Read Chapter 32: The Wings of an Angel

The tunnel mouth gaped beneath the chapel floor like a wound in the stones. Alex leaned on Pierre's shoulder, every step sending fire through his leg, while Camille de la Tour held the lantern aloft, her face a study in shadow and resolve.

"You cannot walk to Versailles," she said, not unkindly. "You cannot even walk to the edge of Paris."

Alex gritted his teeth. "Then we find another way."

Pierre grunted, shifting Alex's weight. "The exile order says by nightfall. We have maybe three hours. The gates will be watched—Desmoulins bought you a reprieve, not a miracle."

Camille's fingers traced the ornate lid of the snuffbox at her belt—the twin to the one that had cost Alex so much. "My grandmother's network can get you out. There are safe houses along the road to Versailles, innkeepers who owe the Marchand name favors." She paused. "But that is not where you want to go, is it?"

Alex met her eyes. "No. I need to see Lafayette."

The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on. Pierre laughed—a short, bitter sound. "Of course you do. Because being hunted by royalist assassins and sentenced to exile wasn't enough. You want to walk into the middle of the most dangerous game in France and declare yourself a player."

"Lafayette is the only man who can hold the moderates together," Alex said. "If someone takes him out, the revolution becomes a bloodbath. The crackdown will come, martial law, arrests by the thousand. Everything we survived at the Bastille will look like a garden party."

Camille studied him with those unsettling, knowing eyes. "And you know this how? That a plot exists at all, that it targets Lafayette specifically?"

Because I've read the history books, Alex thought. Because I know that someone tries to kill Lafayette at least three times in the next decade, and each attempt pushes France closer to the abyss. But he couldn't say that. Not to her, not to Pierre.

"I have my sources," he said instead. "The man who hunts me—the red heels—he's not just a thug. He's an instrument. Someone in Versailles is pulling his strings, and that someone wants Lafayette dead."

Pierre shifted uneasily. "I heard whispers before I left the armory. A faction among the court, waiting for the right moment to strike. They call it 'the Wings of an Angel'—the moment when Heaven opens and delivers France from her tormentors."

"Poetic," Camille said dryly. "Assassination usually is."

"Where did you hear this?" Alex asked.

Pierre's face closed. "I don't remember. Rumors in a tavern, fragments of conversations I shouldn't have been party to. People talk to men who carry papers, thinking they're deaf."

The armory papers. Alex had never pressed Pierre on what he'd actually fled with. Now he wondered if that had been a mistake.

Camille reached into her cloak and withdrew a folded map, worn at the edges. She spread it across a crate, her lantern illuminating the careful ink strokes. "If the plot is in Versailles, that is where the counter-revolutionary leadership meets. My cousin Auguste has rooms at the Hôtel de Noailles. He entertains guests who value discretion."

"But your cousin is the one holding the key information about the plot," Alex said slowly. "You wanted to stop him. Now you're saying he might be part of it?"

Camille's expression flickered. "Auguste is many things. A loyalist, a snob, frightened of change. But he is not a killer. He collects secrets the way other men collect coins. The assassination plot came to his attention because he associates with those who would plan such things—not because he endorses it." She looked up. "I still believe he can be turned. That he will help us if we can reach him."

"And if you're wrong?"

"Then I will have made a very large mistake, and we will all die." She said it without drama, a simple statement of fact.

Alex stared at the map. Versailles sprawled across the paper, a labyrinth of royal architecture and hidden passages. Somewhere beneath it lay the time door—the final door that could send him home. And somewhere within its walls, a plot was forming to murder the one man who might keep France from tearing itself apart.

"Can your network get us to Versailles?" Alex asked. "Without going through the gates?"

Camille smiled faintly. "Henri Marchand spent forty years building paths that the King himself doesn't know exist. There is a way—a smuggler's route along the Seine, used by messengers during the last war. It takes us past the royal hunting grounds and into the town through a series of forgotten tunnels."

"Injured, hunted, and navigating tunnels," Pierre muttered. "This is becoming a theme."

"You're welcome to stay in Paris," Alex said.

Pierre's eyes hardened. "I've thrown my lot in with you, for better or worse. The armory papers gave me a road out of this city, but they didn't give me a destination." He paused. "And I owe you. The Bastille, the tribunal—you stood when others ran."

Alex looked away, uncomfortable with the weight of Pierre's loyalty. He didn't deserve it. He was lying to all of them, playing a role that would eventually get someone killed.

"The wings of an angel," Camille murmured, tracing the words in the air. "A strange name for a plot. Unless..." She trailed off, her brow furrowing.

"Unless what?"

She looked up, and there was something new in her eyes—something cold. "The chapel of Saint-Angel. It stands on the grounds of the Hôtel de Noailles, a private sanctuary that my cousin's family maintains. If you wanted to gather conspirators in secrecy, there would be no better place than a church that everyone forgets exists."

Alex felt the pieces click together. "The plot is scheduled for the chapel. And Lafayette—he's known to attend services there when he visits Versailles. He's Protestant, but he makes a show of respect for the old faith."

Camille nodded slowly. "He would. He is always performing, always balancing."

Alex gripped the edge of the crate, his wounded shoulder screaming in protest. "Then that's where we go. We get to Versailles, we find the tunnel that leads to the chapel, and we intercept whoever is planning to strike."

"Intercept them?" Pierre asked. "We're three people, one of whom can barely stand. What exactly do you propose to do when we find them—ask nicely?"

Alex thought of the red-heeled hunter, of the man's deliberate retreat and his promise to meet Alex in Versailles. The enemy was already there, waiting, preparing. Alex was walking into a trap, and he knew it.

But the alternative was letting history plunge into a darkness he knew was coming—the Terror, the guillotine's rhythm, thousands upon thousands of deaths. He'd been sent to observe, to resist the urge to interfere. But from the moment he'd taken that snuffbox from the old man in the alley, he had stopped being a historian. He was a variable now, an equation that shouldn't exist, and he would either balance the scales or break them entirely.

"Take me to Versailles," Alex said quietly. "Get me to the chapel of Saint-Angel before dawn, and I'll find a way to stop the assassination."

Camille rolled up the map. "And if you can't?"

Alex met her gaze, feeling the weight of every choice that had led him here. "Then the revolution doesn't need saving. It needs a sacrifice."

The tunnel swallowed them, darkness closing in around the small circle of lantern light. Behind them, somewhere in the city they were fleeing, Alex could imagine the red-heeled man smiling, already marking his calendar for the Wings of an Angel.