Read Chapter 11: The Number 40

The national warehouse squatted on the quai de la Grève like a sleeping beast, its stone flanks streaked with river damp and coal ash. Étienne watched it from the shadow of a grain cart for the better part of an hour, counting the guards. Two at the main gate. One patrolling the river side. The loading doors were chained, but a service door on the north wall opened every fifteen minutes as clerks shuffled in and out with manifests.

The number 40 burned in his pocket. A scrap of paper, creased and stained with the dead prisoner's final sweat.

He crossed the street with the easy gait of a man who belonged there. The clerk coming out of the service door was young, fumbling with a clay pipe he couldn't seem to light against the wind. Étienne produced his own striker—a carpenter's tool, common enough—and offered it.

"Filthy weather," the clerk said, cupping his hands around the spark.

"Filthy for all of us," Étienne replied, and when the clerk handed the striker back, he did not take it. "Keep it. I've another."

The clerk grinned, pocketed the striker, and went on his way. Étienne slipped through the service door before it fully closed.

Inside, the warehouse was a cathedral of crates and barrels, stacked in orderly ranks toward a ceiling lost in shadow. The air smelled of sawdust, tar, and the faint metallic tang that followed coinage. Lanterns hung at intervals, casting pools of yellow light across the aisles. Étienne moved between them, reading the stenciled marks on each crate.

Most bore the names of suppliers. Flour merchants. Wool merchants. Rope, iron, tallow. The business of feeding a city at war with half of Europe.

He found the chests near the back, against the eastern wall. A row of wooden strongboxes, each the size of a coffin for a small man, marked with painted numbers. He counted as he walked. Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.

At number forty, he stopped.

The chest was empty.

He had known it would be, somehow. The weight of the lid lifting too easily, the hollow echo when he set it back down. No gold. No bars. No ledger. Only a thin bed of straw and the deep scratches in the wood where heavy objects had been dragged across the grain.

He ran his fingers along the interior walls. His carpenter's eye caught it before his mind did—the nail heads on the left side were newer than those on the right. The panel had been removed and replaced. He pried at the edge with his knife and felt it give.

Behind the false panel, a single sheet of paper.

The manifest was dated three weeks prior. Forty chests delivered to the Conciergerie for safekeeping, then transferred to the national bank. Signed by a clerk Étienne had never heard of. Stamped with the seal of the Committee of Public Safety.

But next to chest number forty, someone had written in a different hand: *Diverted to the Mint. Melt order immediate.*

*Melt order.*

Étienne folded the paper and slipped it inside his coat, next to the ivory razor. The razor his brother had hidden. The razor that had somehow come back to him like a message from beyond the grave.

He was nearly to the service door when a voice stopped him.

"You're not Mistral."

Étienne turned. The man standing in the aisle was older, with the soft hands of a clerk and the sharp eyes of someone who had learned to see through other men's lies. He wore a green coat with brass buttons and carried a ledger under his arm the way another man might carry a weapon.

"The loading foreman sent me to check the manifests," Étienne said, keeping his voice steady. "Chests are light on the eastern wall."

"Light?" The clerk's brow furrowed. "I logged those myself. Every chest left with its seal intact."

"Then someone resealed them after."

The clerk's face went through several expressions in rapid succession—doubt, calculation, and finally a thin, careful smile. He stepped closer, and Étienne could smell the wine on his breath, sour and persistent.

"You're not Mistral," the clerk repeated. "You're not even a warehouse man. I know every face that walks these aisles."

Étienne's hand drifted toward the knife at his belt. The clerk saw it and held up his own hands, empty.

"I'm not your enemy," he said. "If you've found something in the chests, you're not the first. And I'd rather talk to you than report you and spend the rest of the week wondering what you knew."

"The chests were emptied before they reached the bank," Étienne said. "The manifest says they went to the Mint for melting."

"Of course it does." The clerk laughed, a dry, mirthless sound. "Where else would royal gold go but the national Mint? They've been melting everything that isn't nailed down. Coins, plate, candlesticks from the churches. But there's one thing I've noticed."

"How much did you have to bribe the clerk to get that?"

Étienne frowned. "What?"

The man leaned forward, lowering his voice. "The bars that come out of the Mint don't carry the king's stamp. They carry a new one. A fleur-de-lis with a crack through it. Haven't you seen one? They're circulating all over the city now. The men who pay with them are the same men who don't seem to worry about the guillotine."

A fleur-de-lis. The symbol of the crown. Cracked, but unmistakable.

"Why would the Mint mark royal gold with a broken royal symbol?" Étienne asked, though he already had the beginning of an answer forming in his gut.

"That's the question, isn't it? The Convention says the monarchy is dead. But someone in the Mint is still carving the old insignia into every bar that leaves the furnace. Either they're sentimental, or they're telling someone something." The clerk straightened and adjusted his ledger. "I've said too much. If you're caught here, I'll deny we ever spoke."

He turned and walked away, disappearing between the ranks of crates.

Étienne stood in the aisle for a long moment, the paper burning in his coat, the razor cold against his ribs. A fleur-de-lis with a crack through it. A mark meant to be recognized by someone. A signature.

He thought of Pierre, vanished with the gold. He thought of the hidden cell in the Conciergerie, the poisoned corpse, the dawn coach that carried the night ones away. He thought of Marchand, scheduled to face the blade tomorrow.

The gold wasn't stolen for the Republic. It was stolen to fund the Restoration. Someone was buying back a kingdom with the very metal the Revolution had confiscated.

He slipped out the service door and into the fog, the number 40 etched into his memory like a scar. The Mint Master would know. The Mint Master would have to be his next stop.

But as he crossed the bridge back toward the Île de la Cité, he caught a glimpse of a man in a brown coat standing beneath a streetlamp, watching him. The man didn't move when Étienne looked his way. He simply raised a hand in a gesture that might have been a greeting—or might have been a warning.

Étienne kept walking, but he didn't look back. The razor in his coat felt heavier with every step, and the fleur-de-lis burned in his mind like a brand.