At the time, the book had been my way of indicating how my priest could get me information. It was also the means of how he could communicate with me, using various pages, depending on the date of the letter, to determine the words of the cipher.
When I looked at Hugo’s classic, I never saw anything except the red of revenge and the steps I needed to take to make it happen. Until now. When I saw her.
The gypsy.
I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath. Maybe it had been too long since I’d been with a woman. No excuse for my distraction. Shoving all thoughts of the chimes and charms of the woman who I’d make sure never set foot in my domain again, I set myself to my task.
A few moments later, flipping through pages I knew like they told the story of my own life, I had the message decoded.
Hubert to run. Macron to be ruined. Destruction coming.
Even without the code, the messages were just enough to give me something to go on.
Hubert.
Gustav Hubert.
The image of a younger man about my age flashed in front of my eyes—the man whose face had been scattered throughout the city because, in an infamous speech that went viral after a particularly strained protest by the Yellow Vests—the populist political movement in France calling for economic justice —Hubert had stepped forward and called for the president to step down or risk being dethroned.
It was the word dethroned that rung the loudest through a population of people whose monarchial heritage still left a bitter taste in their mouth. Not fired. Not impeached. Not removed.
Dethroned.
As though the president of France had turned himself into a king.
And even though our last king was over a century ago, the oppressive taxation the French people were protesting against seemed to cling perfectly to the bitter taste of the word.
Gustav Hubert, who’d called for the removal of the current president, was Méchant’s man, and he was running for president.
My stomach rolled with a violence I hadn’t felt since I’d approached the church that fateful night.
There were rumors through the organization that Méchant already had a man in the running, but no one could find any proof. And without proof, many of the Valois scoffed that Méchant hadn’t the foresight or power to get one of his men so far up the playing field as to be running for president of the country.
But he had.
Gustav Hubert.
Riffling through my notes on the candidates, I found Hubert’s name and scanned the scribbled shorthand for the details I’d marked.
Inherited a profitable construction company from his father as the only child. Began running for smaller councils and positions six years ago. Involved in numerous protests and rallies over the last year. A champion for the working man by all accounts.
And in the pocket of the one man who wouldn’t hesitate to crush the working man for his own profit.
He had to be a sleeper—someone Méchant had installed in a specific place for a specific purpose, and now was his time to shine. There was no other explanation for how Hubert had never even been suspected as being a part of the Méchant organization.
But how the hell was Méchant going to convince the entire French government to support Macron’s impeachment?
It was true. The current president’s popularity was rapidly dwindling amid protests, many of which were instigated and funded by Méchant. The threads of his power were thin and fraying, but even after a year of being worn ragged, they still held on.
Destruction is coming.
Whatever Méchant was planning was big. The protests, easily justified and inflamed by the actions of the president, were the kindling. Whatever was coming would be the blaze that paved the way for Méchant, through Hubert, to take control.
Crumbling up the paper, I pulled a lighter from my pocket and set it on fire, staring at the black ash flakes as they floated in the air.
I needed to find out who Hubert truly was and how the hell Méchant was going to get him in power.
Because I knew better than most that Méchant would level this city to the ground as long as he could still set up his throne and rule over the rubble.
Returning to the rest of the pile of news that I knew wouldn’t hold a tenth of the weight of the information I’d just destroyed, I scanned through them, knowing by the handwriting to whom each belonged and that the information contained inside could wait.
The colors of the sunset were always magnified by the small rose window housed in my space. It was, quite possibly, the only source of color in my life. And now that the sun had fully set and only the uneven dots of city lights bled through the old, watery glass panes, it was time to go.
Slipping silently back down the secret stairs and into the small side-chapel, I made for another similarly latched piece on the far wall. Cursing myself for another moment of hesitation, I didn’t bother to hide my annoyed steps as I wove back to the altar, needing to confirm that the gypsy was gone.
Back to work.
I scoffed. There was no work to be done here. There never was.
In all likelihood, with the notebooks and bags she’d had with her, she’d been given permission to come and do some sketches of the architecture for a few hours when there weren’t tourists around. Every once in a while, it was an annoyance I had to deal with, but for the few hours they were here, it was nothing worth trying to prevent.
But instead of relaxing when I came upon the empty space of the church, the voluptuous vagrant gone, my body tensed and my mind, disciplined over years to question to the point of obsession, began to wonder.
Who was she?
What was she working on?
Why the cathedral?
Why now?
Where was she now?
Was she okay?
I growled and spun away at the last. She wasn’t my concern.
I stalked to the side of the church, opening another passage behind a large stone inscription which led to a narrow hall that paralleled the long side of the cathedral and exited onto the walk near the back corner of the church.
It was never smart to exit through the front doors.
My phone buzzed with a message the instant I turned it on about a block away from the church. I never used technology inside the cathedral after visiting hours just in case anyone was looking for a signal. I was too smart to make a stupid mistake.
Turning into the small and nondescript Café du Cloud where I frequently stopped for dinner, I pulled my hat down to hide what I could of my face and opened the message from Léo Baudin, an old friend from college—and another person I’d more or less lost after that night.
While I’d been recovering from that fire—and even more cut off from the world than I was now, Léo had married, unknowingly to both of us, Méchant’s daughter, my stepsister, Amélie. Another of his many plans. I’d learned too late from the Valois who she was—learned too late that Méchant’s most valuable players were the many bastard children he wielded like spawned swords.
But Léo returned into the periphery of my life a year ago, asking for help to clear his name and free him of his marriage. Friendship, guilt, and, of course, vengeance fueled me to merge his plea with my own quest. So, I’d helped him because it severed another head of the serpent and wounded Méchant.
We need to talk. Meet me at my office.
My jaw tightened as I murmured “Merci” to Agnes for my nightly Croque Monsieur and shoved back out into the street. But instead of turning right toward the dark alleys of information that could lead me to what I was missing about Hubert and his connection to my ultimate target, I turned left toward L’École des Beaux-Arts and the man who held the only semblance of friendship in my life.
“I hope this is important,” I rasped, closing the door that held Léo Baudin’s name on a bronze plaque on the front.
Léo’s head whipped up from his desk. “How did you—” He broke off and shook his head, not knowing or really caring how I’d let mys
elf in to both the locked building of the school and his office. “Never mind.”
“Is Troian okay?” I demanded.
Troian—Troy was Léo’s fiancée.
In many ways, I saw pieces of myself in my friend. When Amélie betrayed him and disappeared, leaving all of Paris to believe he murdered her, he plummeted into a pit of desperate anger and determined revenge.
I’d watched from afar—from the shadows—as his life began to crumble, his career as one of the most prominent artists of our time fractured, as he searched for answers and justice.
A little over a year after her disappearance, he’d met Troy, and somehow, she’d stopped him from spiraling further, and managed to give him everything, including a beautiful baby girl.
While Léo had lived in the darkness, he’d been saved before it consumed him.
There had been no one to save me.
In fact, when I disappeared from life and joined my father and the Valois, I’d been taught how to make a home in the darkness. How to thrive in it.
Now, I was a man who no longer knew how to live in the light.
“Troy is fine,” he confirmed. “I didn’t reach out for me this time, Quinton, but for you.”
My eyes narrowed, and he brushed a stack of papers off his laptop and flipped open the screen, motioning me to come to him.
The internet had its purposes. I knew the Valois had men that could hack and crack even the very darkest corners of it. But for me—for my purpose—it hardly served a use.
I was hunting a man who operated right beneath my nose. A man whose every move bore no trace of plausible or provable reproach because all he did was pull the strings—the strings of the puppets or the strings of the noose, controlling both life and death in this city.
What he pulled up was an article from Le Figaro—an exposé on Gustav Hubert and his contributions to the working-class economy over the last few years. I’d caught bits and pieces of it from the physical copy I’d skimmed a few days ago, but Léo scrolled past the article itself and clicked to the gallery of images that hadn’t been in the actual newspaper.
“Vincent sent me this earlier today,” he explained as he clicked through the images.
Vincent was Léo’s younger brother and the heir to the Baudin fortune after Léo cut his family ties to pursue a career in art.
The pictures went back several years, showing Hubert as a longtime, community-focused family man.
But then, Léo stopped on one specific photo and clicked.
It was the day Hubert took control of his father’s construction company, symbolically accepting the keys to the business. But it wasn’t a photo from direct center like most press shots would be. The perspective of the camera was angled from the side, showing Hubert’s face and the back of his father’s head.
“What is it?” I groused. “So, the newspaper should’ve picked a better photo of the two of them?”
Léo didn’t reply and instead zoomed in on the crowd in the image.
Like he’d dropped the needle of a record machine onto the waiting track, a symphony of recognition boomed so loudly in my head I jerked back.
Behind Hubert, there was a sizeable mass of people, providing a general background of faces behind the action, many of whom would’ve been cut off from a photo taken directly in front of the two men. But, from this angle, it revealed a line of onlookers including, right there in the front row, Léo’s ex-wife and Méchant’s daughter, Amélie.
Mon Dieu. What the hell was she doing there?
My mind immediately filtered through scenarios.
Maybe Méchant had sent her to blackmail him.
Maybe he’d sent her to seduce him before setting his sights on Baudin.
Maybe both.
“That’s not all,” Léo claimed as he slid the enlarged photo just a bit so that the face in the center of the frame was now only a half visible one of a man in a stylish fedora with lying eyes and a sly, sinister grin.
Méchant.
I squinted, unwilling to believe what I was seeing in the poor quality of the enlarged photo. But I would never forget that gaze—not the one that held mine with calm cruelty as he murdered my mother right in front of my eyes.
I immediately checked the date of the photo. Almost five years ago.
Five years ago, Méchant was invested in Hubert.
Five years was not only before he tried to claim the Baudin empire through marrying Amélie to Léo, but it was also before Macron was even elected to the presidency.
Méchant always had long-term plans, but there were too many variables here. Too many opportunities for something to go wrong.
“Quinton?”
I reared back as Léo gripped my shoulder, realizing he’d been trying to get my attention for a few moments. But I’d been lost, weaving through unsteady connections and unstable possibilities.
“Sorry,” I said gruffly, spearing a hand through my hair. “Merci.”
He nodded and asked, “Did you know they were connected?”
I dipped my head slightly. “A new development,” I said through tight teeth. “But I hadn’t known it was for this long,”
“His plant for the presidency,” Léo surmised, and I couldn’t bring myself to disagree with the truth even though it would be safer for him the less he knew. “What do you think he has on him?” He returned the photo to its normal size and looked to me. “And why the hell would Amélie be there?”
My teeth grated together.
“You think he wanted her with Hubert first? Until he realized I was the easier target?”
All questions I didn’t have answers to.
My eyes squeezed shut, but instead of the vast blackness that usually came when I found a string that needed to be unraveled, I saw glittering gold and green eyes. A wide, teasing smile and a body made for sin.
I snapped my eyes open and my body jerked in frustration
“You don’t know, do you?” Léo finished quietly.
“Whatever he’s planning, it’s been for some time. I just need to figure out all the pieces,” I replied curtly, knowing it wasn’t an answer. “And I need to figure it out before it’s too late.”
“Quinton.”
I halted in my steps to the door, only half turning over my shoulder to meet my friend’s gaze.
“He’ll kill you in a heartbeat if he finds you.”
“That will never change.” I let out a harsh laugh. “For him or for me.”
“Even if you stop him, he won’t stop looking for you,” he continued. “I know what you risked to help me stop Amélie. You cut off Méchant’s sure path to legitimate wealth, and now you are going after his advance for power—”
“I know,” I interjected. “Three years ago, he gave me the choice—kill or be killed. I know how this ends, Léo. I knew this would be the end of me before it began.” I smirked, feeling the way it pulled at the glossy tight scars on the right side of my face. “This is all I have—all I can have. I don’t wish for more.”
“If you stop him, you could have a life—”
“Léo,” I growled, anger flaring. I wasn’t him. I wasn’t saved in time. I wasn’t loved in fucking time. “Enough.” I exhaled loudly and slowly. “I live in darkness. My life is steeped in death and deceit and destruction of those who deserve it. Monsters don’t get to have a life, Léo. They only get to take it.”
“Mon Dieu,” he swore. “You’re not a monster, Quinton.”
“Have you looked at me?” I seethed. “Have you forgotten what I do? What I did for you?”
At that he remained respectfully silent.
I laughed bitterly and reached for the door, hating the feeling of someone’s eyes on my face for too long; it felt like hot water on a sunburn.
“I don’t have a life, Léo, but I do have a purpose,” I spoke harshly, pulling open the door to his office once more. “And it is enough.”
I caught his loud huff as the door shut behind me.
But I also caught m
y reflection in the mirror in the hallway outside.
My two faces.
It was enough.
Reminding me that the only person I was good at lying to was myself.
It was not enough.
Esme
“Giselle!” I stood and reached for my friend, wrapping her in a hug in the middle of the small café a few blocks from Notre Dame and L’École des Beaux-Arts in the Marais neighborhood.
Even though I wasn’t short by any means at five-foot-eight, the blonde still tipped her head down to make up for the few inches difference between us.
“Mon amie, you look fabulous!” I exclaimed and added, “And happy. But you were always happy.”
It was one of the many things that drew me to the bombshell who I’d met outside the Louvre on my second day in Paris. There was a genuine happiness that glowed from her—like sunshine in a bottle. The second thing that had struck me was how easily she’d started a conversation just by asking me for a cigarette between my sets, complimenting my violin skills while seeming to care very little that it wasn’t every day a posh Parisian model made friends with a girl who appeared to be nothing more than a threadbare street performer.
“Me? Mon Dieu, Esme St. Claire, you haven’t aged a bit, and it’s been what… six years?”
I cringed and tried to remember.
“It’s been a long time—too long,” I agreed with a long exhale and chuckled. “Although I will warn you, my French is just as poor as it was back then, however it’s no reflection on your attempt to teach me rather my complete inability to focus on tense and pronunciation.”
We both laughed and approached the register. The woman taking our order did a double-take, noticing my hair completely wrapped up in a bright red and gold scarf.
Islam had been the religion of both my parents, but, like so many things in life, I’d lost my desire to practice along with them. I rarely prayed. I didn’t always cover my hair, and when I did, it was only to support others. Like the rest of me, my religious heritage existed in fragments. But today, I’d pulled my hair back underneath a gold-studded scarf because we would be in public, and I wanted to make that statement.
The Gargoyle and the Gypsy: A Dark Contemporary Romance (The Sacred Duet Book 1) Page 4