Page 44

Léonie’s skin was cold, and my fingers shook as I placed them over the pulse in her throat.

Nothing. Not a beat. Not a sound.

Tilly was sobbing, burying her face in a handkerchief as Armand patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.

“We-we put a blanket over her. It didn’t seem right to just leave her like that. Poor little thing. Least she has a little peace this way. Lord knows she didn’t in life.”

My elbows gave way and I landed on my chin so hard on the ground my lip split open and blood was running down my face.

“I was always going to bring her back,” I croaked through bloody lips.

Mano? Had it been Mano? Where was his car now?

Had he been hiding somewhere and then killed them? Had he been angry at her rejection?

Hugo had been even more severely burned, as I watched Tilly carefully covered his body with a blanket.

“I was always going to bring you back,” I said again, but my wife’s eyes were closed, her injured face frozen, indifferent.

“Étienne, we need to go back home—” Mme began. “In case the Pinoteaux⁠—”

“I don’t care,” I snarled, pulling Léonie into my arms. “I’m not leaving her. She’ll come back. She couldn’t leave me on this earth. She’d never leave me. She’d never leave me.”

“Monsieur, you must stop,” Tilly pled as I put Léonie’s cold hand to my cheek.

And the older servant pushed in between us, and there were more hands, pulling at me, prying my fingers off Léonie.

“Monsieur, no good can come of this!” Tilly said firmly. “You have to accept the truth. She is gone.”

No no no

“They must be taken to the funeral parlor,” Armand said. “Best to move them as soon as possible.”

The words meant nothing. My howls of rage that shook the hills meant nothing.

My hands could snap a neck, climb a cliff, lift a boulder. But they couldn’t bring my wife back. They couldn’t fix what I had done.

I refused to leave Léonie. I stayed beside her. In the back of the hearse, down the road, and to the viewing area in the funeral home.

“You may stay with her until tomorrow morning,” someone in a suit said.

Mme spoke, Faustine spoke, my security chief spoke, but I heard none of their words.

Only a piercing, shattering ringing in my ears. My throat was hoarse, so hoarse.

I must have been roaring in rage and terror, only I wasn’t even conscious I was doing it, or what words I was saying.

And then at last I was left alone in the dark viewing area, my wife’s body resting on a table in front of me.

Until tomorrow morning.

Was that really how long I had left on this earth with my wife?

With Léonie, who the ancestors had given to me.

Léonie, who I had watched for years without her knowing it, because I couldn’t believe someone like her could be real.

Surely she was a tool of the Pinoteaux dogs, to seduce and weaken me. . .