Read Chapter 14: The Journalist's Toll

The morning light was a blade against my skull.

I had forgotten—no, I had never known—what it meant to carry Philippe's blood in my veins. The sun that once felt merely warm now pressed against my skin like a heated iron held too close. I drew the heavy velvet curtains in my garret room and dressed in the dark, fingers finding the familiar bones of my corset, the worn wool of my working skirt.

The mirror showed me a woman I barely recognized. Paler, yes, but that could be blamed on the past weeks of chaos. It was the eyes that betrayed me—too bright, too hungry, catching light that wasn't there.

I turned away and went to work.

Le Figaro's newsroom swallowed me whole, as it always did. The clatter of typewriters, the acrid cloud of tobacco smoke, the shouted questions across desks—it was a world I knew how to navigate. But now I heard too much. The scratch of pens three desks away. The whispered calculation in an editor's voice as he spoke to the publisher's assistant. The steady drum of hearts, human hearts, all around me like a rain of flesh.

"Delacroix!" Marat, the wire editor, tossed a sheaf of telegrams at me. "The Préfecture wants a piece on the missing banker. Reynaud. You covered the Arnaud disappearance—they think there's a connection."

I caught the papers without looking, which made Marat's thick brows rise.

"You're quick today."

"I've had my coffee." I smiled, and it felt like baring teeth.

The article wrote itself between my fingers, which was fortunate, because my mind was elsewhere. On a ledger page in handwriting that was not Philippe's, recording my sister's death. On the portrait of the woman who was supposedly dead. On Séverine Arnaud's sharp eyes, watching me from across the council chamber, waiting to see if I would betray her trust or Philippe's.

The letter arrived at my desk at noon, slipped into my coat pocket by a boy who vanished before I could thank him. I recognized the hand at once—Isabelle's rounded, schoolgirl letters, so at odds with the danger she was in.

*Camille—*

*I cannot stay where I am. The house in Passy is watched. I have moved to the Saint-Éloi convent on the Rue des Rosiers, where the sisters do not ask questions. Please. I am so frightened. I see him everywhere. The man with the pale eyes. He knows I saw what happened to Élodie. He knows I can identify him.*

*He is looking for you too.*

*Come to me. Bring help. I trust you to know what kind.*

*Your friend, Isabelle*

I read it twice, then a third time, committing the convent's name to memory before touching the paper to the flame of my desk lamp. The edges blackened, curled, and fell to ash.

Help, she said. Trust you to know what kind.

She didn't know what I had become. She didn't know the man I now moved among, the blood I carried, the secret council that had declared me dead. And I could not tell her in a letter—too many eyes read the mail of La Société, and the wrong ones would find her before I did.

I wrote my reply in the code we had used as schoolgirls, a simple matter of the third letter of every fourth word. The message was short: *Stay hidden. I am alive. I will come by Friday.*

Then I folded the note, sealed it with wax, and addressed it to *Sœur Marguerite, Saint-Éloi Convent* —a name we had agreed upon years ago for emergencies, when I had thought we were playing at intrigue.

I was not playing anymore.

Dusk fell as I left the office. The streets of Paris transformed in the fading light—gas lamps flaring to life, the golden glow of café windows, the first glitter of evening gowns through carriage windows. The city of light was preparing its nightly masquerade.

I kept to the crowded boulevards, losing myself in the press of bodies. My new senses hummed with information—the quickened pulse of a woman walking too fast, the sour tang of fear from a man glancing over his shoulder, the sharp bite of hunger from a child pressed against a baker's window. Paris was a symphony of desperation, and I could hear every note.

I was crossing the Pont Neuf when I felt it.

A wrongness, like the moment before a storm. The air grew heavy. The sounds of the city dimmed, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the world. My heart—my traitorous, newly-racing heart—began to pound.

I kept walking, but I looked.

He stood at the far end of the bridge, silhouetted against the dying sun. Tall. Still. Watching me with an attention that felt physical.

And his eyes—even at this distance, even in the gloom—glowed red.

Not like Philippe's. Philippe's eyes were dark, warm, human at most times, only shifting to amber in certain lights. This was something else. A fire banked but never extinguished. A predator's gaze.

I turned down the Rue de Seine, quickening my step. Behind me, the soft scuff of boots on stone. Not running. Matching my pace. Patient.

I ducked into a bookshop, pretending interest in a display of penny dreadfuls while watching the street through the window. He passed by a moment later, his face in profile—sharp, young, handsome in a way that felt wrong, like a painting of a man rather than a man himself. He did not look into the shop. He kept walking.

I counted to fifty before slipping out the back, into the alley that ran behind the shop, toward the river.

I was halfway down the alley when he stepped from the shadows.

"You smell like him," he said. His voice was pleasant, almost amused. "Like the old blood. But you're not one of his. You're new. Raw."

I pressed my back against the damp wall, fingers finding the edge of my hatpin. Useless, perhaps, but it was something.

"I don't know what you mean," I said.

"You lie," he said, without anger. "I can taste it on you. The lie and the blood. He marked you, didn't he? The Marquess. Gave you a sip of himself to keep you breathing." He tilted his head, studying me like a curiosity. "What did you do to earn that gift?"

"I didn't earn anything. I—"

He moved.

I had no warning. One moment he was five paces away; the next he was before me, hand closing around my throat. Not squeezing, not yet. Just holding. The pressure of his fingers against my pulse was intimate, terrifying.

"She sent me," he said. "To find who's been meddling. To find the ones who carry his scent." His eyes flared brighter, and I saw the hunger there, barely leashed. "You'll do. You'll tell me where he is."

"No," I gasped.

He laughed, and the sound was wrong—too full of teeth. "You'll tell me because if you don't, I'll take you apart piece by piece, and I'll keep you alive through all of it. It's a talent I have."

His grip tightened. The world swam. The alley walls seemed to press in, and I felt something in my chest—Philippe's blood, his gift, his mark—flare in response.

I did not think. I moved.

My hand shot upward, hatpin driving into the soft tissue beneath his jaw. He howled, releasing me, and I ran. Not toward the street, where he could catch me easily. Into the dark, into the warren of alleys I had known since childhood, the secret paths of the poor that the rich never learned.

His roar echoed behind me, but I did not stop. I ran until my lungs burned, until the sounds of his pursuit faded, until I burst out onto the Boulevard Saint-Germain, gasping, wild-eyed, drawing stares from the evening crowd.

I stumbled into a cab, gave my address, and collapsed against the worn seat.

The mark on my skin where he had touched me felt cold.

He was looking for Philippe. And he served a woman—she sent me, he'd said. The woman in the portrait. The one who was supposed to be dead.

I had to warn him.

But when I reached my garret, the door was already ajar, and a pale envelope lay on my pillow. The wax seal bore a crescent moon pressed into black—the mark of the council.

Inside was a single line, in handwriting I did not recognize:

*The Marquess has been summoned to answer for the blood spill of his making. He will not save you. No one will.*