Read Chapter 31: Forsaken

The chapel door groaned shut behind her, and Camille found herself in a Paris she no longer recognized. The gaslights hissed and sputtered along the Boulevard de Port-Royal, casting jaundiced pools on wet cobblestones. Somewhere a horse whinnied, a carriage clattered past, a woman laughed behind a curtained window—ordinary sounds, all of them, from an ordinary world she had been torn from.

She walked. That was all she could do. The hunger burned low in her belly like banked coals, a patient, sullen flame that licked at the edges of her thoughts whenever she let her mind go quiet. She kept her jaw clenched, her teeth pressed together, and counted her footsteps.

*One. Two. Three.*

She passed a café where a group of students argued over a chessboard, their voices loud and careless. The scent of roasted chicken wafted through the door, rich and warm, and her stomach seized. Not with hunger for food—that appetite had died weeks ago—but with something else. Something sharper. The blood beneath their skin sang to her, a faint hum she could only hear when she stopped trying not to.

She kept walking.

By the time she reached the Seine, her shoes were wet through and her hair had escaped its pins in long, dark strands that clung to her neck. She stopped at the iron railing and stared down at the black water, watching the reflection of the city ripple and break.

*Philippe.* The name tasted like ash. He had been her anchor, her north star, the man who had pulled her from the clutches of death and shown her a world of shadowed elegance and forbidden knowledge. And now Élodie—*Élodie, alive, her sister, her betrayer, her protector*—had shattered that image with a single word.

*Original.*

Camille pressed her palms against the cold iron and forced herself to breathe. The night air smelled of river mud and coal smoke and, faintly, of blood from a butcher's stall somewhere upstream.

"You look lost, mademoiselle."

She spun. A boy stood three paces away, all sharp elbows and sharper eyes. He couldn't have been more than ten, with a cap pulled low over his brow and a threadbare coat that had been patched so many times it was more thread than coat. He held out a hand, palm up, a single copper coin glinting in the lamplight.

"For a story," he said. "You look like you know some."

Camille stared at him. The hunger pulsed, and for one horrible, crystalline moment, she imagined the thin blue vein at his throat, the way it would feel beneath her tongue—

She recoiled from the thought as if slapped. "I'm not a storyteller," she said, her voice rough.

"You're a writer." The boy shrugged. "I seen you before, at Le Figaro. You're the one who writes about the murders. Everyone says you're fearless." He lowered his hand but didn't put the coin away. "My ma used to read your articles to me before she died."

The words hit Camille somewhere soft, somewhere she thought the turning had left no room for feeling. She sank onto the edge of a stone block, heedless of the damp, and pressed a hand to her chest.

*Fearless.* What a joke. She had spent the night fleeing her sister, her lover, and her own reflection.

"One story," she said, more to herself than to him. "A short one. And then you go home, child. It's not safe out here."

He grinned and sat cross-legged on the pavement before her, the coin still glinting in his hand. "Make it a good one, then."

Camille closed her eyes. The hunger stirred again, but she pushed it down, down, down, and reached for something else. A story. A fiction. A distraction she could build with words the way other women built walls with bricks.

"Once," she began, "there was a woman who lived in a castle made of night."

The boy leaned forward. His eyes were bright, brown like autumn chestnuts, and Camille found she could not look away from them.

"Not a castle of stone," she continued, "but of darkness itself. The walls were shadows, and the windows were stars, and it stood at the edge of the world where the sea meets the sky. The woman had lived there for a very long time—so long, in fact, that she had forgotten her own name."

"Was she a prisoner?" the boy asked.

"No." Camille shook her head slowly. "She was the guard. The castle existed to hold something inside it—something that must never be allowed to leave. And the woman's duty was to sit at the gate and watch. Day after day. Year after year. She watched the stars wheel overhead and the sea beat against the cliffs below, and she told herself that to guard was enough."

The boy frowned. "But she was alone."

"Yes," Camille whispered. "She was very much alone."

The hunger surged again, and she felt her jaw unlock, her fangs descend. She clamped her lips shut so fast her teeth clicked, and she looked away, pretending to study the flow of the river.

"Go on," the boy pressed. "What happened next?"

Camille swallowed. The taste of her own blood, from where her fangs had cut the inside of her lip, flooded her mouth—copper and salt and somehow *not enough*, not nearly enough. She thought of Élodie's face in the greenhouse, that mixture of love and desperation. She thought of the ritual, three nights, a way back to the woman she had been.

"Why doesn't she leave?" the boy asked when Camille fell silent. "She could just... walk away."

"She doesn't know how." Camille's voice cracked. "She has forgotten there is a world beyond the castle. She has forgotten that she was once a girl with a family, with dreams, with a life that did not revolve around the thing she guards. And some part of her is afraid that if she stops guarding—if she lets the thing out—she will have no purpose at all. She will be nothing."

The boy studied her for a long moment. Then he tossed the coin in the air and caught it. "That's a sad story," he said.

"It is."

"Does it end well?"

Camille looked at him—at this small, sharp-eyed child who had lost his mother and still had the nerve to ask for a story on a cold Paris night—and felt something crack open inside her chest. Not the hunger. Something older. Something that had been locked away ever since she woke up changed, ever since she saw her own fangs in the mirror, ever since she learned that the man she loved might be a monster wearing a hundred faces.

"It ends," she said, "with the woman remembering her name. And with that name, she remembers everything else—her mother's voice, her sister's laugh, the first time she fell in love. She remembers that she was not made to guard a castle. She was made to live. And so she opens the gate, and she steps into the dark—not knowing what awaits her, only knowing that she cannot stay."

"But what about the thing inside the castle?" the boy asked. "Does it escape?"

That was the question, wasn't it? Camille thought of the hunger in her throat, the beast that wore her skin. Élodie believed it could be cut out, burned away, reversed with a ritual she had never spoken of before tonight. Philippe—*if he was Philippe*—believed it was a gift, a transcendence, something to be mastered and worn like a fine coat at the Opera.

"It is still there," Camille said. "But the woman decides that she and the thing will have to learn to live together. Or die apart. She doesn't know which, and she is terrified, but she is also free."

The boy stood, brushing dust off his trousers, and pressed the coin into Camille's palm. His fingers were cold, and she felt the rush of blood beneath his skin like a distant drum.

"For the story," he said. "It's a good one. I'll remember it."

He was gone before she could protest, swallowed by the night like a shadow recalled to darkness. Camille stared at the copper coin in her hand, the smooth weight of it, the warmth it still held from his pocket.

The hunger ebbed. For the first time in hours, it ebbed.

She sat there for a long time, watching the river flow, feeling the cold seep through her thin dress. She did not know what to believe anymore. She did not know who to trust. Philippe had lied to her—or Élodie had. Her sister had faked her death and watched over her from the shadows—or she had been a pawn in a game Camille did not yet understand.

But she knew her name. She was Camille Delacroix. She was a journalist who had written the truth when no one else dared. She was a woman who had been told she was a monster, and had decided, against all evidence, that she might still be something more.

Footsteps approached, unhurried. She did not turn.

"Camille."

His voice was soft, familiar, laced with centuries of sorrow. She heard him stop a few paces away, respecting a distance she had not consented to cross.

"You look like a drowning woman," Philippe said.

She turned the coin over in her fingers. "I met a boy who asked me for a story."

"And what story did you tell?"

"I told him about a woman who forgot herself." She finally looked up. Philippe stood in the spill of a gaslamp, his dark coat immaculate even now, his face a mask of careful composure. She searched for the man she had kissed in the study at Étienne Moreau's vineyard, the man who had held her hand and promised her the world would open to her like a flower.

She found only a stranger.

"Élodie says you orchestrated my turning," Camille said. "She says you have worn many names, and that you are the first of your kind."

The smallest flicker crossed his face—gone before she could name it. "Élodie has been lying to you since before you drew your first breath."

"And you haven't?"

Philippe reached into his collar and undid the top two buttons of his shirt. Camille tensed, but he did not step closer. He simply pulled the fabric aside, revealing the hollow of his throat and, just below his collarbone—

A birthmark. Dark and unmistakable, shaped like a crescent moon cradling a star. The exact twin of the mark she had seen on Élodie's wrist when they embraced in the greenhouse, when her sister had whispered apologies and promises through tears.

Camille's breath caught.

"Élodie and I were turned in the same year," Philippe said quietly. "By the same hand. The Baron was my sire before he was hers. We share something that runs deeper than blood—deeper than loyalty, deeper than love." He let the shirt fall and met her eyes. "She has told you I am the first vampire. She is wrong. She has told you I orchestrated your turning. She is wrong. But she has also told you that you can be human again." A long pause. "On that one point, she is telling the truth."

Camille stood, the coin still clutched in her fist. The hunger had returned, soft and insistent, but she did not let it rule her. Not yet.

"Why should I believe you?" she asked.

Philippe's smile was tired, ancient. "Because I have been alive for four hundred years, Camille. I have lied to kings and queens, to popes and courtesans, to women and men who believed they owned my heart. Every lie I have ever told has been in service of survival." He stepped closer, and she let him. "But I have never lied to you."

The words hung between them, delicate as glass. Camille looked at the birthmark on his throat, then at her hands, then at the dark water of the Seine.

"I don't know what to believe," she said at last.

Philippe said nothing. He simply stood beside her, sharing the silence, as the river flowed past and the city slept around them both.