Read Chapter 3: A Traitor's Mark

The morgue at the Prefecture of Police smelled of bleach and regret. Élise signed the register with a steady hand, ignoring the clerk's nervous glance at the hour. Two in the morning. The building hummed with fluorescent light, empty corridors echoing her footsteps as she descended to the basement level where the dead waited for justice that rarely came.

The attendant on duty was a thin man with spectacles and a consumptive cough. He led her to the cold drawer without asking questions—her captain's bars and the Minister's seal on the paperwork she'd forged were enough. The drawer slid open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing the assassin's face, waxy and slack. Up close, he looked younger than she'd remembered. Twenty-five, perhaps. A laborer's hands, calloused at the palms, but the skin of his face was soft, unweathered by sun or wind. That told her something. He hadn't worked outdoors recently.

"I need the body." She pulled on latex gloves. "Records first."

The attendant handed her a clipboard. The file was thin. Name: unknown. Cause of death: multiple gunshot wounds, Palace Guard. Next of kin: none. She scanned the notes from the initial exam performed before Captain Beaumont's obstruction had taken hold. No tattoos noted. No scars documented. Whatever they'd recorded had been cursory at best, done in haste by a tired coroner who likely knew his work would never see a courtroom.

She began with the hands. Palmar calluses absent—not a laborer, then, despite the rough appearance. The fingers were long, elegant. She turned the left hand over and stopped.

On the web of skin between thumb and index finger, a small tattoo. Blue ink, faded but clean lines. She leaned closer. A lily, broken at the stem, the bloom severed from the stalk by a clean diagonal cut.

"Bring me the magnifying lamp," she said. The attendant obliged, and she examined the design with a pathologist's care. It was not the crude work of a street parlor. The lines were fine, precise, the shading delicate. This was professional work, the kind done in discreet shops that catered to clients who wanted marks that meant something. She'd seen gang tattoos before, prison ink, the patriotic symbols of veterans. This was different. This was a signature.

The broken lily. The same symbol—but reversed—from the prince's letter. His mother had used the lilies whole. The assassin bore one shattered. A mark of defection, perhaps. Or of betrayal within the cause itself.

She pulled out her phone and photographed the tattoo from three angles. Then she returned to the hands, examining each finger, the nails trimmed and clean—another sign of recent care. She checked the collar of his shirt for a tailor's label and found none; the clothes had been removed and bagged in evidence. She'd need to access the property room. That would require another form, another door opened by another man who'd have questions she didn't want to answer.

But there was something else. On the inner lining of the wrist, just above the pulse point, she found a faint line. Raised tissue, a scar that had healed poorly. She pressed it, feeling the edges. It ran the length of her little finger, thin and straight. The mark of a blade, well-healed. Old. This man had been cut before.

The attendant coughed. "Is there something else, Captain?"

"The tailor." She stripped off the gloves. "The cufflink chain in evidence. What's on file?"

He consulted a ledger. "The items from the suspect were logged this morning. A cufflink, silver, maker's mark registered."

"Show me."

He led her to the evidence safe and retrieved a small paper envelope. She opened it, and the silver lily glinted under the fluorescent light. She handled it with gloved fingers, turning it over. On the back of the stem, so small she'd missed it in the gardens, was an engraving: a tiny checkmark inside a circle. The maker's mark of a workshop.

She knew that mark. Every police officer in Paris did—it was the signature of Maison Delacroix, the finest jeweler in the city, whose client list was a who's who of the old nobility. Their work didn't appear on a dead man's shirt by accident. It was purchased, commissioned, or given.

"Maison Delacroix only serves the court," the attendant said, reading over her shoulder. "They keep a register of every commission."

"Not every commission." She spoke half to herself. "They keep two." Delacroix was notoriously discreet, but there was a second book—she'd heard whispers from a colleague in the vice unit who'd once traced a stolen brooch. The private register, the one they didn't show the authorities, held the names of the houses that traded in secrets.

She'd need a warrant. Or she'd need to be very persuasive at three in the morning.

She was still holding the cufflink when her phone vibrated with a text from an unknown number. She checked it, and the name on the screen made her pause: *Madame de Villiers*. The prince's private secretary. The text was a single line.

*You should see where they found him. The kitchens. Under the Salle des Glaces.*

Élise stared at the screen. The palace kitchens. The assassin had been discovered near the royal apartments, not in the gardens—she'd read conflicting reports in the initial chaos. One guard had claimed the shooter had been found among the crowd in the courtyard. Another said he'd been pulled from a service corridor. No one had been certain because no one had been in control.

She typed back: *Where in the gardens was he found?*

The reply came instantly: *He wasn't. He was found in the south corridor, forty meters from the prince's private study.*

The gardens had been a convenient fiction, then. Someone had moved the story in the confusion, or someone had moved the body.

She closed the envelope and returned it to the safe, her mind working. A tailor's mark for a maker who served only the court. A tattoo of a broken lily—a symbol used by a royalist faction, perhaps one that had split from the Crown's cause. And a body found not in the gardens where the prince had been shot, but in a service corridor outside the prince's own study. The assassin hadn't been an outsider scaling walls and evading guards. He'd been inside. He'd walked the halls, known the geography, and died in the very belly of the palace.

The attack wasn't an act of public terror.

It was an inside job.

She left the morgue without signing the exit log, her steps fast and deliberate, climbing the stairs to street level. The cool air of the Paris night hit her face, and she stood for a moment, breathing in the smell of wet asphalt and exhaust. In the distance, the silhouette of Versailles rose against a bruised sky, all gilded windows and hidden rooms, holding secrets in every locked corridor.

Somewhere in that building, a man with a fine tailor and a broken lily tattoo had walked through the heart of the court, past guards who should have stopped him, to fire a shot at the heir to France's throne. And the palace guard had executed him before a single question could be asked.

She called up the thread from Madame de Villiers again. Her own visit to the prince's bedside was scheduled for tonight. But perhaps she'd visit the south corridor first.

"The inside job," she murmured, pocketing her phone.

No one who mattered would believe her. She'd have to prove it alone.