Read Chapter 8: Sister's Shadow

The morning light was mercifully dim when Camille arrived at Le Figaro, the gray Parisian sky pressing against the windows like a held breath. She had not slept. The photograph burned in her coat pocket—her mother, young and radiant, arm linked with Philippe’s, both wearing matching lockets.

The year 1867 was scrawled on the back in her mother’s hand.

“Delacroix.” Her editor, Monsieur Bouchard, gestured her into his office without looking up from his desk. He was a man of compact fury and smaller patience. “I have an assignment.”

“The disappearances—?”

“Are no longer yours.” He slid a sheet of paper across the desk. “The Montfort family has friends in high places, Camille. Very high. I received a visit yesterday from a man who suggested, in the politest possible terms, that your continued interest in the aristocracy would be… regrettable.”

She picked up the paper. *“The Golden Age of Parisian Salons: A Society Column.”*

“This is fluff.”

“This is survival.” Bouchard finally met her eyes. There was something tired there, something almost apologetic. “You write this, you keep your position. You chase ghosts, you find another employer. Choose.”

Camille folded the paper and slipped it into her pocket beside the photograph. “I’ll need the afternoon for research.”

“Research.”

“Salons don’t write themselves, Monsieur.”

He waved her away, already lost in another file. She left before he could change his mind.

---

The morgue sat beneath the Pont Saint-Michel, its entrance marked by nothing but a rusted iron door and the smell of river water. Camille had been here twice before in her career, both times with a police escort and a signed letter of introduction. Today she had neither.

She knocked three times anyway.

A porter opened the door, a wizened man with gray-veined hands and no patience for etiquette. “We’re closed to visitors.”

“I’m not a visitor.” Camille produced her press credentials and the society column, folded to show the Le Figaro masthead. “I’m writing a piece on Parisian families of note. I need to verify a record of a death from several years ago—a private matter involving household staff. The family wishes to commission a memorial.”

The lie was smooth enough. The porter squinted at her, then at the paper, and shrugged. “Ten minutes. Don’t touch anything.”

The interior was cold in the way of places where warmth never reaches—a deep, wet chill that settled into the bones. Camille followed him past rows of steel drawers, each tagged with a name or a question mark. The air was thick with chemicals that couldn’t quite mask the sweetness beneath.

“Which family?” the porter asked.

“Montfort.”

He stopped walking.

“You’ll want the cold annex,” he said, voice dropping. “They keep the unclaimed ones there. The ones that come in wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Missing records. No family. No paperwork. Just bodies somebody wanted gone.” He gestured toward a far door. “Through there. Lock’s broken. I didn’t see you, and you didn’t see me.”

He retreated without another word.

Camille pushed through the annex door. It was darker here, lit only by a single gas lamp that threw long shadows across the walls. The drawers were smaller—older models, some with rusted handles that had turned green with age.

She started at the far end, working her way through the tags. Most were blank. A few bore names she didn’t recognize. One, near the bottom, had been carved with a knife into the metal: *Unclaimed, 1887.*

Camille pulled the drawer open.

The body was preserved well enough—the cold did that much, at least. A woman, perhaps five years younger than Camille herself, with dark hair that had been braided and pinned in the old style. Her eyes were closed, her face peaceful in that false way of the dead. She wore a plain wool dress, the kind worn by servants, stained dark at the collar.

Camille’s hand went to her mouth.

She knew that face. She knew the curve of the jaw, the stubborn set of the lips, the way the hair grew in a widow’s peak above the brow. She had memorized it from a small portrait in her mother’s bedroom, taken down the year of the funeral and never spoken of again.

“Élodie,” Camille whispered.

Her sister. Dead of—of what had they said? Consumption. The fever that had taken her in a single winter.

But Élodie had been buried. Camille remembered the small ceremony, the rain, her mother’s hand gripping hers with desperate force as the coffin was lowered into the earth.

She had been thirteen. She had worn black for a year.

This body was never buried. It was never claimed. It was left here, in the dark, with no record and no name.

Camille reached for the cuff of her sister’s sleeve, pulling it back with shaking hands. The skin beneath was pale, waxy, pricked with the marks of old needles and the deeper marks of time.

And there, on the inside of the wrist—

A burn. Not accidental. Not a scar raised by illness or injury. It was precise, deliberate, a pattern of interlocking lines that caught the lamplight like a brand.

The solar mark.

Camille’s knees buckled. She caught herself on the edge of the drawer, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. Her sister. Her sister had been one of them. Had been taken, had been killed, had been left here while her family mourned an empty coffin.

Or—

She forced herself to think. Élodie was said to have died in 1882. The tag said 1887. Five years apart. Either the body had been stored and re-tagged, or—

No. She would not jump to conclusions. She would verify.

She looked at her sister’s face again, touched her cheek with two fingers. The skin was cold, but no colder than the others in this place.

“What happened to you?” she asked, though the dead offered no answers.

A sound came from behind her. A soft scrape of leather on stone.

Camille turned.

The masked figure stood in the doorway of the annex, silhouetted against the dim light of the main chamber. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in black. The mask was the same: dark cloth, no features, only holes where the eyes should be.

He had found her again.

Camille backed against the drawer, her sister’s body between her and the intruder. “You’re the Marquis’s man.”

He did not answer. He took a step forward.

“He sent you to kill me.”

Another step.

Camille’s hand closed around the metal handle of the drawer. It was the only weapon she had. She would not die here, not beside her sister’s corpse, not without knowing the truth.

But the figure stopped. He tilted his head, as though listening to something beyond the walls. Then, with a fluid grace that belonged to no normal man, he drew a small object from his coat and tossed it to her.

It landed at her feet with a soft clatter—a silver locket, cracked open, its hinge broken.

Philippe’s likeness stared up at her from the interior. The other side held a photograph of her mother.

In her mother’s handwriting, cramped and quick: *“He knows. Be careful.”*

When Camille looked up, the masked man was gone.

She stood there for a long moment, trembling, the locket clutched in her hand. Somewhere above, the city stirred with the sounds of the day. Here, in the cold beneath the river, the dead kept their secrets.

Camille closed the drawer gently, pressing her sister’s cheek one last time.

“I will find who did this to you,” she promised. “Whatever it costs.”

She slipped the locket into her pocket beside the photograph and left the morgue without looking back.

The afternoon light stung her eyes. She blinked against it, steadying herself on the wall of the bridge, and retrieved the note that had been pinned beneath the locket. It was small, folded into quarters, sealed with a drop of black wax bearing the Montfort crest.

She broke the seal.

*My dearest Camille,*

*Your sister was not the first of your family I failed to save. I hope you will allow me the chance to correct my mistake. Meet me beneath the opera house at dusk. Come alone.* *Do not trust the Marquis. But trust that I am not what he is.*

*— P.*

Camille stared at the words until they blurred.

Her sister, her mother, the Montforts, and the hidden passages beneath the Palais Garnier. Everything converged on one point. She had thought Philippe her enemy. She had thought him her father.

Now, she did not know what he was.

But dusk was coming, and she had a promise to keep.