Chapter 21: Three Hundred Guests

Élise's POV

Adrien told me the rest at dawn, standing at my window with his back to the forest.

He had not exposed her.

He had only told her, in the bedroom doorway, that he knew about the camera and the messages.

She would leave the château before breakfast, or he would hand the thread to Henri.

She was gone before the hounds were fed.

"Why not give it to Henri?" I asked.

"Because you asked me to be on your side without being your accomplice," Adrien said. "I think that includes giving her one chance to stop."

She did not stop.

Five weeks later, the Rochefort townhouse on rue de Varenne held three hundred guests, and not one of them was thinking about the debt.

The partnership papers had been signed on a Tuesday.

Henri had taken the Viscontis as partners, not rescuers, and the old banker's lever had gone slack in his hand.

But the old man had come to the ball anyway, in a tailcoat, leaning on his gold-headed cane.

Bianca had come on his arm, in the old pearls, with a smile that was too bright.

I stood on the staircase landing in a gown of dark wine, with the Visconti sapphire at my throat.

I watched the room turn.

Adrien stood one step below me with his hand at the small of my back.

In the first life, a car had taken me down this drive at midnight and a truck had come out of the rain.

I had told him that, in the dark of the previous night, and he had held me until I stopped shaking.

"You will leave with me," he said now, very low. "No one else's car."

"I know."

"Say it."

"No one else's car."

The orchestra began a waltz, and my father stepped onto the dais with a glass in his hand.

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