Read Chapter 10: The Warning

The cold of the vine-choked earth seeped through my shirt before I was fully conscious. My cheek was pressed against gravel, and the grit had carved a raw line into my skin. The night air smelled of wet leaves and stone, and somewhere not too far off, a dog barked once—a sharp, territorial sound—then went silent.

I pushed myself up slowly. Every joint protested. A throbbing knot sat at the base of my skull, sticky with dried blood. My hands found nothing in my pockets: no phone, no keys, no wallet. The leather satchel with Étienne Duclos's letters was gone. My notebook, my photographs, the scratch copy of the 1975 file—all of it, taken.

I stood. The vineyard stretched out dark in every direction, row after row of sleeping vines under a thin moon. I’d been dumped at the edge of the property, a quarter mile from where I’d left my car on the service road. I could just make out its silhouette through the trees, but even before I reached it, I knew the tires would be slashed. Whoever had done this had been thorough, and they’d wanted me to understand that.

The note was pinned to my jacket, at the chest—as if they’d buttoned me up afterward and made sure I wouldn’t miss it. A single sheet of off-white paper, folded once. The handwriting was unhurried, elegant, a pen with real ink:

*Leave the past in the cellar, or follow Étienne.*

I read it twice. The name was the part that stuck. Follow Étienne. Étienne Duclos, who had vanished in 1905 under coercion, erased from his own estate. Étienne Belliveau, the nephew who wore his uncle's blood mole and called himself the founder. Two Étiennes, both swallowed by the family's secrets. The note wasn't a mystery. It was a threat with a reference list.

I staggered to my car. The driver's-side window had been smashed, and the tires were flat—all four, even. The glovebox was open and empty. The boot was unlocked. They’d gone through everything, and they'd left nothing.

I dropped into the driver's seat anyway, hands on the wheel, forcing myself to think past the pulse hammering in my skull. My phone was gone. That meant no signal, no GPS, no contact with Paul Marchand. No way to call the journalist friend I'd been saving for the right moment. And whoever had attacked me knew I'd been at the municipal library, at the prefecture, in the hidden room under the cellar. They'd followed me for days, maybe longer, and I'd never noticed.

The château sat on its rise above the vineyard, its stone hulk barely visible against the darker sky. A single light burned in the east tower—the family’s private wing. I stared at it, and the light did not move. It didn’t flicker, didn’t shift from window to window. It just stayed fixed, watching me back.

I felt exposed in a way I hadn't since my badge had been taken. The collapse of my career had been public, humiliating, but it had never made me feel hunted. This was different. Someone had stood over me while I was unconscious, decided not to kill me, and pinned a note to my jacket like a returned library book. They wanted me to know they *could* have. The restraint wasn't mercy; it was a demonstration.

I climbed out of the car and walked back toward the château's perimeter wall. My legs were unsteady, and every few steps I had to stop, hand on a vine stake, to keep from pitching over. The hidden service stair I'd used earlier was around the east side, tucked behind a walled courtyard and a dead oak. I made it there in fifteen minutes, and what I found stopped me cold.

The door was gone. Not locked, not barred—*gone*. In its place, fresh mortar and new limestone blocks, damp in the night air, rising from the ground to the top of the arch where the old doorway had been. Bricked up. Sealed as if it had never existed. The work was too clean, too recent. They'd known I'd come back. They'd sealed it the moment I was out cold, maybe the moment I'd left the first time, waiting to see if I'd come back for more.

I put a palm on the new stone. It was not yet dry. Whoever had done this was close. Within hours.

A twig cracked behind me.

I spun, fists up, heart slamming hard enough to hurt. The vineyard was empty. The rows were black, the spaces between them blacker. But the sound had been close—ten feet, no more. I held my breath, counting seconds. Nothing moved. No rustle of cloth, no shift of weight. But I knew, with the certainty of someone who'd spent years reading lies on people's faces, that I was being watched.

They'd wanted me to find the wall. They were still here, in the dark, watching me react to it. The thought was cold and quiet inside me: *This is part of it. The note, the wall, the stolen evidence—it's a performance. And I'm the audience.*

I backed away slowly, keeping my face toward the vineyard, until the dead oak was between me and the château. Then I turned and started walking west, toward the village road. My car was dead, my phone was gone, and my only copy of every lead I'd gathered had been taken. All I had left was my memory: the forged registry, the hidden notary statement, the letters, Victoire Mercier's photograph, and the bottle with the Belliveau seal and the scratched inscription I'd barely read in the half-dark.

I'd lost the physical proof. But I could still taste the wine I'd had at the family dinner—the 1975 estate bottle that sat on their table like a trophy. I had a fragment of the inscription from that hidden bottle, cut by a dead woman's hand perhaps. And I had the name of an old witness, just a pair of initials and a memory: A.G.

The road was long and dark. No headlights came. No one followed. Or if they did, they were better at it than I was.

By the time I reached the village, the eastern sky had gone grey. The bakery on the corner was still shuttered, but the lights were on in the gendarmerie annex, and I knew the night-duty officer was an old colleague of Paul's, a man who owed me a favor I'd been saving for a real emergency.

I stopped outside the station, breathing hard, and pulled the note from my jacket one more time. *Leave the past in the cellar, or follow Étienne.*

I read it in the new light and noticed something I'd missed in the dark. The ink wasn't black. It was a deep, faded violet—the same colour as the wax seal the Belliveaus used on their bottles. The same colour Victoire Mercier's photograph had been marked with, in the hidden room they'd sealed up like a grave.

They'd wanted me to know precisely who had written it. They just hadn't realized that knowing who *threatened* me and knowing who *killed* were two different things. I folded the note carefully, tucked it into my inner pocket, and pushed open the gendarmerie door.

I was still being watched. I could feel it on the back of my neck. But I was done running from it. Whoever they were, they'd made a mistake—they'd given me their ink. And I knew a journalist who'd built her career on a single bottle's provenance. It was time I introduced myself.