Read Chapter 13: The Hidden Orchard

The wasteland had a way of swallowing sound. Julien’s boots crunched through dry grass and brittle earth, each step a small violence against the silence. The moon was a pale coin behind thin cloud, and the air smelled of dust and something older—something green trying to die quietly.

He’d come back for the soil samples. Not the ones from last night—those had been taken with him when he fled, stuffed into his jacket pocket, still there when he woke on the cold ground. But he needed more. He needed to understand the place before the hooded figure’s shadow made it impossible.

The orchard was not where he expected it to be.

He’d walked the perimeter twice, counting his steps from the rusted fence post to the dead oak, and found nothing but scrub and broken stone. Then he stopped walking and simply stood still. That was when he noticed the air. It moved differently here—a current flowing toward a place that didn’t exist, pulled by something invisible.

He parted the curtain of wild brambles and found the gap. Narrow, barely shoulder-width, but the branches had been bent back recently. Fresh breaks. Someone else had come this way.

Julien slipped through.

The world changed behind the curtain. The dead grass gave way to soft, dark soil. The air turned cool and damp, carrying the scent of moss and overripe fruit. And there, impossibly, stood the orchard.

Ancient vines twisted up wooden stakes that had long since gone grey with age, their trunks thick as a man’s arm, gnarled and knotted like arthritic hands clawing at the sky. Some were dead. Most were not. Leaves still clung to the branches, small and dark, and here and there hung clusters of grapes—small, shriveled, but unmistakably there.

Julien knelt between two rows and pressed his palm into the earth. It was cool, rich, dark. Nothing like the wasteland soil he’d sampled an hour earlier. This soil was alive.

He pulled his trowel from his belt and dug. Eight inches down, the soil changed again—layers of clay and decomposed limestone, the kind of calcareous base that growers dreamed about. He filled a sample bag, sealed it, then dug another from the base of the oldest vine he could find, a massive trunk with bark like cracked leather.

He held the two bags side by side, remembering what Anne-Claire had told him about the 1961 vintage’s chemical signature—high strontium, low iron, a fingerprint of calcium carbonate that matched nothing else in the appellation. He didn’t need a lab to know. The soil in his hand was mother’s milk.

This was where the wine came from. Not the reclaimed parcel the Belliveaus had spent fifty years pretending was their prized vineyard. Not the rows of replanted vines that produced the modern vintages. This orchard had been producing grapes before any of that. Before the Belliveaus, even.

The path from the wasteland to this place had been overgrown for a reason. Someone had wanted this ground forgotten.

A sound cut through the air. Not a branch snapping. A breath.

Julien didn’t turn. He kept his eyes on the vine in front of him, his hands steady as he slipped the soil bags into his jacket. His pulse hammered in his throat.

“You should not be here,” a voice said. Low, gravelly, muffled by fabric.

Julien rose slowly, turning to face the figure. The hooded man stood twenty feet away at the entrance to the orchard, blocking the only path back. His face was hidden in shadow, but the violet ink stains on his fingers glowed faintly in the moonlight. The same ink. The same hands that had written his threats.

“Interesting,” Julien said, keeping his voice calm. “You’d think a family that owns half the appellation wouldn’t mind a visitor appreciating their oldest vines. These must be pre-phylloxera. Worth a fortune.”

The figure didn’t move. “You are not a guest.”

“No, I’m a detective. Which means I know the difference between a vineyard and a graveyard.” Julien gestured loosely at the orchard. “What’s buried here that’s worth this much watching?”

The hooded man’s head tilted slightly. Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a knife. The blade caught the moonlight, cold and thin.

“You have the same disease as Étienne,” the man said. “Curiosity.”

Julien’s blood went cold, but he didn’t run. Running was what the figure expected. Instead, he looked past the man’s shoulder, at the gap in the brambles he’d come through.

At the other end of the orchard, on the side furthest from the wasteland, there was another opening. Vines had been cut there recently, too. A second path out.

“Was it curiosity that killed him?” Julien asked, edging sideways. “Or did the family help him along?”

“The family helped him remember his place.”

“Which was in the ground?”

The hooded man lunged.

Julien was already moving, but not toward the first gap. He dove left, rolling through the base of the ancient vines, feeling thorns tear at his jacket and skin. He came up running toward the second gap, but the figure was fast—faster than a man his size had any right to be. A hand caught his shoulder, yanking him backward.

Julien twisted, driving his elbow back into the man’s ribs. A grunt of pain. The knife swung wide, slashing past his arm, missing his face by an inch. He grabbed the sleeve of the man’s coat, threw all his weight forward, and sent the hooded figure crashing into one of the dead vines.

The wood cracked. The man grunted again, but the knife stayed in his hand.

Julien didn’t stop. He lunged through the second gap, feeling branches tear at his face and clothing. He burst out the other side into open wasteland—flat, exposed, impossible to hide in. He kept running. Behind him, the sound of snapping twigs and heavy breathing told him the man was in pursuit.

Julien pumped his legs, legs that had carried him through war-torn streets and hostile vineyards and criminal back alleys. The soil bags thumped against his ribs, a reassuring weight. He’d gotten what he came for.

But as he cleared the treeline and hit the road, breath burning in his lungs, he risked one look back. The hooded man had stopped at the edge of the wasteland. He wasn’t chasing anymore. He was just standing there, watching Julien flee—

and he was holding Julien’s trowel. The one he’d left at the base of the oldest vine.

Not watching, then. Marking.

The evidence of where Julien had been was now in his hands.

Julien ran toward the town, toward the lights, knowing that any proof he thought he’d stolen might already have been found. And somewhere behind him, the orchard stood silent, its ancient vines holding secrets that had just become more dangerous than ever.