Read Chapter 13: The Broken Thread

The night air was thick with the promise of thunder. Camille pressed her back against the cold stone wall of the service corridor, counting her heartbeats until the guard’s footsteps faded. August 22. The alignment. The last page of the diary had been precise: *the mirror that holds no reflection, the hour when the moon bleeds into the seam of the world.*

She had imagined the portal hidden in the old atelier, wrapped in dust and cobwebs. But the diary’s final line had been ambiguous. She’d assumed the room where she’d found the journal—the one with the tapestry door—was the site. She’d planned for that. Rethought it. Convinced herself.

It was only when she slipped past the tapestry and stood before the empty wall where a mirror should have hung that she saw the truth in the faded ink of the diary’s map underneath the table. A line leading not to this room, but through it, across the palace. A sketch of the Hall of Mirrors, annotated in a trembling hand: *the light finds the glass.*

The portal was there. Not here.

Camille swore under her breath, a sharp modern curse that would have earned her a slap in any salon. She had minutes, if that. She shoved the diary’s map into her bodice and fled through the forgotten corridor, her skirts catching on splinters, her heart a wild drum.

She emerged into the grand gallery breathless and wrong-footed. The Hall of Mirrors stretched before her, a fantasy of gilded arches and candelabras, but the moonlight was doing something strange—banding through the tall windows in silver sheets that fractured against the mirrors, creating an impossible lattice of light. The air itself hummed. Her skin prickled.

*There.* At the far end, where the central arch distorted the reflection, a seam of light was opening. It rippled like fabric caught in a breeze, and through it she saw—she *saw*—the blurred silhouettes of modern streetlamps, the stutter of a blinking sign, the smell of diesel and rain. Home. Actual home.

Camille ran.

Her shoes skidded on the polished parquet. The seam widened, thrumming, pulling at the hem of her gown. Twenty yards. Fifteen.

A hand closed around her wrist.

Drouet’s face emerged from the shadows by the window, pale and triumphant, his other hand already scrabbling at his coat. Not for a letter. For something else. His grip was iron.

“You flighty little thing,” he said, voice low and venomous. “I knew you’d come. The stars told me you’d come.”

Camille twisted, but he yanked her hard against his chest. She smelled his breath—sour wine and secrets. The portal pulsed behind her, brightening, taunting.

“Let me go!” She brought her heel down on his instep. He grunted but held. The seam was shrinking. No. *No.*

“You’re going to tell me who you are,” Drouet hissed, “or I’ll see you burn. The Austrian ambassador has a personal interest in strange women who speak of things they shouldn’t.”

Camille shoved her free hand into her pocket. The key. The heavy old key from the atelier, its cool weight a comfort. She drove it into his knuckles with all the force of her panic. Drouet howled, grip loosening, and she tore free, stumbling toward the dying light.

But Drouet lunged again, catching the back of her gown, and in the struggle she felt the key slip from her sweat-slick fingers. It spun in a high arc, catching the moon for half a heartbeat.

It dropped into the bronze grate beside the central arch, clattering against iron bars, and vanished into the darkness below.

The seam of light flickered. Wavered. Camille saw, for one terrible, crystalline moment, the blinking sign and the wet asphalt of a street she would never walk again. Then the light folded in on itself like a breath released, and the Hall of Mirrors went dark and empty, filled only with the echo of her own despair screaming off the gilded walls.

Drouet stood panting by the window, something dark dripping from his hand onto the floorboards. The polite menace was gone. In its place was the kind of calm that promised ruin.

“What a shame,” he said softly. “You were so close. I wonder what it was you were chasing.”

Camille couldn’t speak. The grate. The darkness beneath it. The key was gone, lost to the damp foundations of Versailles, and with it her only path home. She stood in the center of the Hall of Mirrors, chest heaving, the phantom smell of diesel still in her nostrils, and she wanted to scream until the glass shattered.

But she didn’t. She looked at Drouet with eyes that had nothing left to lose, and found a thread of calm she didn’t know she owned.

“I was chasing nothing,” she said. “You came in the dark, grabbed a lady’s arm, and threatened her. What do you imagine the King will do when I tell him the Austrian ambassador’s spy is accosting his seamstresses in the Hall of Mirrors?”

Drouet smiled. “The King will learn a different story. I’ve been patient, Dubois. I’ve watched you. But patience has its limits. When I decide to act, there will be no one to hear your screams—not the Queen, not your banker friend. And certainly not the man you left in the atelier, longing by a dead mirror.”

He bowed, mocking, and slipped away into the shadows. The breath left her lungs.

The mirror beside her reflected a woman unraveling. A broken thread. A lost key. A future with the door slammed shut.

And somewhere in the palace below, the key settled into a century of dust, taking her way home with it.