Read Chapter 22: The Escape

The gunshot was still singing in Camille's ears when Laurent moved. He was faster than she expected, faster than a man who had just been shot at should be, and he was already sweeping the worktable clean with one arm—portrait, pigment, brushes, all of it crashing to the floor in a spray of turpentine and linseed oil.

“The lamp,” he said, his voice low and hard. “The one on the far table. Kick it over.”

“What—”

“Now, Camille.”

She understood when she saw him drag a stained rag through the puddle of oil spreading across the wooden floorboards. The smell of solvent hit her nostrils a heartbeat before the idea did. Without thinking, she crossed to the far workbench and knocked the kerosene lamp off its hook. It shattered against the floor, and fire bloomed like a poisonous flower.

“What are you doing?” Vasseur shouted from the doorway. Smoke was already curling toward him, thin and hungry. “That’s the portrait! That’s the only one!”

Laurent stepped back from the spreading flames, his face half-lit by the orange glow. In his other hand he held something small and dark—the portrait. He’d caught it before it hit the ground. He looked at Vasseur, and Camille saw something shift in his eyes, something centuries old and patient.

“You want it?” Laurent said. “Catch.”

He threw it. Not toward Vasseur, but high and wide, arcing over the alchemist’s head into the dark corridor beyond the doorway. Vasseur’s head snapped to track it, and for the barest fraction of a second he lunged—

Laurent grabbed Camille’s wrist and pulled her toward the back of the workshop. There was a door she hadn’t noticed before, half-hidden behind a ruined gilded frame. He shouldered it open and they were in a narrow service alley, night air cold against her smoke-stung face.

Behind them, Vasseur’s shout rose above the crackle of fire. “You’ll burn it all! You’ll burn everything!”

Laurent didn’t slow down. He pulled her through a gap in a rusted iron fence, across a courtyard, and out onto a street she didn’t recognize. Only then did he stop, breathing hard, and put a hand against the stone wall.

“He’ll think the portrait’s in the fire,” Camille gasped. “He’ll think it’s burning.”

“He’ll think it burned.” Laurent’s jaw was tight. “He saw it fly past him. He’ll assume I threw it into the flames.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.” Laurent reached into his coat and pulled out the small dark object. It wasn’t the portrait. It was a scrap of black canvas, rolled tight, practically weightless. “I dropped the real one under the workbench when I cleared the table. This piece was an old test painting of Lucien’s. I hid it behind the frame months ago, waiting for a moment like this.”

Camille felt the silver key press against her thigh through the fabric of her pocket. She hadn’t let go of it when she kicked over the lamp. She hadn’t even thought about it. It had simply stayed.

“The real portrait’s still in the workshop,” she said. “It’s going to burn.”

“Yes.” Laurent’s voice was quiet. “It is.”

They stood in silence for a moment. The portrait of Camille—painted in sweat and obsession by an unknown hand, delivered as a threat, meant to be the instrument of Laurent’s destruction—was feeding the flames of Vasseur’s workshop. It would burn, not by Vasseur’s hand, not by Laurent’s, but by accident. By fire, and by Laurent’s willingness to fake his own defeat.

“That means Vasseur can’t inherit the curse,” Camille said slowly.

“He can’t inherit a burning he didn’t perform. The contract was always about the act. The intention. He’ll know it was a trick, eventually. And when he does, he’ll know the key is still out there.”

“But the portrait is gone. He said he needed the portrait *and* the key.”

Laurent looked at her, and for a moment the firelight from the distant workshop reflected in his eyes. “He needs to burn *your* portrait—the true-love portrait, of the two of us—to break the curse. But what I destroyed was the threat portrait. The one meant to frighten you.”

Camille’s heart stuttered. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the silver key, small and cold and impossibly heavy in her palm. “Then the true-love portrait is still somewhere.”

“It was never in the workshop,” Laurent said. “I checked when I identified the figure outside. The portrait of us—the one Édouard told you was the only honest thing he’s made—Édouard kept it. He showed it to you as a postcard. He kept the original.”

She remembered then. Édouard’s voice, apologetic, crooked: *I kept the original. This is just a copy, but it’s honest.*

“He lied,” she said.

“He obscured,” Laurent corrected. “He told you what he could. He’s been tangled in this as long as I have, as long as his brother was, and he doesn’t know how to be honest with anyone anymore.”

Laurent tried to push off the wall and shook his head, pressing a hand to his ribs. Camille saw the dark stain there, spreading through his shirt. She hadn’t noticed it in the chaos.

“You’re hurt.”

“The warning shot found a target,” Laurent said tightly. “A graze. Not enough to stop us.”

“We need to stop you bleeding.”

He smiled, faintly apologetic. “I know a place. It’s not far. It hasn’t been touched in a century, but the door still opens if you know the lock.”

They moved through streets that grew narrower and darker as they walked. Suresnes gave way to an older quarter, where limestone buildings leaned toward each other like old women whispering gossip. Laurent stopped at a door on a street so small it didn’t appear on most maps. The paint was peeling, and the window boxes were long dead, but the keyhole gleamed as though it had been polished recently.

He produced a key on a chain around his neck, small and ornate and nothing like the silver thing Camille carried. The lock turned easier terrain than it ought to have after so many years.

Inside, the air was stale and cold. Laurent found matches and lit a lamp, and the room revealed itself slowly—a painter’s studio, dusty and frozen in time. Canvases leaned against the walls like grave markers. A palette crusted with old pigment sat on the table. There were framed sketches of faces Camille didn’t recognize, and one of a woman who made her breath catch in her throat.

Élodie. It was Élodie, young and laughing, caught in charcoal with a kind of tenderness Camille had never seen in a century-old drawing.

“This was Lucien’s home,” Laurent said quietly. He’d made his way to a chair and was lowering himself into it with a controlled wince. “After everything, the lease passed through families, and eventually it came to a nephew who was happy to let it rot. I bought it through a proxy. Kept it as. A memory.”

“You loved them,” Camille said. “Lucien and Élodie both.”

Laurent’s hand paused over his ribs. He was pressing a wadded cloth against the wound, blood soaking through. “I loved them differently. Lucien was my brother.” He glanced at the charcoal of Élodie. “Élodie was a profound error on my part.”

Camille didn’t have anything to say to that. She crossed to the table and found a clean cloth, old but serviceable, and knelt beside his chair to help press it against his wound. He let her, which surprised her. He’d been so carefully guarded for weeks. Here, in this dust-filled room, it seemed he had no more guards left.

“You don’t have to trust me,” Camille said. “I’m not asking for that. But I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere until you’re not leaking anymore.”

Laurent looked at her face, and his expression shifted, something cracking through the stone he’d built around himself. He reached out slowly, as though she might spook, and touched a strand of hair that had escaped her braid. Gently, he pushed it behind her ear.

“I have spent a very long time trying not to love anyone,” he said. “It was easier when I didn’t know what it cost. But you have made it impossible, Camille. Not because you try to save me. Because you don’t seem to care whether you save me or not. You just act. You just stay.”

She felt his fingers leave her hair, and she caught his hand before he could pull it away. Pressed it against the cloth at his side, to keep him from bleeding and to keep him from leaving all at once.

“I’m not staying because I want to save you,” she said softly. “I’m staying because I want to know you. The real you. The century you. The man who kept a secret apartment for a brother he lost.”

Laurent let out a breath that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been so hollow. “That man is a fool.”

“That man is here,” Camille said. “And he survived his own brother’s betrayal and centuries of running, and somehow he still throws himself between me and a man with a gun. I don’t care if that’s love or madness. I want more of it.”

The silence between them was no longer painful. It was tired, and warm, and the fire crackled distant and far away, in a workshop that was already burning down to ash.

“I want to show you the truth,” Laurent said. But he didn’t let go of her hand. She pressed the cloth closer, and they sat together in the lamplight of a dead man’s studio, not speaking, and the night settled around them like a blanket they could both hide under.

At some point, exhausted, she laid her head on his shoulder and he rested his cheek against her hair. The blood had stopped soaking through the cloth. The fire had burned itself out somewhere behind them, on a hill they had left behind. The silver key was still in her pocket, heavy as a secret.

“Tomorrow,” Laurent murmured, half asleep, or perhaps not, “I’ll show you what the curse does to me. The whole of it.”

She didn’t ask him to clarify. She only said, “I’ll still be here.”

And they sat there, the two of them, until the lamp guttered and the room went dark, and the night passed over them like water over stones. Silence settled on that dusty, ancient place, and for a while there was no curse to break, no fire to outrun. Just two people, hiding from a world that didn’t want them to exist.