She wanted him to look up at her again, but he wouldn’t.
“They hanged me at Montfaucon in front of a crowd, every last one of them believing I’d murdered an innocent priest.”
Luc huffed a laugh, but Ingrid felt sick. She could see it all. Luc, standing at a gallows with his hands bound behind his back, a noose around his neck. A jeering crowd the last thing he saw before a suffocating black hood was thrown over his head. And then the fall. The snap of his neck.
“I didn’t repent then, and I still don’t,” he said.
Ingrid no longer just felt sick. She worried she might actually be sick. “I’m sorry, I need some air,” she said, her hand clasped lightly at her throat. “I’m fine. You needn’t come with me.” She scrambled forward and shoved open the carriage door. The steps were already lowered and she took them, fast.
She headed straight for the arcade entrance, a pair of glass doors under a fanned-out awning of iron and glass. To her relief, the doors were open, and she hurried inside.
He had died.
Of course, she’d known Luc had died and that he’d been young, but … she hadn’t been prepared to learn how. That he had been executed.
The arcade’s main doors swung closed behind her. She slowed, the tap of her heels echoing along the long, empty corridor. The shopping arcade was an indoor plaza, with storefronts on either side of a wide corridor, topped by a glass roof. The stores weren’t open yet, and Ingrid hoped she wouldn’t come upon any vagrants taking shelter. Though she supposed that was what she was doing, in a way.
Ingrid started for the stone fountain up ahead. Here, in the warmth of the greenhouse-like building, water burbled from the fountain. There were benches nearby. She needed to sit and get the wretched image of Luc swinging from a gallows out of her mind.
She walked along the marble-floored corridor, passing over a short stretch of glass and iron that was in fact the roof of an underground arcade directly below. Little stretches of glass-and-iron bridges allowed the sunlight down to the subterranean arcade where Ingrid and Gabby had once shopped for hats and gloves.
She had nearly reached the benches when something moved near the tip of the fountain’s spout. The fountain was a basic tiered design with three bowls, the smallest at the top and the widest at the bottom. Water overflowed at each bowl’s rim, creating a cascade into the basin. Ingrid stopped walking and stared at the falling water. There was something moving through it, dropping from one bowl to the next. It looked like a white braided rope, thicker even than rope used to moor ships. But it wasn’t rope.
It slinked from the widest bowl into the main basin and then up over the lip of the fountain edge. Ingrid froze.
Axia’s serpent.
The snake’s diamond-shaped eyes fixed on Ingrid, its pale scales glistening and wet. Ingrid had nearly forgotten about the serpent and the way it had darted out from Axia’s robes to attack Ingrid when she’d been in the Underneath.
Axia couldn’t leave the demon realm, but her serpent clearly could. And it had come to fetch Ingrid.
The front doorbell rang its grating trill throughout the rectory, and Gabby slouched with relief. The breakfast table had become a war zone. The opposing armies were her parents, and Gabby had somehow become the innocent citizen caught in the cross fire.
“I don’t see the scandal in French lessons,” her mother said to Gabby, though her words were directed at her father. Lord Brickton sat at the opposite end of the table, the skin around his club collar mottled purple.
“Sending her off at the crack of dawn, without a chaperone and to a man’s home, isn’t scandalous?” he roared at Gabby, refusing to meet his wife’s eyes.
Gabby stared into her tea, which was far too milky, but her arm had jumped when her father had shouted earlier and she’d spilled in more than she preferred. Grayson had been smart enough not to come down to the dining room. The weasel had probably sneaked out altogether.
Their butler, Gustav, entered the dining room, his hands clasped behind his back. “My lord, my lady. Monsieur Quinn to see you.”
Gabby startled again, and this time a splash of tea crested the lip of her cup and sloshed onto her saucer. She sat with her back to the foyer entrance and heard Nolan’s footsteps as he entered. What on earth was he doing here? It was far too early to call, and Gabby hadn’t even pinned on one of her veiled hats yet. She resisted turning to face him.
“Detective Quinn, what a surprise,” Lady Brickton said, addressing him as she had in December when Nolan had pretended to be a detective searching for Grayson.
Her mother knew the truth now, of course, and her greeting had sounded cool.