“I don’t bring her; she brings me. She’ll come anyway.”
Noah’s voice receded as the distance grew, their boat carrying Cally away from him for the last time.
“Tell her not to. Tell her I said…” I love you. I miss you. I’m sorry. “… to move on.”
No reply through their link.
“Noah?”
Nothing.
Antoine floated in his steel cage, alone again, nothing to keep him company save for the agony of his body and his memories.
*
Paris, France, 1750
“When she is gone, let the Seine have her.”
Antoine wrapped her in a sheet with hands that lingered. But it was a paltry gesture; Éliane deserved so much more.
Barely four weeks they’d had together. Belle had implied that he could have her forever—at least as long as she lived naturally—but he should’ve known better.
Just another of her games.
He left her face until last, and her eyes were closed as though she were sleeping. He placed a kiss on her lips in farewell, then cinched the sheet tight around her.
A life snuffed out in its prime. Éliane would never become the dancer she had wished to be.
But what did it matter? Chattel died every day, and none of them would live as long as he, as long as Belle. They would all die, in time, while he never would. Yet he carried her body through the streets like it was something precious, even though it was now nothing more than a husk.
On Île Saint-Louis, one never had to walk far to encounter the Seine, and at this hour there was no one to bear witness.
Antoine crouched on the bank and eased Cally into the water, the black water quickly enveloping—
No. Not Cally. Éliane.
It wasn’t even the same; I didn’t love Éliane, not truly. She’d been an innocent spirit, full of life, until Belle had taken it from her. She wasn’t Cally. Cally was still alive.
Antoine remembered walking the banks of the Seine that night, for so long that the smell no longer bothered him, and the sky lightened on the horizon.
Usually, at this time, the stupor of helpless sleep overcame him. But instead, his grief and anger held it in check.
He hadn’t seen the sun in too long; more than anything he wanted to glimpse it now. All throughout the seventh arrondissement were townhouses owned by nobles. Many had courtyards with side alleys. From the pitched roof of one, he would be able to watch it rise.
He leaped for a windowsill to pull himself up, only to be caught by surprise when instead he landed on it, feet scrabbling for purchase on the narrow ledge. He could jump higher than he’d imagined possible, and in a few more leaps he reached the top of the building, the whole of Paris laid out before him, a sea of uneven rooftops like waves of gray.
The Seine snaked muted and dark through the city, and in the distance lanterns illuminated a cargo boat moored at a quay. Beneath him, narrow, cobblestoned streets wound between tall buildings, as streetsweepers scraped the muck toward the river.
The sun crossed the horizon, flares of light so bright that it seemed to wash out the colors, and Antoine sat with his back to a chimney stack and took in all the beauty for the last time.
He didn’t notice his skin and hair steaming until steam became smoke. And then the pain arrived.
The memory of that moment slammed into the anguish that gripped him, physical and emotional: the loss of Éliane, the loss of Cally; sunlight searing every nerve, the lack of air clawing at every muscle. Until Antoine was no longer sure whether he was in the present or the past, remembering that morning in Paris, or reliving it.
He covered his head in his hands, crouching on the rooftop, as the day dawned around him and the dawn burned the gloom away. Every inch of his skin felt the bite of a thousand needles and the sting of a thousand wasps. Half of him wanted to flee, to seek cover, to find somewhere the sun could not reach.
But what did it matter anymore?
