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children will be expecting you.”
    Jean the gatekeeper slammed the door shut behind Jaouen as he swung up into the carriage. The horses’ nostrils flared, their breath steaming in the cold air as the coachman clucked to them, setting them into motion. Through the rapidly misting glass of the window, Jaouen was nothing more than a silhouette, a blurred image in tans and browns.
    That was it. She had done it. She had really done it. Blood surged to Laura’s cheeks and fingertips, sending a rush of warmth tingling through her despite the freezing wind gluing her soaking skirts to her legs. Whatever else came of it, the first step was accomplished; she was a member of Jaouen’s household. She was in.
    Between the rain and the sound of hooves against the cobbles, Laura could just barely hear her new employer call out his instructions to the coachman.
    “To the Abbaye Prison. As fast as you can.”
    Laura swallowed hard, turning her face away from a sudden gust of wind that tore at her bonnet strings and snatched away the very breath from her throat.
    Oh, she was in all right. Way over her head.

Chapter 2
    T he carriage rocked abruptly forward and then back as it came to a stop in front of the Prison de l’Abbaye. The stone bulk of the Abbaye squatted sullenly in front of the carriage, the towers set in each side jutting out like a pair of angry elbows. Torches illuminated the entrance, burning greasily against the early dark of a wet winter night.
    “So kind of you to finally join us.” A small man in unrelieved black stepped out from under the lee of the portal at the entrance of the Abbaye Prison.
    “Us?” André said mildly, taking his time climbing down from the carriage. He’d be damned if he’d hurry for the likes of Gaston Delaroche. “I had no idea this was to be an ensemble event.”
    Delaroche positioned himself so that the guttering torches on either side of the entrance cast an eerie glow over the polished silver of his coat buttons, bathing him in an unnatural and unholy light.
    Bloody stagy, if you asked André’s opinion, which no one had.
    Delaroche liked to claim he had once been the second most feared man in France. André would have put his position at fourth or fifth at best. Voicing that opinion had not endeared André to Delaroche.
    “How very … unlike you to be tardy, Jaouen.” Delaroche bared a set of unnaturally yellowed teeth. André suspected him of buffing them with tobacco and a side of tea leaves. “It is, I suppose, no surprise that you would be distracted—now that your children are come from Nantes.”
    There was no point in asking him how he knew. They were all in the business of knowledge. Any self-respecting senior official in the Ministry of Police employed his own private system of informers, above and apart from those sanctioned by the state. They spent as much time monitoring one another as they did the enemy.
    André forced himself to shrug. “A nursery is a nursery, whether in Paris or Nantes. They provide no impediment to my duties.”
    Delaroche’s eyes glinted red in the torchlight. “Paris is a far cry from Nantes, my friend. So much more … dangerous.”
    Rain ran beneath André’s collar from the back of his hat, sending an icy sluice down his spine. André favored Delaroche with a hard stare. “Can any relation of Fouché, however young, be deemed to be in danger? They are not unprotected,” he added pointedly.
    Delaroche shrugged, a shrug that made André want to take him by the shoulders and shake him like the little rat that he was. “Even so,” he said.
    Even so? Even so ? What in all the blazes was that supposed to mean?
    André pictured his children, Gabrielle, with her snub nose, her plump child’s cheeks, her hair that was beginning to lose its baby curl and the eyes that looked so uncannily like his own; Pierre-André with Julie’s open, smiling countenance and hair like the gilded angels’ wings in a church fresco, trusting, open, laughing.