Read Chapter 20: Aftermath: The Redemption

The bullet was still inside him. Élodie could feel it when she pressed the linen against the wound—a hard, foreign lump lodged beneath the collarbone, refusing to leave the body it had invaded.

Ashworth’s face was the color of candle wax. He had stopped screaming, which frightened her more than the screaming had. His lips moved soundlessly as she worked, and she realized he was praying, or trying to remember how.

“Stay with me,” she said, tearing another strip from the bedsheet. “Do not go where I cannot follow.”

She packed the wound with the pressure dressing, then bound his shoulder tight enough to slow the bleeding. The blood had soaked through three towels already and had begun to pool in the hollow of his collarbone, dark and glossy in the lamplight.

“I need you on your feet.”

He blinked at her, slow and uncomprehending. “The girl—Sauvage—”

“Sauvage is dead.” She slipped her arm beneath his good shoulder and hauled him upright. “And if Lefèvre finds you here, you will be too. Up. *Now.*”

He stumbled against her, nearly bringing them both down, but she braced herself against the bedpost and took his weight. Together they staggered toward the narrow door behind the wardrobe—the one that led to the cellar stairs. She had installed the false panel herself in the first year of her widowhood, a precaution for the kind of night she had never imagined she would actually live.

The stairs were steep and uneven. Ashworth’s boots caught on each step, and she felt his weight sagging more heavily with every footfall. By the time they reached the bottom, her back was screaming and his breath had become a thin, whistling rasp.

She laid him on the old cot she kept among the wine racks, then retrieved the blue enamel watch from where it had fallen on the stairs. She pressed it into his hand.

“Hold this. It is Mathieu’s. He gave it to me so that I would remember to love again.” She paused. “I do not intend to lose that love tonight.”

Ashworth’s fingers closed around the watch. He tried to smile. “I thought you were supposed to be the spy.”

“And you the gentleman.” She pressed a fresh cloth against his wound. “Stay here. Do not die. I will be back.”

She climbed the stairs and found Marie crouched in the corner of the bedroom, trembling, her face buried in her hands.

“Listen to me,” Élodie said, gripping the girl’s shoulders. “There is a physician in the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, a man named Corbeau. He has helped fugitives before. Tell him the password is ‘the nightingale sings at midnight.’ He will come.”

Marie’s eyes were huge. “But what if he is not loyal?”

“He is loyal to gold, which serves the same purpose. Go now. Use the back alleys. If Lefèvre stops you, you know nothing.”

Marie hesitated. “What about you?”

“I will be here when you return.”

The girl vanished down the stairwell of the servant’s entrance, her footsteps echoing off the courtyard walls. Élodie counted her heartbeats until the sound faded, then turned back to the shuttered window and listened.

The street outside was too quiet.

She parted the curtain by a finger’s width. In the shadows of the opposite building, a shape moved—a man in a dark coat, standing perfectly still except for the slow exhalation of breath that clouded in the cold air. Behind him, a second shape, then a third.

Lefèvre’s men had arrived.

Élodie did not run. Running would confirm what they already suspected. Instead, she straightened her dress, wiped the blood from her hands onto her apron, and walked calmly to the front door.

She opened it before they could knock.

Lefèvre stood on the threshold, his coat spattered with mud, his eyes bright with the particular cruelty she had come to recognize. Behind him were two gendarmes, their hands resting on their truncheons.

“Madame Marchand.” He did not step forward, forcing her to stand in the cold doorway. “You look unwell.”

“I have had a trying evening.”

“Yes, I imagine you have.” His gaze swept past her, into the dim interior of the inn. “Your English guest—Mr. Ashworth, I believe. I understand he has been receiving visitors tonight. A very particular visitor.”

“I would not know. I retired early.”

Lefèvre smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes. “Would you step aside so that we may search the premises?”

“You have no warrant.”

“I do not need one. You are harboring a known agent of the British crown. That is treason.” He leaned closer, close enough that she could smell the wine on his breath. “And you, Madame Marchand, are a traitor to your country, your husband, and your name.”

Élodie did not flinch. “My husband died for France. I will not hear his name on your lips.”

“Your husband—” Lefèvre stopped himself. Something flickered behind his eyes, a calculation, a consideration of what he knew and what he could use. “Your husband’s memory will not protect you.”

He pushed past her into the inn, his men following. They moved through the parlor, the kitchen, the guest rooms, overturning cushions and throwing open wardrobes. Élodie stood in the center of the dining room and watched them, her hands folded in front of her, her heart counting each tick of the clock.

They found nothing.

Lefèvre returned to her, his face tight with frustration. He looked at the floor, at the fresh scratch marks on the wooden boards that led toward the wardrobe, and followed them with his eyes. He studied the wardrobe for a long moment.

Then he turned back to her.

“You will not leave this inn,” he said. “You will not receive visitors. You will not send messages. You are under house arrest until I decide what to do with you.” He gestured to one of his men. “You will remain here. Watch her.”

He left without looking back. The gendarme stationed himself in the corner of the parlor, cap in hand, eyes fixed on her with the blank obedience of a man who had been told to watch and would watch, whether or not there was anything to see.

Élodie waited until the front door clicked shut behind Lefèvre. Then she walked to the kitchen and began to make tea.

The gendarme watched her, but did not stop her. When she returned with the tray, she passed close to him, and he blinked, and yawned, and did not notice that her sleeve had brushed the small key she kept hidden in the seam of her dress—the key to the cellar door.

She served him tea, and he drank it, and within minutes his head had drooped forward onto his chest.

Élodie had kept the laudanum for Marie’s nightmares. She had never thought she would need it for anything else.

She slipped past the sleeping gendarme, down the cellar stairs, and found the hidden passage behind the wine rack that had been built in the days of the Revolution, when a woman’s life could be forfeit for hiding the wrong fugitive. She had discovered it as a child, playing in the cellars of her father’s house. She had never told anyone it existed—not even Mathieu.

Unlocking the iron grate, she eased herself into the narrow darkness. The tunnel ran beneath the street, connecting her cellar to a drainage grate two houses down. She crawled through it, holding her skirts above the slime, and emerged into the cold Parisian night with dirt on her hands and a plan forming in her mind.

Lefèvre had threatened her family. He had threatened her father, her name, everything she had built. He had called her a traitor to her country and her husband. But he had also given her what she needed: a target.

She knew where Lefèvre kept his records. She had seen them once, in his office at the Prefecture—ledgers with names in them, names of men who had paid to disappear, names of men who had paid to make others disappear. She had always suspected the source of his fine coats and his wine. Now she would prove it.

If she could not fight him on charges of treason, she would fight him on charges of corruption. The Prefecture would not protect a man whose ledger recorded bribes from the very enemies he was meant to catch.

She thought of Marie, sent to the physician, waiting for her return. She thought of Ashworth, bleeding in the cellar, trusting her to save him. She thought of Lucien, somewhere in Sauvage’s network, still waiting to be freed.

She would not fail them.

Dawn was breaking over the rooftops of Paris when she finally returned through the tunnel to the cellar. Ashworth was still breathing. The watch was still clutched in his hand.

She sat beside him in the darkness, her back against the stone wall, and listened to the city wake above them. Somewhere a bell was ringing for morning mass. Somewhere a cart driver was cursing at his horse. Somewhere Lefèvre was already planning his next move against her.

She looked at Ashworth’s face in the faint gray light, at the lines of pain etched around his mouth, at the hand that still held the watch, and she allowed herself one moment—one brief, fragile moment—to feel the weight of what she had chosen.

Then she picked up the lamp and began to plan.