Read Chapter 25: The Release

The ink was the color of blood, and it smelled of lamp oil and desperation. Lise pressed the type onto the paper with Perrin’s trembling hand guiding hers, the press groaning like a dying beast. Perrin, a man of fifty with ink-stained fingers and frightened eyes, had agreed to print her broadsheet after she’d placed her father’s list on his desk and told him the Tribunal’s own prosecutor was a traitor.

Now the press slammed down again, and another sheet came out bearing the words that would either save her father or kill them all.

**FOULQUIER-TINVILLE SELLS JUSTICE — ENGLISH GOLD, FRENCH BLOOD**

The names were listed beneath. Dates. Sums. The docking records of the *Marie-Ange* matched against the deposits in Fouquier’s private accounts. Lise had read the list for the first time that morning, her hands shaking as she verified her father’s story line by line. It was real. It was damning. And it was about to be public.

“How many?” she asked, her voice raw from the hours of whispered coordination.

“A hundred,” Perrin said, wiping sweat from his brow. “The newsboys will have them by noon.”

“Noon is too late.” Lise grabbed a stack of the still-damp sheets. “Dawn. Fouquier questions my father at dawn.”

Perrin’s face went pale. “The markets won’t be open. The streets will be empty.”

“Not the streets.” Lise shoved the papers into her satchel. “The Tribunal itself. The clerks arrive early. The guards change shifts. I know the building—I’ve delivered my garments there a hundred times.”

Perrin stared at her, and she saw the calculation in his eyes, the weighing of his own neck against hers. She didn’t give him time to refuse. She was out the door before he could speak, the cold Paris air hitting her face like a slap.

The prison complex rose before her as the sky began to gray. Torches still burned at the gates, and the guards were sluggish, stamping their feet against the cold. Lise kept her head down, her nun’s habit a shield against suspicion. She’d become Sister Anne of the Hôtel-Dieu, a nurse making her morning rounds. But instead of bandages, her basket carried a hundred declarations of war.

She reached the tribunal’s outer wall and began to distribute the broadsheets where they would be seen first. On the clerk’s desk, slipped through a gap in the shuttered window. Against the door of the records room. Tucked into the hand of a messenger boy who ran off before he could ask questions.

By the time the first clerk arrived, yawning and rubbing his eyes, the papers were everywhere. She watched from across the street as he picked one up, his face shifting from confusion to horror to something else—excitement, maybe, or the thrill of a man who sensed the world about to tip.

The second clerk came running. The third. And then a crowd began to gather, drawn by the commotion, and Lise felt the first crack of the earth opening beneath her feet.

“Read it aloud!” someone shouted. “What does it say?”

“Fouquier’s been taking bribes from the English!” Another voice. “The Tribunal is a sham!”

The word spread like fire through straw. By the time the sun was fully up, a riot was building outside the Palais de Justice. Stones flew against the walls. The guards were overwhelmed, calling for reinforcements that were slow to come. And Lise, her heart pounding in her ears, slipped through the crowd and made her way toward the holding cells.

She found her father in an iron cage, his pale face pressed against the bars as the noise of the uprising reached him. His eyes found hers, and a light came into them that she hadn’t seen since the monastery.

“Lise,” he breathed. “What have you done?”

“What you taught me to do,” she said, pressing her fingers through the bars to touch his. “Tell the truth.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“They’ll have to catch me first.”

A shout echoed down the corridor. Guards. Fouquier’s men, perhaps, already moving to secure their master’s prisoners. Lise pulled back from the cage, her eyes locked on her father’s.

“Stay alive,” she said. “I’ll come back for you.”

She fled before he could answer, through the maze of corridors that she knew better than any servant of the state, past the seamstress’s alcove where she’d once mended the robes of judges who now hunted her. She burst out a side door into the chaos of the streets, and the mob swallowed her whole.

The city was alive with fury. Crowds surged toward the Tribunal, and above the noise, she heard the name that had once been whispered in fear, now shouted in defiance:

“Fouquier-Tinville! Traitor! Bring him out!”

She pushed through the crowd, heading toward the print shop, toward Jean-Luc’s hiding place, when a hand grabbed her arm and yanked her into an alleyway.

“Élisabeth.”

The voice was low, familiar. She turned to face Dumas, the man she’d refused to trust, the man Jean-Luc had told her to avoid. His face was cut, his coat torn, and his eyes burned with something she couldn’t read.

“Perrin was arrested an hour ago,” Dumas said, his voice tight. “He broke under questioning and gave them everything. Your name. The print shop. The evidence.”

Lise’s blood turned to ice. “Then why are you here? Why aren’t you running?”

“Because Fouquier doesn’t know you have a copy.” Dumas reached into his coat and produced a folded broadsheet, the ink still fresh. “He thinks Perrin burned the original. He thinks the list is gone.”

“And you let him believe that?”

“I’m the one who told him.” A grim smile crossed Dumas’s face. “I’m the one he trusts. That’s why he didn’t run—he’s too busy searching for the supposed original to notice the copies spreading across Paris like a plague.”

Lise stared at him, her mind racing. Double agent. Triple agent. She didn’t know which, and she didn’t have time to find out.

“But he arrested you,” she said. “You said Perrin gave them your name.”

“Perrin gave them a name.” Dumas stepped closer, and she saw the bruise forming around his eye. “I gave him yours. The real one—your father’s. It’s what Fouquier expects.” He paused. “It’s also what will happen unless we move fast. Fouquier’s taken your father to the tribunal hall. He’s going to make an example of him before the crowd. Prove that the accusation was a royalist lie.”

Lise’s hand flew to her mouth. “No. He can’t. The people are on our side now.”

“The people are a mob,” Dumas said. “And mobs are fickle. They’ll cheer for whoever shouts loudest. Fouquier is about to shout.”

He grabbed her wrist and pressed something into her palm. A key. Cold iron.

“The Tribunal’s records room,” he said. “Second floor. The original bribe list—the one you took from the *Marie-Ange*—Perrin had it with him when they took him. Fouquier’s men will bring it to his office any minute to prove the accusations are false.”

Lise looked at the key, then at Dumas. “Why help me? You’re British. You wanted the chaos.”

“I wanted Fouquier destroyed,” Dumas said. “But I didn’t want your father’s blood on my hands. That’s not how I do business.”

A crash echoed from the street behind them—the Tribunal’s doors, breaking open. The crowd was surging inside. Lise had seconds, perhaps less.

“The records room,” she repeated, gripping the key.

“Go.” Dumas turned and melted into the crowd, leaving her alone with the chaos and the cold iron in her hand.

Lise ran.

She was through the side door before the guards could react, her feet finding the familiar stairs, her heart pounding a desperate rhythm. Second floor. The records room. She reached the door, shoved the key into the lock, and pushed inside just as a hand caught the door from behind.

She spun, raising her arms to defend herself, and found herself staring into the barrel of a pistol.

“Mademoiselle Marchand.”

Fouquier-Tinville stood in the doorway, his thin lips curved into a smile. Behind him, two guards pinned a struggling Dumas against the wall.

“I believe you have something that belongs to me.”