to learn the truth of that, with or without his permission.