Read Chapter 27: A Stolen Hour

Étienne’s fingers worked the lock of Drouet’s office door with a silence that belonged to a man who had spent years reading numbers, not picking locks. Camille pressed her back against the wall beside him, breathing through her mouth to quiet the rasp of her own lungs.

“This is madness,” she whispered.

“That’s why it will work,” he murmured back. The latch clicked. He pushed the door open, and the smell of smoke—charred wood, wet wool, the ghosts of the fire—rolled out to meet them.

The office was smaller than she’d imagined. A writing desk, a single green-glass lamp, a coat rack stripped of its coat, and in the far corner, the blackened steel of a new safe. Not the one that had burned. Drouet must have ordered it brought in with the morning light.

“He replaced it already,” Camille said, disappointment flattening her voice.

“Of course he did. A man like Drouet doesn’t leave his secrets in a burning building.” Étienne slipped inside and closed the door behind her. He crossed to the safe and crouched before it, running his fingers along the seams with the same precision he’d used on the lock.

Camille hovered near the window, peering through the curtain’s edge at the courtyard below. Lanterns bobbed along the gravel paths. Guards patrolled at regular intervals—she counted the seconds between their passes. Forty-three. Forty-three seconds of darkness between each circle of light.

“How long?” she asked.

“The combination is a number.” He produced a small notebook from his coat, pages folded and creased from handling. “Drouet requisitioned a new dress uniform three months ago, itemized at eighteen livres, not seventeen and a half. He overpaid deliberately. The difference went to a seamstress he believed was bribable.”

“And what does that have to do with the safe?”

“Drouet thinks in entries.” Étienne flipped a page. “Every ledger has its logic. His mistress’s birthday is the twelfth. His childhood home number is seven. His son’s—a boy he never speaks of, in a school near Lyon—was born in March.” He spun the dial. “Eighteen. Twelve. Seven.”

The safe did not open.

Camille crossed to him, dropping her voice lower. “You’re guessing based on his ledgers?”

“I’m reasoning.” He frowned at the dial, then ran a hand through his hair. “He’s arrogant. He has a system that makes sense only to him, and he believes no one else can crack it.”

“But the fire—if he reordered a new safe, he would have changed the code.”

Étienne looked up at her. There was a streak of soot on his jaw, probably from their escape the night before. It made him look younger, or less like a man who lived inside ledgers and balance sheets.

“Then what would he trust?” he asked, almost to himself.

Camille thought of Drouet’s face in the firelight, the pistol in his belt, the way he’d smiled when he’d taken the needle from her. He wasn’t a man who trusted easily. He was a man who kept everything in reach.

“His own name,” she said. “Arrogant men use their own names.”

Étienne turned back to the dial. “Drouet. D-R-O-U-E-T.” He counted letters, muttering numbers under his breath. Four. Eighteen. Twenty-one. Not a code. He shook his head and tried again, this time converting each letter to its position in the alphabet. Four, eighteen, fifteen… no.

Camille pressed her hand to the cool steel top of the safe. Her palm tingled.

“Try the date he took us.” she said. “The day he became untouchable.”

Étienne’s eyebrows rose. He spun the dial. “The fourth. The eleventh. The year.”

The lock turned.

The safe swung open with a low groan, and there, wrapped in a square of burgundy velvet, lay the needle. Beneath it, the locket gleamed. Étienne lifted both out with the reverence of a man handling fragile paper, and Camille’s chest ached at the sight of them.

“He put them together,” she breathed. “He has no idea what they are.”

“He knows they mean something to you,” Étienne said. “That’s enough for him.”

On the ledge inside the safe, beneath where the artifacts had rested, lay a thin file of papers. Étienne hesitated, then took it. He flicked through the first pages, his face tightening.

“What is it?”

“Drouet’s correspondence.” His thumb marked a page. “He’s writing to a merchant in Vienna. He’s offering the locket—but also information. Names. Dates. Court movements.” He closed the file and tucked it inside his coat. “He’s selling secrets. Not just ours. The queen’s. The court’s.”

A boot scraped on the flagstone outside the door.

Camille froze. Étienne’s hand went still on the safe door. In the corridor, footsteps approached with the slow precision of someone in no hurry, and then came a voice she recognized—Drouet’s low rasp.

“—and check the terrace posts. If she’s slipped the Orangerie, she’ll be hiding in the shadows to the west.”

The footsteps stopped directly outside the door.

Étienne moved. He closed the safe with a whisper of steel, grabbed Camille’s sleeve, and dragged her away from the window toward the corridor wall. There was no other exit. The room was a trap with one door, and Drouet was on the other side of it.

The handle turned.

Camille dove behind a tall folding screen painted with pastoral scenes—shepherds and lovestruck milkmaids, utterly absurd. Étienne pressed against the wall beside it. Not hidden. Simply not yet seen.

Drouet stepped inside. The lamp hissed as he lit it, throwing jagged amber shapes across the room. He paused, head tilted, as though sensing the cold air from their intrusion. Then he crossed to the window and looked down at the courtyard.

“Close the terrace posts,” he said to someone in the hall. “Now.”

The door shut behind him.

Camille held her breath. Through the thin cloth of the screen, she watched Drouet’s silhouette move to the safe. Her heart seized. If he opened it now—

But he only tapped his fingers against the side, once, twice, then turned away. He was not looking for the needle. He was looking for something else. He lifted a loose floorboard near his desk and withdrew a second bundle of papers, tied in black ribbon. He pocketed them.

Drouet left without locking the door.

The breath rushed out of Camille in a shudder. She pressed her forehead to the screen frame, counting her heartbeats until their sound no longer filled her ears. Étienne came around the screen and knelt beside her, his hand finding hers. The needle and locket were still clutched in her palm.

“We need to move,” he said. “Now, before he returns.”

They slipped into the corridor, hugging the wall. The palace at this hour was not asleep—it was a living thing with its own breath, servants and guards whispering through its veins. They reached the chapel side chapel near the southern transept, where candle stubs gutted in iron stands and the stained glass turned the moonlight to sickly colors. The door of the confessional was ajar.

Étienne pulled her inside.

The space was impossibly small. Wooden walls pressed close, dark with age. The grille between priest and penitent cast a lattice of shadows across their faces. Camille leaned against the carved rail, catching her breath, and Étienne’s body bracketed hers without quite touching. His chest rose and fell with the same uneven rhythm as her own.

“That was closer than I care to repeat,” he said.

“You were brilliant,” she whispered. “The safe. The numbers. You cracked him like he was no one.”

“I read people, Camille. I read their numbers.” He lifted his eyes to hers, and in the thin light, they were the deep gray-green of the Rhine in winter. “You were the one who knew his arrogance.”

She laughed, soft and shaky. “I’m good with people too. Sometimes.”

“Sometimes.” His voice was quiet now, stripped of all pretense. Their breath tangled in the small space between them. His hand came up, slow enough that she could have pulled away, and brushed a strand of hair from her temple.

“I care for you,” he said, and there was no ledgerman in his voice now, only the man underneath. “I should not. I have known you in this life for weeks, and yet I feel I have always known you. Whatever you are, wherever you are from, I want you to know it does not matter to me. Nothing you have hidden, nothing you fear—it would not matter.”

Camille’s throat tightened. She thought of the baronne’s warning, of Marguerite’s plan, of the new moon in two days. She thought of a world beyond this one, of a sewing machine and traffic and a modern flat with no servants and no king.

“Étienne,” she breathed, “if I go home, I may not be able to come back. There may be a door, and it may close, and you would never be able to—I would never be able to see you again.”

His hands settled at her waist, soft, not demanding. “But you are here now.”

“That’s not enough.”

“It may be.” He leaned closer, so close she could see the pulse beating in his throat. “It may have to be enough for both of us.”

The confessional walls held their silence. Candlelight from the chapel beyond bled through the carved grille, haloing his jaw in gold. She reached up, her fingers tracing the fine line of his brow, and she thought, I should not. She thought, I do not belong here. She thought, the new moon is in two days.

Then she kissed him.

The needle and locket pressed between her chest and his, and the world outside the small, dark box ceased to exist.

When he broke away, his forehead rested against hers, his breath warm and unsteady. “We have two days,” he said. “Whatever you choose, I will stand beside you.”

In the distance, beyond the chapel’s walls, a bell began to toll. Midnight. The first of the two days had begun, and somewhere in the palace, the woman in emerald was waiting for her answer.