My fist flexed at my side.
I wanted him to feel me coming at him from all angles—big and small.
I stepped off the metro at Légion d’Honneur and took the stairs two and a time, ascending into a part of Paris that would never make it onto a postcard or tourist guide. At least, not in its current state.
Especially after the Charlie Hebdo attack, the outskirts of Paris were further branded as areas of lawlessness, drug trafficking, and radical Islam—areas it was easy for a man intent on stirring unrest, like Méchant and Hubert, to plant even the tiniest seeds of vitriol and hate and watch them infect like weeds over an underserved population.
No one stopped to look at anything here. Everyone walked with a purpose—to get where they were going as fast as possible and without incident. Here, the immigrant populations from Northern Africa and the Middle East totaled almost half of the demographics. And it was clear, as I scanned my surroundings, that I was an outlier.
Then again, a man with half a face always was.
In Paris, the public was either too busy being a tourist or too busy avoiding them to notice a man who skipped like a stone from shadow to shadow. In the Neuf Trois, they noticed but never asked. In the Neuf Trois, a man with a face like mine was not as surprising. And not something to mess with.
I kept my head down, following the already forming crowd down the Légion d’Honneur Street which led straight to the open square in front of the twelfth century basilica.
“Did you know the basilica was the first cathedral to show the elements of Gothic architecture that made Notre Dame famous?”
I could hear Esme in my head, always rattling off facts in the moments when I kept silent, luring me in with harmless topics that somehow ended up on the subject of family, my past, and my dreams.
She roamed wherever she pleased inside my thoughts, laughing and humming, her bracelets chiming along with every step, coaxing me to follow her back into the light.
With a low growl, I shook her from the forefront of my mind and ducked into a small alley across from the church.
I examined the scene before me, trying to get a sense of what was about to happen.
Méchant preferred to use public events geared toward good and turn them into something evil. It not only got the press involved, but stunted the desire to continue to hold community events for fear of unrest.
“Monsieur Bonheur vient ici?” Monsieur Bonheur is coming here?
“Avec des photos… de la musique…” With his photos… and music…
I only caught crumbs of a conversation between two tall Black males, one with a ski mask pulled half over his face, as they unknowingly walked right by me. A few seconds of reviewing the square again confirmed the few facts I’d heard.
One by one, projectors lit up around the square, shining onto screens portraits and stills of the people and life in the banlieue.
It only took minutes before the square was completely filled, and I could see the news vans parked on the outskirts as reporters tried to cover the story.
I looked for any familiar faces—anyone I knew or had seen who was part of Méchant’s organization, but came up empty.
They’d wait until he was mid-speech.
They’d wait until the very height of the event before turning it sour.
A few people walked past me, bumping into my shoulder without looking back to me, until I had to guess there was at least two hundred people in the square.
“Bienvenue!” A lively voice rang out over the loud murmur of the crowd.
My eyes whipped toward the basilica, seeing a dark man with a brightly colored bandana wrapped around his forehead at the helm.
Esme would like his bandana.
Fuck.
I couldn’t think of her now. Or ever. Malik had confirmed what I knew from the start—that she was hiding something.
Maybe it was the kind of secret that all females had.
But it could also be the kind of secret that the authorities only figured out after something bad had happened.
Lost in thought, I’d missed the first few things that he said, but it only took another moment to realize what they were.
It was the hum of her violin I heard first. The note to tune that only foretold my worst fear.
I caught the bald scalp of the guitar player first—Khal. Then, the familiar observant eyes of Malik as they joined Monsieur Bonheur on the small stage.
And finally, across the square and through the crowd, I heard the soft jingle of her step before I caught the bright wrap of her headscarf and the green of her eyes buzzing with revolutionary electricity.
Esme was here.
And Méchant was planning violence.
Rage and adrenaline pumped through my veins. I was only one fucking person—one person sent to take out the instigators of the fight in the hope it wouldn’t spread too far. But I couldn’t do that and protect her. I couldn’t stop evil and protect good at the same time.
My blood thundered in my ears. I couldn’t hear the social activist as he spoke, but I saw the way his lips moved as he introduced Esme and her companions, telling the story of the first time he’d heard them play.
He’d seen the effect their music had on the crowd.
I’d only felt the way she’d had an effect on me.
I wished she could see me, so I could warn her. This wasn’t safe. She wasn’t fucking safe.
I wished I could go to her.
And that was the most dangerous realization of them all.
Because even if I could—even if I could make it through the crowd to her—it would risk everything. It would put me right out into the open where ghosts are never supposed to be. And worse than exposing me, it would expose her as my weakness.
And if I thought she was in danger now, there is no telling what Méchant would do to the woman I’d risked everything for after seeing what he’d done to my mother—his wife.
There is no turmoil like the violence of helplessness when it rages inside you—both needing to act yet knowing you can’t.
My only hope was to do my job—to put an end to the rioters before they reached her.
I watched as my beautiful gypsy moved to the front with a wide white smile on her face, her whole body effusing a melody of hope even before she raised her violin to her shoulder, looked back at the other musicians, and began to play.
Like the Pied Piper, I felt my attention desperate to be drawn to the song, but I forced it to stay focused on the crowd—the crowd that grew increasingly jubilant as the music continued.
My head flung wildly from side to side, trying to take in every detail of the gathering, but it was the equivalent of trying to catalog every star in the galaxy.
Every cheer I began to mistake for a battle cry. Every clap I mistook for the firing of some sort of weapon. Every move to dance, the first motion of a fight.
But through it all, my concern was no longer the hysteria it would cause. My concern was only her.
Monsieur Bonheur had the right idea.
The crowd drew together with smiles and comradery. The camera crews appeared much calmer and more excited to be covering the story. No one eyed each other with skepticism or concern. Esme and her group’s music struck a common chord between them all—like a smile, spoken the same in every language, the allure of a toe-stomping beat was irresistible no matter who you were or where you came from.
Unless who you were was someone with the intent to destroy and where you came from was an organization that thrived on chaos.
But I couldn’t find those someones. There were too many, too closely packed together, and moving too many ways that could be both the start of something and nothing.
If this were any other operation, I’d stay on the sidelines and patiently wait for the violence to start. Wait and watch for the men who provoked a fight and then faded onto the sidelines, letting their anger topple through the crowd like dominos.
But this wasn’t any other operation.
Swearing under my breath, I pushed off the wall that shielded me and into the throng of people.
Bodies bumped and brushed against me as I moved closer to the wrong—closer to the stage. The entire time, my eyes locked on her.
Her cropped white shirt clung to her chest, outlining the very beat of her heart. Bright emerald pants rose up to meet the edge of the white, loosely falling over her hips where the fabric of each pant leg separated in the front so her rich, tanned legs appeared through them with each step.
But it wasn’t just the jewels on her wrist and ankles that wove their magic around her. Coming down from around her neck and draped over her chest was a gold body chain. Not one of the thinner ones I’d seen her wear before. This one hung in thick swoops against her breasts like gold, glittering chainmail adorned with small charms along each strand which bounced and swayed, adding the faintest melody of her movement to the music.
The closer I got, the tighter the crowd was packed.
It took several moments for me to realize the shoving at my back had become both more insistent and less controlled. And when I turned, I saw what I’d been waiting for.
A man with a mask over the lower half of his face, black with a skull colored in red on it. A man with evil in his eyes and terror in his intent.
I shouted, but it was nothing—a pin drop against the music and the noise of the crowd—nothing that could stop him.
The man pulled back his arm and slammed his fist into the side of an unsuspecting man’s head. I heard the crack of a fist against bone over the music. To me, louder than a gunshot.
The victim dropped like a sack of potatoes onto the ground. And, as his friend around him turned to see what happened, the man with the mask slipped behind a man in a suit, shoving him forward and pointing a finger in accusation.
The innocent man didn’t have a second to process his shock let alone proclaim his innocence before he was mobbed by the unconscious man’s friends.
And so, the dominos began to fall.
One after another, the crowd began to turn away from the light and the music and toward the darkness of violence that ate away from the back edge of the crowd.
And then, there was no other word but chaos for what followed.
The cries and shouting. The thumps of fists over the beat of the music. It couldn’t have been a minute before I saw Malik catch what was happening at the fringes of the crowd and slowly working its way toward them. And it was only a few seconds after that when Esme and the rest of the musicians saw how the mood had turned.
The sad streak of Esme’s bow against the string was the sad cry for how a few with malicious intent could destroy so many who’d gathered for good.
I had to find that man in the mask—the mask that both let him blend in with the rebellious attire of many of the onlookers but made him stand out to me.
My eyes zeroed in on the masked rioter as he slithered back through the crowd to make his disappearance.
I knew I should go after him, but I felt the roughness and the violence of the crowd growing closer to me.
And so, I made a choice which I knew would cost me.
“Malik!” I turned and yelled his name over the roar of unrest, waiting a split second before his eyes and Esme’s found mine.
I caught the way her mouth dropped as she murmured my name in disbelief, but I didn’t focus on it.
“Get her out of here!” I commanded with a ragged yell, meeting Esme’s eyes for one soul-aching moment before I turned toward the fight.
Knocked from either side, I hit only those that were necessary out of self-defense as I worked my way toward where I’d last seen the red skull mask. Yelling to Malik had let him slip from my watch—a price I knew I was going to have to pay in order to save her.
As I broke through the far edge of the now full-fledged riot, a flash of black and red caught my gaze. The man with the skull mask stood with two others, murmuring to one another.
And that was when I glimpsed what their hands concealed in their jackets. Explosives.
Fuck.
I looked back to the crowd, too embroiled in a fight they’d been set up to start to notice something even more harmful coming their way. But beyond them, I looked for Esme.
By now, the stage had cleared and there was no sign of her or Malik or any of the other two who’d been up there with them. I searched for her bright colors and brilliant eyes but came up empty.
My gut tightened.
I prayed that meant they’d left and gotten somewhere safe.
Turning back to Méchant’s crew, I unsheathed my knife from where it was hidden in my sleeve, my lip curling as fiery vengeance overwhelmed all my senses.
The man with the skull mask saw me first. He did a double-take at my scars. I didn’t need a mask to look fearsome. And then he started shouting at his comrades.
Fear of failure and fear of the repercussions flashed in one of the other’s eyes as he pulled out a handheld explosive. Frantic inexperience, as was common with Méchant’s pawns, caused him to yank out the pin and throw it directly at me, even as the man in the mask—the one with evidently more experience—tried to stop him.
I couldn’t stop the explosion, so I did the best I could to make its reaction as the least destructive as possible.
With a growl, I swung out and knocked the device off to the side and away from the crowd behind me.
A few seconds later, the explosive detonated. And the riot turned to terror.
Stronger than I anticipated, it threw me to the side and turned each of my senses into a coalescence of bright, ringing light.
And while they had the explosives, I had been trained for this, which was my advantage.
Swaying onto all fours, I pushed myself back onto my feet, the world tipping and shifting in front of me.
But though the horizon was unsteady, the three men also thrown to the ground weren’t.
My steps were firm but unsteady as I closed in on them. The first man I reached opened his eyes as I gripped him by the collar of his shirt. There was nothing but hatred inside them. Whether it was his explosive or some other weapon he reached for, his body went limp as my knife plunged into his soft center, up and under his ribs, through a trove of vital organs that wouldn’t survive the blow.
His eyes bulged, mouth parting in disbelief and death, and then he was gone, the warm rush of his life drenching my hand. Freeing my weapon, I raised it and cut a cross onto his right cheek.
One down.
My balance faltered as I dropped him, his blood dripping from the tips of my fingers.
Turning toward the second man, I fell back as his boot shoved out and slammed into my knee.
Fire burst up and down my leg. But I quickly relegated the pain to where I held back the ringing in my ears and the throbbing in my head.
On my knees, I lunged my arm out and drove my knife into his leg. I saw his mouth move though I couldn’t hear his scream as I used the anchor of my weapon to drag his body toward me, sliding the blade deeper into muscle, tearing it from bone like a skilled butcher.
He didn’t attempt to hit me again, rather his hand reached for the pin of his explosive, knowing his end was near and determined to take me with him.
“Not today,” I muttered as my knife made a clean swipe across his neck, the warm spurt of his blood drenching the front of my shirt.
Wiping my blade on his clothes, I slashed the same cross into his cheek.
The effects of the first explosion were starting to wear off and the doubles in my vision began to disappear. The sounds of chaos and police sirens filtered through my senses.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I turned toward the last man—the man in the mask.
He’d been thrown the farthest in the blast, only a few more feet to my right, but he seemed to be the least affected. Rising off my good leg, I preyed on him, my l
imp barely slowing me down.
I reached down, straddling his partially limp form, and ripped his mask off his face just before I slammed my fist into it.
“Who sent you?” I demanded.
At the slightest turn of his head, I hit him again.
“Who do you work for?”
I needed to hear it. I needed to hear that I was hurting him—that I was hurting Méchant.
“Fuck you, fucking grotesque monster,” he garbled through the blood that filled his mouth. He swung up and clipped me across my chin, my teeth clacking together painfully. “You can’t stop him.”
Everything turned to red as I whipped back and returned his strike.
I hit him over and over again until my shoulder burned and my knuckles split, his blood mingling with my own.
“Quinton!”
My world—the one that spun on revenge and restitution—came to a grinding halt, frozen by Esme’s voice.
My head angled away from my prey who groaned and whimpered in a blood-covered sheen against the pavement.
Esme stood almost thirty feet away, her hand on her chest, her jeweled chains glinting with the rapidness of her breaths. She was frozen too, paralyzed by the sight of me attacking the man with the mask.
What was she still doing here?
Why hadn’t Malik taken her as far away from this fucking disaster as possible?
The look of shock on her face sliced through me as sharply as a blade.
I’d told her…
I’d warned her I was a monster. She was the one who’d chosen to want me anyway.
Then I saw him. From inside the church, Malik ran toward her, yelling her name though she didn’t hear him.
In spite of the chaos around us, the weight of shock and truth seemed to stop it all—the sights, the sounds, the fear, the fight.
Who are you? Her eyes seemed to ask.
A monster.
Her hand curled against her heart, My monster.
Something caught her eye and the moment passed.
“Quinton!” Bloodcurdling would’ve been a melody compared to the fear and warning in her scream.
She didn’t get anything else out before I grunted, feeling the sharp plummet of a blade into my side.
The Gargoyle and the Gypsy: A Dark Contemporary Romance (The Sacred Duet Book 1) Page 23