Read Chapter 15: The Escape Attempt

The cart lurched over a cobblestone, and Célie bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying out. Beside her, Marguerite swayed with the motion, eyes closed, lips moving in what might have been prayer or might have been counting. The other prisoners—seven of them, manacled wrist to wrist—sat in silence thick as fog.

Through the canvas flap at the back of the cart, Célie watched the Conciergerie shrink. Dawn had not yet broken. The city was a charcoal sketch, rooftops cutting into a pale violet sky. The guards had been shouting for hours, moving prisoners between holding cells, and she had timed her moment to the chaos of a forced march.

She had not expected the chains.

But even chained, she had planned. The slim iron key Jean had secured for her—no bigger than her smallest finger—was tucked into the seam of her sleeve, and she had spent the night working it into the lock of her manacle until the mechanism gave with a whisper-soft click. It rested loose against her wrist now, waiting.

Beside her, Marthe Aubry shifted.

Célie had spotted her in the transfer column an hour ago, bundled in a gray shawl, feigning sleep. The woman was too attentive to be asleep. Her breath came even, but her head tilted, listening.

*She knows.*

Célie looked away. She had fed Marthe the name of the dead aristocrat two days ago—a man who had been guillotined in April and could not possibly be conspiring with anyone. The informant would discover the lie soon enough. By then, Célie planned to be across the city, or across the channel, or anywhere that was not the shadow of the Tribunal's scaffold.

The cart turned hard. Through the gap in the canvas, the Seine appeared—gray-green, moving fast with spring rain. They were on the Quai de l'Horloge. Fifty yards ahead, the Pont Neuf.

The cart slowed for a bottleneck of market carts, and the driver cursed. The guard beside him spat. In that single, unguarded moment, Célie twisted her wrist free of the manacle and threw herself over the side of the cart.

She landed wrong. Pain shot up her ankle, but she was already rolling, already on her feet, already running for the bridge stairs before the guard's shout tore through the morning.

"*Fuyez! The prisoner!*"

She ran. The stairs were slick with dew. Behind her, boots on stone, a single set—someone light, fast, unhobbled. She did not look back. She could not afford to see who followed.

The Pont Neuf stretched before her, empty of traffic at this hour. Her ankle screamed with every step. She clutched her chest, pressing against the seal there, its familiar metal edge biting into her palm through the fabric of her dress.

She had made it to the middle of the bridge when she heard the voice.

"Marchand! Célie Marchand!"

She did not stop. But the name—her name, her true name, the name she had shed like a serpent's skin when she fled her family's château—froze her for half a step, and half a step was enough.

A hand closed on the back of her collar. She was yanked backward, nearly off her feet. She twisted, clawing, and the morning light caught the face of her pursuer.

*Duval.*

Not dead. Not dead at all.

He grinned. The scar on his cheek stretched white. "Did you think I would not check your pretty lie? I was in Lyon, Marchand. Not in the grave." She drove her heel into his shin, and he grunted but did not let go. His grip tightened on her collar until the fabric bit into her throat.

"Where are you going, little aristocrat? To warn your co-conspirators?" He shook her, hard. "There are no co-conspirators. There never were. You have nothing, and you know nothing, and you have one week to prove otherwise."

She spat in his face.

He roared, shoving her back against the stone railing. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. The seal pressed painfully against her sternum. Dimly, she heard the clatter of guards' boots on the bridge.

Duval wiped his face with the back of his hand. He was still grinning.

"You will hang, Marchand. I will see it—"

She lunged. Not at him—at the gap in the railing. If she could get to the water, if she could swim—

But Duval was faster. He caught her arm, spun her, and in the brutal motion, she felt the threads of her bodice give.

She felt it go.

The seal, wrapped in its scrap of linen, slid from between her breasts and arced through the cold morning air. Time stopped. She saw it turn once, twice, a dull flash of brass catching the rising sun—

And it hit the water with a sound so small it should not have mattered.

She watched it sink. She watched the gray-brown water close over it. And something inside her went with it, some anchor chain snapping, some tether to every woman who had worn it before her, every hand that had pressed it into wax, every oath sworn over its engraved surface.

*Maman. Grand-mère. Célie.*

"*No—*"

The word was out of her before she could stop it. A raw, broken thing. Duval's grin faltered. He looked at the water, then at her face, and something like curiosity flickered across his features.

The guards reached them. Rough hands seized her, dragged her away from the railing. Duval did not stop her from being taken. He just watched, head cocked, as if she had revealed something far more interesting than a conspiracy.

The guard commander shoved her toward the cart. "No more tricks. You'll go to La Force."

*La Force.* Not the Conciergerie. No familiar corridors. No Marguerite. No waiting game. She was being buried alive in a prison she did not know, a stranger in her own skin.

The sun crested the rooftops as they pushed her into the cart. She did not resist. The seal was gone. The seal was gone, and with it, her name, her lineage, her proof that she had ever been anything other than a woman running from the shadow of the scaffold.

She thought of her mother, pressing the seal into her palm at the château gate. *"You are a Marchand, Célie. No matter what they take from you."*

But they had taken it. They had taken all of it.

The cart lurched forward. Célie closed her eyes. The chains were heavy on her wrists, and for the first time since this began, she did not have a plan.