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been alone, he’d have stopped to take a look through those cupboards, just in case something trifling had been overlooked.
    Ten paces and the cabinets ran out. Now he had stone wall under his fingers. His foot hit a stair—sturdy, solid-build, wood, curved in a circle, headed up. Air flowed down from above, carrying the wind in from outside and a small, sharp lemon smell with flowers at the edges. That was Owl. No aspect of that girl that didn’t have a bite to it. He didn’t hear footsteps, but she rustled the way women do, faint and subtle.
    So. Upstairs. He counted the steps as he went in case he had to retreat with some deliberate speed.
    The good news was, she probably hadn’t brought him here to gut him. If she wanted him dead, she’d be sensible about it and stab him in the street. She was complex, not perverse.
    He took the steps two at a time, which was why he ran into her, full-tilt, in the dark. Because she’d stopped to wait for him. He didn’t run into her hard, but she jerked like he’d poked her with a stick.
    He felt shock in her muscles. Her whole body went stiff, ready to fight or run. He stepped back, quick-like, but tension kept right on drumming in the air around her. “Sorry.”
    “It is nothing.” A stiff little answer, in a tight voice that barely escaped her throat.
    She didn’t much like men. He’d seen that the first time he laid eyes on her. Seen all the signs that said some man, sometime, had done a right professional job of hurting her. Where he came from, he’d known a lot of women like that.
    She said, “Ahead, there is better light. Perhaps you will refrain from stumbling over me until we get there.”
    He could have said he wasn’t the one standing stock-still in somebody’s path, but he didn’t.
    When the stairs circled again, light started filtering down from the top. A hundred and six steps more and they got to the trapdoor, already opened. Owl crawled up onto the platform of the bell tower. His eyes stung, coming out into the sunlight. Sparrows came out of nests tucked up in the edges of the roof and flew back and forth, objecting.
    He’d never been in a bell tower before, largely because there was nothing to steal in them. But this . . . This was prime. You could see all the way from the Seine out to the hill at Montmartre with the windmills on top. Notre Dame really was on an island. It looked like a bloody map.
    All four sides were open. Up top, over his head, the roof had a beam across it from corner to corner, thick as a tree trunk. That’s where the bell had been. You could see the grooves where it used to fit. The wood floor was scraped up where they’d dragged the bell across. They’d have taken it off to melt down for cannons. There was a square in the floor where the bell ropes must have come up. Big enough to fall through. Somebody’d set three boards across the space.
    Owl put her basket on the stone sill and leaned over, showing off a pretty, rounded arse. He didn’t take any notice of that, since she was a French agent and didn’t like being touched anyway. But when she was grown up a little, she was going to drive some man mad.
    She pointed southeast. “They are outside. You will see them.” She’d brought field glasses in her basket. “Take this.”
    What she handed over was a nice sturdy set of optics, standard issue for the English military. It was just a wonder and a mystery how the French got their hands on so much British equipment, wasn’t it?
    He wasted forty seconds thinking how much money a man earned smuggling and being wistful about it. But he was a spy now, not a member of the criminal classes, and he was reforming himself, so there was no point in thinking about profits from smuggling.
    He shook hair out of his eyes. “What am I looking at?”
    “That street. The long wall. You see it? The gate is green.”
    He was good with maps. “Rue de la Planche.”
    “It is. Do not boast to me. Look at it.”
    He adjusted the optics,