Read Chapter 15: A Brother's Visit

The footsteps were heavy on the stair, and they did not pause at any other door.

Élodie heard them the way she heard all sounds now—through the filter of fear. A man's boots, worn at the heel, coming up to her rooms. Her hands stilled over the inkpot. The copies were hidden in a false panel she'd spent the last hour carving into the floorboards of her closet. Twelve names done. Eleven to go.

The knock came hard and uninvited.

"Élodie." A voice she had not heard in four years.

She opened the door and found her brother standing in the lamplight of the corridor. Luc was thinner than she remembered, his face shadowed with neglect, his coat of a better cut than his boots suggested. He wore the hungry look of a man who had not eaten well in weeks and did not intend to suffer it much longer.

"Hello, sister." He smiled, revealing a chipped tooth that had been intact the last time she saw him. "You've done well for yourself. This place is a step up from Mother's hovel."

Élodie did not step aside. "What do you want, Luc?"

He glanced down the corridor, then shouldered past her into the room before she could stop him. He took in the narrow bed, the writing desk, the neat stacks of paper with a slow appraisal. "You could afford better," he said. "Copyist for the Tribunal. They pay well, don't they? Or perhaps you've found other income."

"Whatever you've heard is wrong."

"I haven't heard anything." He turned to face her, and the smile was gone. "That's the problem. Nobody hears anything about you anymore—Élodie the quiet one, who writes all day and says nothing. But I found out anyway. Amélie is in La Force."

Élodie kept her face still. "Amélie's fate is in the hands of the court. I have no part in it."

"The court." Luc laughed, a short, bitter sound. "The court hands down sentences like my butcher hands out scraps. And here's the thing I've always admired about you, Élodie. You never wasted time on what couldn't be changed. You let me rot in debtor's prison and didn't write a single letter." His eyes hardened. "But Amélie. You've been working miracles for Amélie, haven't you?"

"I've done nothing."

"You're a terrible liar. You always were." He stepped closer, and Élodie forced herself not to retreat. "The way I see it, you owe me. You let me starve. You let Father's debts fall to me. I've heard you're flush with coin now—copies commissioned by men who pay in silver, not hopes. So here's what we'll do. You'll give me fifty livres. Now. And I'll keep walking, and I'll never mention to anyone that your sister sits on a list with the others."

"I don't have fifty livres."

"Then find them. This time tomorrow." His gaze swept the room again, and this time it snagged on something on her desk—a letter with the Tribunal's seal. He picked it up before she could stop him. His eyes moved over it. "What's this? Aha. 'Re: arrest file 472-A. No record located.' " He read the bureaucratic death of the hope aloud, tasting it. "Someone's asking questions about Amélie's file. Or someone else's." He looked at her with a slow, dark grin. "Sister, what have you been up to?"

Élodie snatched the paper from his hand. "You'll leave. Now."

"Not without what I came for."

"Then you'll leave with nothing."

Luc's smile faded into something harder. His jaw worked. "You think I'm bluffing?" He pulled a folded paper from his coat and tossed it onto the desk. She recognized the broadsheet instantly—the daily list of the condemned, printed for public contention. Her eyes found names, hundreds of names, and she did not need to search far to understand what he was showing her.

"Look at today's list," Luc said. "Look at the numbers. Arrest records are supposed to match the names. But I've been to the Tribunal archives. I know a clerk who writes for me when I can't read the fine print. Your Amélie's name is on the execution list for next week." He paused. "But there's no arrest file for her in the archives. And no one named Amélie Moreau was ever tried by due process."

Élodie's blood turned cold.

"Interesting, isn't it?" Luc reached for the broadsheet and folded it back into his coat. "I don't know what you've done, and frankly I don't care. But I know something's wrong. And I know men in this city pay well for information about people who disappear people." He smiled. "Fifty livres. Tomorrow. Or I go to the Committee of General Security myself and show them the mismatch."

"You'd betray your own sister?" Élodie heard the break in her own voice.

"I'd betray anyone." Luc said it simply, without malice. "I learned that from watching you."

The boots on the stair were lighter this time. Swifter. Élodie did not hear them, but Luc did. His head turned toward the door an instant before Roussel appeared in the frame, filling it with his broad shoulders and heavier presence.

"Luc Moreau." Roussel said the name like a verdict. "I was told I might find you here."

Luc's eyes narrowed. He looked at Roussel, then at Élodie, and his posture changed—still angry, but now wary. "Do I know you?"

"You know my brother Maurice. Debts at the card table. You've never paid them." Roussel stepped into the room, closing the door behind him with a soft click. "Maurice sends his regards. He also asked me to remind you that you owe four men money, and that one of them serves on the Committee of General Security. He'd be very interested to learn that Luc Moreau—who owes him a substantial sum—has been asking questions about prison records that are no concern of his."

Luc's face drained. He looked from Roussel to Élodie and back. "This has nothing to do with you."

"It has everything to do with me." Roussel's voice was low, unhurried, dangerous. "Élodie works for me now. Copywork for the Tribunal's official records. It's honest work, and it keeps her alive. If you breathe a word about anything you think you know—to the Committee, to a clerk, to a bartender in the wrong part of town—I'll see to it that your debts find you. All of them. At once."

"You can't—"

"I can. And I will." Roussel did not raise his voice. He did not need to. "Now, you're going to walk out that door, and you're going to forget the name Élodie Moreau. If you remember it again—if you ever come near her—I'll make sure the Committee learns that you've been conducting your own investigation into their records. They'll have questions about that. Ones you won't survive."

Luc's jaw tightened. For a long moment, Élodie thought he might fight. Then the hunger in his eyes won out, and he stepped around Roussel with a grunt of disgust. He paused at the door.

"This isn't over," he said to Élodie. "You owe me. You always have."

He left. The door swung shut behind him. Élodie stood trembling in the center of the room, and she did not realize she had been holding her breath until Roussel put a hand on her shoulder and she let it out in a shuddering rush.

"Your brother," Roussel said, "is dangerous."

"I know."

"You don't know. Not yet. Luc is the kind of man who will sell a secret to whoever offers the most silver—and if no one offers enough, he'll sell it twice to the same man." Roussel's eyes were grim. "He'll be back. Or someone in his place will be."

What are we going to do?"

Roussel looked at her for a long moment. Then he crossed to the window and peered out through the gap in the shutters at the street below.

"Luc saw a copy of today's execution list. He saw that Amélie's name is on it." Roussel turned back to her. "That means we don't have a week anymore. We have three days. I'll make the arrangements. We move tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow night?" Élodie's pulse quickened. "But I haven't finished the copies. I still have eleven names—"

"Then you'd better work quickly." Roussel moved toward the door, then paused. "And Élodie. If Luc comes back before we're ready—" He stopped, and something passed over his face she couldn't read. "Don't try to reason with him. Don't try to pay him. You come find me first. Promise me."

She met his eyes. They were the eyes of a man who had lost a sister once, whose heart had organized itself around not losing another one. "I promise."

He nodded, once, and was gone.

Élodie stood alone in the silence of her room, the echo of her brother's footsteps still in her ears, the weight of Roussel's warning on her chest. Through the wall, the clock of Saint-Germain-des-Prés tolled eleven. She had one night left to finish the work that would save her sister. Outside, somewhere in the dark of Paris, her brother walked with a secret that could destroy them all.

She sat down at her desk, opened the inkpot, and began to write.