Read Chapter 12: The Rubble at Rue de la Lune

The iron beam lay across Émile’s chest like a coffin lid. He pushed against it, felt the wet give of his own flesh, and wondered if the blood was his or Céleste’s. The air was a soup of plaster dust and smoke. Somewhere beyond the collapsed wall, the fire that had been licking toward the chemical stores now crackled with a hungry, exploratory patience.

“Céleste.” His voice came out sandpaper. “Céleste, answer me.”

A cough. Then a sound of rubble shifting to his left. “I’m here. My leg—something’s pinned it.”

He found her hand in the dark. Small, cold, but alive. He squeezed and she squeezed back. That was enough. Émile worked his own leg free, felt the beam shift with a groan of fractured timber, and wedged his good shoulder beneath it. The pain in his ribs was a dull orchestra. He pushed. The beam lifted an inch. Two. Céleste dragged herself out from under the debris with a hiss of breath.

They lay side by side in the pocket of ruin, breathing the same poisoned air. Above them, a gash in the collapsed ceiling showed slate-grey sky and the black teeth of a chimney. Smoke curled through the gap like a patient hand reaching down to take them.

“We need to move,” Émile said. “The fire’s heading for the back room. The chemicals go up, this whole block becomes a crater.”

He found a gap in the rubble large enough to crawl through. Céleste followed. The passage was tight, full of splintered joists and the wet silk of a curtain that had once been red velvet. Émile’s palm came down on something warm. He looked. A broken lamp. Oil slicked his fingers. He wiped them on his coat and kept moving.

They emerged into a space that had once been the print shop’s front office. Now it was open to the street, the facade peeled away like a theatrical set. Through the hole, Paris looked calm. The Seine glinted. A woman carried bread. The sun was low and indifferent.

“Help me up,” Céleste said.

He reached for her. And that was when he saw the glint.

Third-floor window across the street. A barrel, a shoulder, a face folded behind a rifle. Sunlight caught the scope—one bright blink of murder.

Émile didn’t think. He moved.

He took Céleste by the waist and spun her into the remains of the wall just as the crack of the rifle slapped across the street. The bullet took him high in the left shoulder. Not the chest, not the head—the shoulder, where the bone stopped the slug from traveling any deeper. It was a clean hit. It was still a hit that threw him back like a child’s doll.

He hit the rubble hard and lay there, staring at the sky. The pain came a second later, a hot wave that started at his collarbone and poured down his arm like molten lead. He tried to lift his left hand. It twitched. That was all.

Céleste was over him, her hands on his face, her voice thin and urgent in a world gone muffled. She said his name twice. Then she said other words, and he watched her lips move, and the words sorted themselves slowly into sense.

“—not his. I never worked for Delacroix. Not willingly, and not as his agent.”

Émile tried to laugh. It came out a gurgle. “You lured me to the Pont Neuf. You sold me to his police. You put a bomb under the building that just nearly killed us both.” He paused. “Or you did. Or he did. I’ve stopped keeping score.”

Céleste’s hands were shaking. She pressed her own coat against his shoulder, hard. The pressure was a white flare that made the sky go dark for a moment.

“I did lure you,” she said. “I did. I had to. He had something on me. He has something on everyone. But I never meant for you to die.”

“Lovely.”

“Émile, listen to me.” Her voice cracked. She leaned close. Her breath smelled of smoke and cheap soap. “Your brother. Lucien. He told me about you. Everything. The studio on the Rue de la Lune. The plates you hide in your boot. The way you photograph people because you can’t trust what they say.”

Émile’s thoughts were sliding. He tried to anchor them. “He wouldn’t tell anyone that. He’d never.”

“He told me because we were lovers.”

The sky tilted. The smoke above them swirled into patterns that made no sense. Émile blinked.

“What did you say?”

“Lucien and I. For eight months. Since January.” Céleste’s jaw was set, but her eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I was a courier for the Versailles delegation. He discovered me, and instead of turning me in, he turned me around. He asked me to watch you. To protect you. He knew Delacroix was circling you. He knew his own work would drag you into the meat grinder. He asked me to make sure you survived it.”

Émile’s hand found her wrist. His grip was weak. “You’ve been watching me since January?”

“Not watching. Protecting. When Delacroix discovered I was still feeding Lucien information, he forced me to stage the betrayal at the Pont Neuf. He threatens my sister, Émile. She’s eleven. She doesn’t know any of this. She thinks I work in a milliner’s.” A tear finally escaped, cutting a track through the dust on her cheek. “I would have let him kill me rather than betray Lucien. But my sister. I couldn’t.”

The fire crackled somewhere behind them, closer now. Émile felt cold. The shock was setting in. He looked at the woman above him, her face smeared grey, her hands pressing his blood into the fabric of her coat, and he saw something he had not seen in any of her lies.

Truth. Or a very talented liar.

“Your sister,” he managed. “Where is she?”

“With a Communard family in the Eleventh. Safe. Or as safe as anyone is in this city.”

Émile closed his eyes. The dark behind his lids was red at the edges. His shoulder pulsed like a second heart.

“Lucien never told me about you,” he said.

“He said you’d never believe him. He said you’d think it was a trick, a trap, part of some grand design. He said to tell you—” Céleste’s voice broke. She swallowed. “He said to tell you that the watch wasn’t a warning. It was a promise. He was coming back for it.”

The silver watch. The one Bastien had left with the message. The one Émile had assumed was a warning to run, a threat of what happened to those who crossed both sides.

His brother had been carrying his love for this woman through those tunnels, through those courier routes, through a war that was eating Paris from the inside. And he had been carrying a promise to come home.

Émile opened his eyes. The sky above the ruined wall was deepening into violet. The fire was a low growl behind them. And across the street, in the third-floor window, the sniper was already gone. Shadows moving in the window frame. More coming.

“We have to move,” Émile said. “They’ll send more. They know where we are.”

“I know a doctor. A Communard surgeon in the Thirteenth. He won’t ask questions.” Céleste helped him sit up. The world swam. “But Émile. You have to promise me something.”

“What?”

“When you get your brother back. When this is over. You’ll tell him you believe me.”

Émile looked at her. The dust, the blood, the firelight behind her flickering like something out of the hell the priests had always promised him. But her eyes were level. Steady. The eyes of a woman who had been holding a secret so heavy it had bent her spine.

“I’ll tell him,” Émile said. “If he’s still alive to hear it.”