Page 4 of Love Beneath the Guillotine
Léon wrapped his hand around the edge of the trough to push himself to standing, then found himself knocked onto his back by a sharp slap across his face. A boot stamped down on his chest, and his assailant soon had a knee at his cheek and that knife right back at his throat. “When you get home tonight, you’ll find your brother is not there.”
No time or food or potion in existence could have knocked the sobriety back into Léon as effectively as those words. “Where is he?”
“He’s safe. For now.”
Léon clamped his hand tight onto Henry’s wrist, those eyes he’d admired moments earlier now begging to be gouged out. “Where is my brother?”
“You’ll go home, you won’t say a word about any of this, and tomorrow, at midday, you’ll leave the keys to the prison cells under a rock at the bend in the river.”
“The keys? Are you mad? I’m an executioner, not a warden. How am I supposed to get your keys?”
“For every hour you’re late, he loses one finger. Then?—”
Henry’s teeth snapped together with a gum-splitting crunch at the sharp thrust of Léon’s palm. His other arm backhanded Henry and knocked him off balance. He yanked a leg up, and Henry smashed down on the cobblestones on his back with the full weight of Léon on top. Léon managed to get one excellent punch in before Henry lifted a knee into his gut and knocked the wind out of him. He threw him off and rolled over. Finding Léon pushing himself up on all fours, gasping for air, he leapt to his feet and smacked a boot hard into his side, felling him against the dewy stone, where he let out a sharp cry, clutching his side.
Henry spat a mouthful of blood to the ground. “Do you imagine I’m acting alone? If I don’t come back, and soon, they’ll kill him. This is your only chance.” He waited for Léon’s coughing and spluttering to quiet, but figured the message musthave gotten through, because Léon, who glared up at him as if he were Satan himself, didn’t launch a new attack. “Midday. There will be a large rock, right at the bend in the river. You’d better have those keys beneath it.”
He stalked off into the dark, his adrenaline rushing too fast to let him feel the cut seeping blood down his cheek.
Léon’s raw scream made him pause for the length of one enormous beat of his heart. “I’ll kill you if you hurt him! I’ll fucking kill you!”
The pitch of that cry went through Henry like an arrow, but he forced himself to stagger on through the night without so much as a glance over his shoulder.
After all, what was Léon’s temporary suffering in comparison to the disaster that awaited the entire city if he didn’t manage to get those keys?
5
A SPARK OF MURDEROUS INTENT
“Émile!” Léon burst into his single-room lean-to, little more than a glorified shed, to find Émile’s babysitter, Madame de Luc, unconscious at the table with her face half sunk into a plate of stew. “Madame!”
His eyes ran frantically over every inch of the dim room as he dashed towards her, calling out in the same breath, “Émile? Émile!”
Not a sound answered him.
Émile’s bed, he could already see, was unruffled, un-slept in.
“Madame?” He sank down beside her, raising his chill fingers to her warm cheek. She let out a loud snort-snore at the touch, but roused no more than that. He tapped her cheek, called her name repeatedly, to no avail.
Her face had settled into the dish with the right half almost fully submerged, nostrils just poking out enough to allow her to breathe, as though she had fallen asleep mid-bite. Across the table sat a second plate, barely touched, Émile’s spoon deep in the stew, readied for a mouthful. An almost-empty bottle of wine sat uncorked next to her drained glass. The single candle that stood between the two dishes had burned to its base, one finalflickering glimmer illuminating all the horror of a loved one’s disappearance, then black.
“Émile!” Léon crashed through the dark room to a side table, where he set a lamp aflame. He tore the sheets from Émile’s bed. His own bed, pushed side-by-side with the little boy’s, was in tatters seconds later. He ripped their threadbare curtains to the floor in his haste to check if he was hiding there. Every basket and box was searched, beneath the table, on top of the cupboard, but he knew the whole time—he knew hopelessly—that his little brother was gone and in the hands of that degenerate.
Léon stood bereft in the centre of the small space, frigid and empty.
They could afford better. They should have afforded better. Had Léon not been saving that money—had he put Émile in the care of a proper family instead of this old drunk…
“Madame? Madame, wake up! Please!” But no entreaty, however urgently made, could wake the woman from her slumber. He took a cloth from the washstand, pulled her head up and cleaned her face. He ran it through the slick of wet hair, down her chin, over her neck, and nothing more than a grunt met these ministrations, even when he settled her light old body on his bed to sleep it off.
Léon crossed the room in two strides and ripped the lid off a sweets tin. All his money was still there. Alltheirmoney. But that man didn’t want money. He wanted keys. And how the hell was Léon to get them?
Of course the prick didn’t say which prisoner he wanted released. Why give anyone forewarning that he was coming for them?
But all the keys were with the warden, who was a complete shit, and the prison was closed. And it wouldn’t open until broad daylight when Léon had no reason whatsoever to show his face there.
He dropped onto the bed and thrust his fingers into his hair, ramming his forehead into his palms.What excuse? What excuse?
It was the one place in town he couldn’t sneak into. The warden’s desk was deep inside the prison, and he kept the keys there with him all day. There or swinging on his belt. From the second he got to work, they were unobtainable.
