Read Chapter 15: A Night of Fire

The safe house Philippe chose was a wine merchant’s cellar off the Rue des Lombards, the air thick with cork dust and the ghost of a hundred vintages. A single lamp burned on an upturned cask, and Philippe stood beside it, his silhouette long and sharp against the stone. He had not yet removed his coat, and his gloves were still buttoned—a man prepared to leave at any moment.

Camille descended the last step and let the door fall shut behind her. The sound echoed once, then died. She could hear his heartbeat. That was new. She could hear the drip of condensation somewhere in the dark, the scuttle of a rat in the walls. And beneath it all, the faint, steady thrum of Philippe’s blood moving through him like a river under ice.

“You came,” he said. It was not a question. There was relief in it, and something else—something wary.

“You said it was urgent.”

“It is.” He stepped toward her, and the lamp caught his face. He looked tired, which was strange. She had never seen him tired. The fine lines at the corners of his eyes seemed deeper, the set of his jaw harder. “The council moved the vote. They want to declare the Blood Price satisfied a decade early. They are desperate.”

“And that makes them dangerous.”

“It makes them careless.” He took another step, close enough now that she could smell him—cedar and rain and that indefinable undertone that was not quite human. “Camille, I need you to understand something. If they find out you are alive, if they find out what I gave you, they will not ask questions. They will act.”

“Then we act first.” She tilted her chin up. “You promised me proof. The ledger. The atelier. You promised me truth.”

“I promised you everything.” His voice dropped. “And I meant it.”

The space between them collapsed. His hand came up, cold fingers brushing the curve of her jaw, tilting her face toward the lamplight. She should have pulled back. She should have demanded answers before she gave him anything else. But the blood in her veins hummed at his proximity, a pull she could not name and did not want to resist.

He kissed her. It was not gentle. It was a claim, a confession, a question all at once. His mouth was cold against hers, but the heat that flooded her chest was anything but. She gripped the lapels of his coat and pulled him closer, and for one reckless moment she forgot the ledger, the poison, the red-eyed thing that had chased her through the dark.

Then the first crack of fire sounded above them.

Philippe broke away first, his head snapping toward the ceiling. “They found us.”

The word *they* had barely left his lips when the cellar door burst inward, a wall of flame and black smoke roiling behind it. The heat hit Camille like a physical blow, and her new senses screamed—light flaring, sound splintering, the scent of kerosene and burning timber flooding her nose until she gagged.

“This way.” Philippe grabbed her wrist and hauled her toward the back of the cellar, past the racks of dusty bottles, toward a low arch she had not noticed before. He shoved a wine rack aside—it scraped across stone with a shriek—and revealed an iron grate set into the wall.

“What is that?”

“A collector’s paranoia.” He knelt and wrenched the grate open. “A tunnel to the sewer. Go.”

She did not argue. She crawled into the dark, cold water soaking through her skirts almost immediately, the stench of the Paris sewers rising to meet her. Philippe followed, pulling the grate shut behind him. The fire roared beyond it, hungry and furious, but the stone walls held.

“They set the street on fire,” she said, her voice shaking. “In the middle of Paris. How bold are they?”

“They are not bold.” Philippe’s voice was flat in the dark. “They are desperate. And they are hunting you.”

Silence stretched between them, broken only by the drip of water and the distant rumble of the city above. Camille’s heart was still hammering, her skin prickling with the residue of his kiss and the brush of death. She pushed herself up from the filthy water and faced him in the dark. She could see him. Just barely—a faint luminescence in his eyes, the pale shape of his face. The blood he had given her had made her something more than she was, and she hated him for it and needed him for it in the same breath.

“You were going to tell me the truth,” she said. “Before the fire. You were going to tell me something.”

He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I have been aging backwards for a century.”

The words hung in the dark like a struck bell. Camille stared at him, waiting for the joke, the correction, the careful explanation. None came.

“Backwards,” she repeated. “That is not—you cannot mean you are getting younger.”

“I was born in 1741. I looked forty when I was thirty. I looked thirty when I was fifty. By the time I met Élodie, I looked barely twenty-five.” His voice was hollow, like a man reciting a lesson he had learned by rote long ago. “I have watched myself grow younger while the world grows older around me. Every decade, a little less of the man I was. Every century, a little more of the stranger I am becoming.”

Camille’s mind raced, trying to find the shape of it. “Then the Blood Price—is that what keeps you young?”

“It is what keeps us all from aging at all. The bargain, the price, the ritual—I do not know what to call it anymore. I only know what happens when it is not paid.” He paused. “I have seen men and women older than me in years and younger in face. And I have seen what happens when one of us refuses. They do not die. They decay. Slowly, over decades, until there is nothing left but a husk that still breathes.”

“Your brother,” Camille said. The word came to her unbidden, a door swinging open in her mind. “The true leader of the faction. It is your brother.”

Philippe did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was barely above a whisper. “You were always too clever for your own good.”

“Tell me his name.”

“You know his name.” Philippe’s eyes found hers in the dark, and for the first time since she had met him, there was fear in them. Real fear, raw and unguarded. “You have met him. At the council. The one with the scar across his throat—the one I claimed I suspected. I lied. I have known for years. He is my brother, Camille. He is the one who wrote Élodie’s name in that ledger. He is the one who has been killing for a century, and he has been doing it in my name.”

The water lapped cold around Camille’s ankles. Above them, the fire crackled and faded. She should have felt shock, or horror, or betrayal. Instead, she felt a terrible, quiet clarity settle over her like a shroud.

“He wants you gone,” she said slowly. “He wants you out of the way. And he is using me to do it.”

Philippe’s jaw tightened. “He wanted you dead. He orchestrated the poison on the carriage—but not for you. For me. He knew you would ride in my seat. He knew you would take the wound meant for my heart. And when you survived, when he sensed my blood in you, he sent the red-eyed creature to finish what the needle began.”

“Because he cannot kill you himself.”

“He cannot. The laws of our kind forbid kin-slaying. But he can destroy everything I love, and he can do it slowly, and he can do it while smiling at me across the council table.”

Camille let out a slow breath. The tunnel stretched dark before them, and somewhere above, Paris burned. But in this moment, there was only the two of them in the dark, bound by blood and lies and the terrible truth between them.

“Then we do not run,” she said. “We go to the atelier. We find the provenance of those pages, and we prove to the council that your brother is the murderer. We take his name and his game, and we end it.”

Philippe stared at her. “You still want to help me. After everything I have kept from you. After my brother tried to kill you twice.”

“I am not helping you.” Camille stepped closer, close enough to feel the cold radiating off his skin. “I am helping the woman in that portrait. I am helping the dead who have been written off as accidents. I am helping my sister, who deserves to have her murderer dragged into the light. And if saving you is part of that bargain, then so be it. But do not mistake my purpose for forgiveness, Philippe. You owe me the truth, and I intend to collect.”

For a long moment, he did not move. Then, slowly, he reached out and took her hand. His fingers were cold, but his grip was steady.

“The atelier is in the Marais,” he said. “Forgive me—but we must go through the fire.”