Read Chapter 13: The Prince's Confession

The crossroads outside her cousin’s farm was nothing but a scar of mud and gravel, and Élise had been standing in the rain for eleven minutes. No headlights. No escort. Just the wet dark and the weight of her service pistol, slippery in her gloved hand.

Then a low growl of an engine, and a black Citroën rolled out of the treeline, lights off. It stopped twenty meters short. The driver’s door opened, and a man stepped out—not Louis. Tall, broad, with the flat expression of a palace security veteran. He raised a hand, palm out, then gestured for her to approach.

Élise didn’t move.

“Captain Moreau,” the man called, voice carrying flat over the rain. “The Prince is waiting. You’ll be searched, then you’ll be driven.”

“And if I decline the search?”

“Then you decline the Prince.”

She weighed the options. Rogue agent, suspended, technically a fugitive from her own investigation. The pistol was her only real protection, but if Louis wanted her dead, he wouldn’t send one man to a crossroads in Normandy. He’d already have done it from a thousand kilometers away.

She walked forward, hands raised, and let the man pat her down. He took her pistol, her phone, her knife—efficient, practiced—and put them in a metal lockbox in the trunk.

“Get in,” he said.

The farmhouse was twenty minutes deeper into the countryside, a stone ruin with a restored wing that smelled of woodsmoke and old plaster. The prince sat at a trestle table by the hearth, a bottle of wine open between his hands, untouched. He looked thinner than his official portraits—sharp cheekbones, shadows under his eyes, a raw exhaustion that no makeup artist had been allowed to touch.

“Captain Moreau,” Louis said, rising. His handshake was brief, dry, and surprisingly firm. “I apologize for the theater.”

“Your Highness,” she said, because old habits died hard, even in a barn at midnight.

“Call me Louis. Please. I’ve had quite enough of titles this week.” He gestured to the chair across from him. “Sit. Drink. You look like you haven’t slept since the last time I didn’t sleep.”

She sat. The wine was Burgundy, better than anything she’d ever poured at her father’s table. She didn’t drink it.

“You reached out through a channel my grandfather thought was dead,” Louis said, settling back. “That took nerve. Finding it took even more.”

“It was in the palace protocol manuals, buried under confidentiality waivers. The kind no one reads unless they’re desperate.” She met his eyes. “I’m desperate, Your High—Louis.”

He nodded slowly, then poured himself the wine he hadn’t touched and drank half the glass in one swallow. “You identified the attack as a warning,” he said. “Not an assassination.”

“Yes. The shot was deliberately off. The chambermaid was meant to be collateral, not the target. And the assassin dropped his cufflink at the scene—a gold lily, custom-made, traceable. A man who intends to walk away clean doesn’t drop a calling card.” She paused. “Unless he wants you to know who sent him.”

Louis set the glass down and stared at the fire. “Three weeks before the attack, I found something I wasn’t meant to. I was in my father’s study—not sneaking, I had papers to sign—and a dossier had been left open on the desk. Minutes from a council meeting. Not the official minutes, but the real ones, with handwritten corrections.”

He dragged a hand through his hair. “There’s a land deal. The largest in the history of the realm. The council is selling a tract of state land—nearly eight hundred thousand hectares in the south, including the old royal forest of Valdore—to a foreign consortium. The price is a fraction of its value. That’s not an error; it’s a transfer.”

Élise leaned forward. “Who on the council?”

“That’s the problem. The King’s council is his own appointment. His closest advisers. I don’t know how many of them are in on it, but the minutes listed the consortium as the buyer. The Crown’s signature block was already pre-stamped, and my father’s seal was on the table, waiting for a date.”

“And the treasury?”

Louis laughed—a short, bitter sound. “You understand finance. The sale, at that price, would gut the royal treasury. It isn’t just the land—it’s the minerals beneath it, the timber, the water rights, the access to the southern ports. Sell it off to foreigners, and the Crown becomes a shell with a nice title and no income. The Parliament would have to step in to fund the household, the army, everything. The monarchy would become a pensioner of the state.”

“And the state,” Élise said slowly, “would be run by the consortium’s friends.”

Louis met her eyes. “Yes.”

She let it settle. The warning shot was meant to silence him. The assassin had been sent to make him afraid, not dead—because a dead prince was a martyr, and martyrs were dangerous. A frightened prince was compliant.

“You went to your father,” she said. “After the attack.”

“I did. The morning after.” Louis’s jaw tightened. “He told me the council had already investigated the incident. He told me it was an isolated act of terrorism by a disgruntled former servant, and that the matter was closed. He told me to focus on my duties, marry well, and stop reading documents that were above my clearance.”

“He knew.”

“I don’t know if he knew the details, but he knew something. He knew that if I pushed, I’d be exposing his own most trusted men. And he chose them over his son.” Louis’s voice cracked on the last word, and he looked away. “I haven’t spoken to him since. I’ve been ‘recuperating in the country.’ They think I’m broken.”

“You let them think that,” Élise said.

“It buys me time.”

She sat back, turning it over. The attack was a warning, not just to Louis—but to anyone else on the council who might stumble across the same trail. The missing ledger, the dead informant, Lefèvre’s ransacked archive. All of it was the same shape: people plugging leaks.

“The archivist who gave me the list,” she said. “Clément Lefèvre. He’s missing. His records, the originals of any land sales, they’re gone. Replaced with forgeries.”

Louis’s face went still. “Lefèvre was loyal to my grandfather. He kept the archive clean for forty years.”

“He was loyal to someone, and it got him killed or taken.” Élise paused. “The list he gave me included a bio-engineering corporation. Recent visitors to the palace. I don’t know how it connects yet, but it was flagged for a reason.”

Louis stood and walked to the window, looking out at the rain-slick dark. “My father’s council is chaired by the Comte de Valencourt. The man my father trusts above all others. If Valencourt is the architect, then this goes deeper than opportunism. He’s been angling for parliamentary supremacy since I was a boy.”

“And Duval?”

Louis turned. “The financier?”

“Yes. He commissioned the lily-marked objects. The assassin’s cufflink bears his pattern. And he threatened my family to keep me quiet.”

Louis’s expression flickered—something between surprise and grim recognition. “Duval has financed the Crown’s private ventures for a decade. He’s a gatekeeper. Nothing moves through the palace without his hand shaping it.” He paused. “If Duval is tied to Valencourt, then this isn’t a rogue operation. It’s systematic. They’re not just selling land—they’re building a new government, financed by foreign capital, with themselves at the top.”

“And the King is either a puppet,” Élise said, “or a sacrifice.”

Louis held her gaze. Then he crossed back to the table, planting both hands on the wood, leaning toward her. His face was tight, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Then I’ll do what my father won’t. I’ll testify publicly. I’ll name the deal, name the council, name Duval—let the world see the rot before it spreads further. I’ll burn my own title if I have to.”

“And they’ll kill you before dawn.”

“Then you’ll have your proof,” he said. “A dead prince, silenced by the council. That’s a scandal that can’t be buried.”

Élise stared at him. He meant it. The fool meant every word.

“No,” she said quietly. “We don’t give them a martyr. We give them a problem.” She rose, matching his intensity. “The sale hasn’t closed yet. The date block on the document was blank—they’re waiting for the right alignment: Parliament recess, your father out of the country, a crisis to distract the press. If we find the actual ledger, the real land records, we can show the true price and who benefits. That makes the plot public before it’s executed.”

Louis’s eyes narrowed. “You think you can recover the ledger?”

“I know who took it,” Élise said. “Or at least who likely hired the people who did. And I know one person in the palace who’s still alive, untraceable, and owes me her life.”

The chambermaid. Claire Delorme.

“You’re asking me to trust a servant,” Louis said.

“I’m asking you to trust a woman who saw the assassin’s face and survived,” Élise replied. “She’s the only witness left who can place Duval’s people at the palace on the night of the attack, and she’s been in hiding for days. If she’s still breathing, she’s a seam we can pull.”

Louis stood motionless, weighing it. The fire popped in the hearth. Outside, the driver’s engine turned over, a low rumble of impatience.

“If we do this,” Louis said slowly, “we’re not just exposing the council. We’re declaring war on every institution that shields them—the palace, the Parliament, the banks. There’s no going back.”

“I’ve been off the grid for three days,” Élise said. “I have no rank, no badge, no backup. And my father’s debts are hanging over my head like a guillotine blade. Going back stopped being an option the moment I walked into that farmhouse tonight.”

Louis looked at her—truly looked, past the captain’s uniform she no longer wore, past the exhaustion and the rain. He saw something that made him nod, once, sharply.

“Then we find your chambermaid,” he said. “And we pull the thread until the whole tapestry unravels.”