Read Chapter 31: The Chase through the Streets

Rapp’s boots scraped against the frozen cobblestones as he bolted across the square, his greatcoat flapping behind him like a torn banner. Three guards flanked him, muskets half-raised, their breaths pluming in the bitter Vilna air.

Marchetti didn’t think. He ran.

Behind him, boots hammered the ice—Bonnard’s heavy stride, Lefebvre’s ragged uneven rhythm, Anya’s lighter footfalls. The night had cracked open. Lanterns swung in doorways, and somewhere a woman screamed.

“Cut him off through the alley!” Bonnard shouted.

Marchetti didn’t answer. Rapp had the lead by forty paces and a head start of knowing the streets. The square funneled into a narrow lane where the shadows pooled thick and black, and Rapp disappeared into them like ink into water.

Marchetti reached the alley mouth and skidded. A musket ball whined past his ear, chipping brick dust from the wall beside him. He flattened against the plaster, drew his pistol, and peered around the corner.

Two guards had halted mid-alley, reloading. The third was dragging Rapp onward—no, Rapp was dragging the *third*, pulling him by the arm, his face caught in the sliver of moonlight: sharp, pale, utterly composed.

“Sergeant,” Lefebvre gasped behind him, doubling over. “I can’t—the leg—you go. I’ll aim from here.”

Marchetti didn’t look back. “Cover the right window. Two floors up. There’s a man with a lantern.”

Lefebvre straightened, biting down on something that might have been a scream, and raised his musket.

The first guard finished loading and fired blindly down the alley. Marchetti heard the ball sing past and answered with his own pistol. The shot cracked loud as breaking ice, and the guard dropped with a choked sound, his musket clattering across the stones.

“Reload him!” Marchetti shouted.

Anya was already there, pulling the dead guard’s cartridge box free and sliding it across the ground to him. She crouched low, eyes scanning the rooftops. “Second alley, thirty paces left. There’s a roof crossing. He’ll try to loop back to the cathedral.”

Marchetti looked at her. “How do you know?”

Her jaw tightened. “Because I used to play in these streets. And because my father planned this escape route for a contingency last winter. Rapp knows it too.”

Bonnard pressed forward, musket leveled, and fired down the alley. A cry answered, not Rapp’s—a guard’s. The way cleared.

“Go,” Marchetti said.

They sprinted down the alley, boots slipping on red-black ice. The dead guard lay crumpled, his blood steaming in the cold. Bonnard stepped over him without breaking stride. Marchetti followed, reloading his pistol as he ran, fingers numb and fumbling with the powder charge.

The alley opened into a second square, smaller than the first, dominated by a boarded-up fountain. Shops ringed it, their windows dark. A single figure crossed the far edge—greatcoat, no guard.

“Rapp!” Marchetti shouted.

The figure didn’t stop. He raised his hand, and Marchetti saw it held a lantern. He hurled it back over his shoulder. Glass shattered on the cobblestones. Oil splashed, then bloomed—an arc of yellow fire licking across the dry boards of a shop front.

Flames clawed up the facade in seconds.

“He’s burning the street,” Bonnard muttered. “He wants cover.”

Smoke rolled across the square, thick and choking. The fire lit the snow orange. Through the heat-shimmer, Rapp dodged right, between a butcher’s shop and a chandler’s office.

Marchetti broke into a run. The heat hit him in a wave, blistering on his exposed cheeks. He pulled his scarf over his mouth and plunged through the smoke.

A guard burst from the haze, bayonet low. Marchetti swayed left, caught the musket’s barrel, and used the man’s momentum. The guard’s chin met his elbow with a wet crack. He crumpled.

Beyond him, Rapp had stopped.

He stood under an archway at the end of a narrow passage, a pistol raised—not at Marchetti. Over his shoulder. At Anya.

“Bring the girl closer, Sergeant, and I’ll put a ball through her father’s name myself,” Rapp said. His voice was smooth, reasonable. Like they were discussing weather.

Marchetti steadied his own pistol. Both of them had one shot. Thirty paces. The archway framed Rapp like a portrait.

Anya stepped from behind Marchetti, into the open.

“Don’t,” Marchetti said.

“He won’t shoot me.” She kept walking. “I know what he wants.”

Rapp’s lips curved into a smile that did not reach his eyes. “And what do I want, half-breed child?”

“My father’s list. The one with your name on it.” She stopped five paces from him. “You don’t want it in French hands. You don’t want it in Russian hands. You want it in yours.”

Rapp chuckled. “Volkov raised a clever girl. Pity you chose the wrong side.”

He fired.

Marchetti’s pistol came up—but Anya had already dropped. The ball passed where her head had been and sparked off the archway behind her.

Rapp turned and ran.

Marchetti sprinted, hurdling Anya’s crouched form. The passage spat them out onto a wide boulevard lined with lime trees, their branches white with frost. At the far end rose the green dome of the cathedral, dark and silent.

Rapp reached a side door, wrenched it open, and vanished inside.

Marchetti slowed, breathing hard, pistol empty. He stopped before the door, then looked back. Bonnard was emerging from the smoke, helping Lefebvre. Anya followed close behind.

“Church,” Bonnard said. “He’ll have guards or not, but he can’t run forever.”

Lefebvre leaned against the wall, face gray with pain. “We’re out of shot.”

Marchetti reloaded in the shadow of the cathedral, one eye on the door. The sky was feathering pale at the edge of the rooftops. Dawn was an hour away.

Anya pressed close, and when she spoke, her voice was low and tight. “There’s something Rapp said. He called me half-breed. He knows who I am.”

“He knows your father.”

“He knows more than that.” She looked at the door. “Before we left the stockade, the prisoner said a name. I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t want to. But Rapp just used it.”

Marchetti turned to face her, slow. “What name?”

Anya swallowed. “Montbrun.”

The silence between them was hard and cold. Montbrun—the dead general, La Grande Armée’s cavalry commander, felled in the first battle of the retreat. A name to rally loyalists, or to hang them for treason.

“That’s not on the list,” Marchetti said. It wasn’t a question.

“It was the prisoner’s last word. Volkov knew it too.” She pulled her scarf up over her chin. “It’s not a name from the past. It’s a name for the future. There’s a man in Paris calling himself Montbrun, and Rapp answers to him.”

Bonnard had gone still, rifle halfway cleaned. Layback was absorbing the news. Lefebvre stared at the cathedral door.

Marchetti turned the name over in his mind like a coin that might be counterfeit. Every layer of this betrayal had another beneath it. This one seemed carved in stone. If Rapp answered to a false Montbrun, the conspiracy reached past the Russian front and into the heart of France itself.

“The prisoner,” Lefebvre said hoarsely. “He’s still back there. He knew this name and they wanted him dead for it.”

Marchetti nodded, checking his pistol’s frizzen. “Then we don’t kill Rapp yet. We make him tell us everything first.”

No one argued.

Marchetti eased the cathedral door open and stepped into the dark, chased by the friend he protected and the secret that had chosen him.