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were greeted by Madame herself. “Darlings!” she cried, opening her tattooed arms.
    Madame Cherie was a little shorter than Arden, putting her somewhere in the vicinity of about five and a half feet. She had thick black hair streaked with white that she wore piled haphazardly on top of her head, dark eyes thickly lined with black kohl and bright red lips. Her skin was the color of cream with just a touch of coffee, and decorated with so many colored pictures Arden often made a game of trying to sort them all out. Today Madame Cherie showed a shocking amount of skin by wearing the latest fashion amongst the artistic crowd—a short violet leather vest that left her midriff bare and a long, gauzy skirt in black and silver.
    “Bonjour, Madame,” Arden replied. “Comment ça va?”
    “ Tres bien, mon amie.” The woman, who was no more French than Arden was, but far more convincing, fixed her with a direct look. “I had hoped to see you soon, Arden.”
    “The countess is in need of a new wardrobe,” Hannah interjected coolly, having found her voice.
    Madame—whose given name was Zoe Harper—arched a brow as black as a crow’s wing, calling attention to the tiny crosses tattooed along her temple. “ Mais oui .”
    Arden didn’t really fancy being caught in the middle of a female equivalent of a pissing contest, so she patted her friend on the shoulder. “There’s no need to stand on ceremony here, Hannah dearest. Madame and I have known each other too long to be concerned with titles. Why don’t you pick out some fabrics while we discuss designs? Whatever colors you think I should have.”
    There wasn’t a woman in the fashionable world who would turn down the chance to dress a friend however she wanted. Hannah’s green eyes brightened considerably before she scurried off to begin hauling bolts of brightly colored silk off the walls.
    Both of Zoe’s brows jumped at one particularly garish shade of puce. “I believe you might regret that, my friend.” There was no hiding the amusement in her voice—not that she would have tried.
    Arden smiled. “I still reserve the right to veto any choices. Might we step into the back, dearest? I have something I wish to discuss with you.”
    The darker woman linked her arm around Arden’s. “And I, you.”
    They left the main room of the shop and passed through a curtained doorway into the sewing room where both humans and automatons—or androïdes as the French called them—worked on stitching and constructing gowns for the shop’s many clients. The automatons worked much faster and more precisely than the humans, but there were simply some things metal could not do better than human hands.
    Zoe’s office was located just off this room, so they could sit in relative privacy, their conversation muffled by the sounds of the workroom. Zoe closed the door all the same.
    “I believe my husband has returned,” Arden said, wasting no time in getting to the point of her visit. She stripped off her gloves with perfunctory tugs on each finger. “He snuck into my room and was hovering over me when I awoke. Do you know anything?” Zoe knew almost everything that happened in London, having contacts in all levels of society. She was one of W.O.R’s best intelligence gatherers, though there were some that sought to brand her as a spy-whore—selling secrets to the highest bidder.
    Arden knew better. Her friend’s moral code might be a tad ambiguous, but once she gave her loyalty to a person she never wavered. Arden was equally loyal to her in return.
    “Your…husband.”
    “Yes, only he doesn’t seem to know me. It’s as though he has some kind of amnesia.” Frowning, Arden finished with her gloves and looked up as she slapped them into one palm. Zoe was watching her with an expression that could only be described as a mixture of trepidation and horror. “Good lord, Zoe, what is it?”
    Her friend took a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard behind her desk, removed the