Read Chapter 18: The Aftermath of Blood

The blood had dried under his fingernails by the time he reached his apartment. Étienne stood over the sink for a long time, watching the water run pink into the drain, scrubbing until his knuckles ached and the skin around his nails was raw and clean. The shirt was ruined. He rolled it into a ball and shoved it to the bottom of the waste bin, then stood there, staring at nothing, his hands braced against the porcelain.

Two days. Forty-eight hours, maybe less if Guérini decided to be impatient.

He moved through the apartment like a man underwater. The small kitchen, the narrow hall, the bedroom where Claire's absence made the walls feel larger. In the corner of the bedroom, beneath the loose floorboard he'd cut years ago—back when the work was just a way to keep his father's illness paid for—he lifted the plank and looked down at the ledger. Dark leather. An accounting of every good thing he'd done wrong in the service of men who would kill him without a second thought.

Not here. Not anymore.

He took it into the bathroom and wrapped it twice in oilcloth, then again in a length of canvas he'd kept for no reason he could name. Back in the bedroom, he slid it beneath a different board—one near the window, where the light hit the floorboards at an angle that made the seams invisible. He pressed the wood flush with his heel and dragged the small rug back over it. Something about the weight beneath his foot settled his breathing.

Not enough to sleep.

He lay on the bed fully dressed. The ceiling was cracked in the corner. It had been cracked for three years; he'd never fixed it. He counted the lines until his eyes burned, then closed them, and the image of the dockworker—the way Guérini had held him, almost gently, one hand in his hair, the other moving with a practiced calm—rose up behind his lids.

The man's name had been Fontaine. Étienne didn't know why he knew that. Someone had said it. Maybe the man had said it himself, begging.

He got up. The apartment felt small and hostile. He made coffee though he didn't want it, just to have something to do with his hands. The steam fogged the window over the sink, and he wiped it clear and looked out at the street. Empty. The streetlamps made yellow pools on the wet cobblestones.

That's when he saw the car.

Black Citroën, parked across from his building, engine off. It hadn't been there when he'd come in. He watched it for a full minute. No one got out. No exhaust plume from a running engine. Just a shape in the dark, waiting.

His hand went to the bruise on his shoulder—the ache had settled deep, a dull throb under the skin. Guérini's fingerprints, left like a calling card.

He stepped back from the window. Let them watch. Let them think he was too frightened to do anything but sit in his apartment and wait. That was what they expected. That was what they wanted.

A knock came at the door, sharp and quick. Three beats.

Étienne's heart seized. He looked at the window again, then at the door, and made a calculation. If Guérini's men had wanted him dead, they wouldn't have knocked.

He opened it.

Moreau stood in the hallway, rain beaded on the shoulders of his coat, hat in his hands. He looked older in the low light, gray around the edges. He pushed past Étienne without waiting for an invitation, moved to the table, and set down a folded newspaper.

"Close the door."

Étienne did. "How do you know where I live?"

"I'm a cop, Morel. I know where everyone lives." Moreau tapped the newspaper. "You haven't seen this?"

Étienne crossed to the table. The newspaper was open to an inside page, a short article about the port commission's ongoing inquiry. His name wasn't mentioned. But there was a photograph—grainy, taken from a distance—of men leaving the customs house. Étienne recognized himself in the background, head turned, mid-stride.

"That was weeks ago."

"It ran yesterday." Moreau's eyes found his. "The mole knows there's an informant inside the port. Whoever they're working for has been told. Now they're searching."

The words settled into the room like smoke. Étienne sat down heavily in the chair opposite the inspector. "Searching how?"

"Watching. Asking questions. Looking for men who've changed their patterns." Moreau leaned forward, voice low. "You've been careful, but careful has a half-life. Someone notices you're looking over your shoulder more than usual. Someone notices you're not drinking at the same bar. Someone notices you went to a funeral for a man you barely knew—"

"Fontaine?" Étienne's voice cracked on the name. "That was—I had to. He worked in my section. It would have been suspicious if I hadn't."

Moreau studied him for a long moment. "You saw it, didn't you? The execution."

Étienne said nothing.

"I heard Guérini does his own work. Keeps the lesson personal." Moreau's voice was quieter now, almost human. "You need to understand something, Morel. The mole isn't just a leak. They're a hunter. They feed information to Guérini, and Guérini acts on it. Fontaine's operation was too small to matter—it was a message. The mole identifying a dockworker who skimmed on his own is how they demonstrate their worth. They're showing Guérini they can smell betrayal."

"And now they're trying to smell mine."

"Intelligence has a pattern," Moreau said. "Someone inside my operation is feeding Guérini what I know. But the port side—that's more delicate. That's you, and men like you."

Étienne stared at his own hands, clean now but still feeling the wet smear of Fontaine's blood. He'd wiped it from the concrete with rags and hot water from the nearby shed. The dockworkers had watched him do it. None had met his eyes.

"Then I need to find the mole before they find me."

Moreau's jaw tightened. "I told you. No independent investigation."

"With respect, Inspector, I'm running out of time to wait for your investigation to catch up." Étienne's voice was steady, but his heart hammered. "You said it yourself. The mole is hunting. That means they're active. They're moving. They're talking to someone."

"They're also protected. Whoever they are, they have access, and they've survived longer in Guérini's operation than any of my informants have lasted in the open." Moreau shook his head. "You're not hearing me. This isn't something you solve by digging around in files you're not supposed to touch. This is something you survive by staying small."

"Staying small got Fontaine killed in a warehouse with a knife in his throat."

The words hung between them. Moreau held his gaze, and something shifted in his expression—a flicker of acknowledgment, maybe even respect.

"Two days," Moreau said slowly. "You get me the mole, and the file on you disappears. Your name never appears in any warrant, any indictment, any testimony. You walk away from this port and this city a clean man."

Étienne felt the weight of the promise. "And if I don't?"

Moreau stood. He folded his newspaper and tucked it under his arm. "Then you'll have the same choices Fontaine had. Only you'll get to make them alone, without anyone watching your back."

He moved toward the door, then paused. For a moment he seemed on the verge of saying something else. Instead, he reached into his coat and pulled out a small card—plain, unmarked.

"If it gets bad—if Guérini gets too close—call this number. A man answers. Tell him you're the friend of the customs clerk who fixes watches."

Étienne took the card. It was blank on both sides. "Who is he?"

"A favor I've been saving up for thirty years." Moreau opened the door and stepped into the hallway. "Don't waste it."

The door clicked shut. Étienne listened to his footsteps recede down the stairs, then the quiet turn of the street door. He crossed to the window. The black Citroën was gone.

He sat down at the table and held the blank card between his fingers. A lifeline, maybe. Or another thread in the web.

He thought about the ledger under the floorboard. The manifest that would prove Reynaud's guilt. The ship he'd deliberately withheld from Moreau, his one piece of leverage against the inspector's promise.

There was a way through this. There had to be.

He collected the watch from the drawer where he'd hidden it after leaving the pawnshop—the face clean, the works quiet and steady. He turned it over in his palm, feeling the weight of his father's hours, the patient accumulation of a life spent doing honest work.

The clasp was still broken. He ran his thumb over the jagged edge of metal where it had snapped, and for the first time in days, he allowed himself to imagine the moment it would finally be fixed.

Tomorrow, he would go to the pawnbroker. He would ask about the scar-faced Corsican, about the picture in the paper, about anything that might give him a name to bring to Moreau.

Tonight, he sat in the dark with his father's watch in his hands, listening to the rain on the window, and did not sleep.