18. Elara
ELARA
Four days later, Blai and Elara were deposited into a back room of étoiles by Nicolette, who had no heart to tease Elara this time. Whatever work Fernand required of her must’ve been hell because she sported numerous bruises along her arms and face, including a massive black eye.
“I don’t trust this,” Blai muttered, pacing the edges of the small room.
“It’s the only option we have,” she replied.
“Let me rephrase that, then. I don’t trust him.”
“Fernand would never harm me. He’s not like that.”
“But he doesn’t seem like the type to go out of his way to save you either.”
That truth stung deep. Fernand wasn’t above sacrificing anything—or anyone—for his plans. Which worked in her favor because helping her meant keeping his secrets safe.
It soothed some of the guilt from last night, when she’d assured Nik not to worry, that she had a plan.
He’d been agitated, restless even. He’d spent most of the past few days in his office, concocting new ways of helping her dodge whatever truth-telling magie the Counseil would throw at her.
She endured tests—tinctures, creams, patches—to try and soothe his nerves and keep from telling him about the deal with Fernand.
When he suggested injections, she caved and told him a vague version of the truth: A friend could hide her memories. In the end, she’d bargained with him. If it didn’t work, he had her full permission to take whatever measures necessary to keep their plan safe.
Their plan. Because, true to his word, Nik acted as a partner. During the day, he let her create and gave constructive feedback. At night? Well, those midnight meetings had become the highlight of her day. She melted into the comfort of sipping tea and baking with him.
Blai leaned against the doorframe. “If this doesn’t work, what will you do?”
“I won’t have much of a choice. I quit or I…” There was no second option. She couldn’t let the Counseil figure out who she was. It would destroy everything. It would destroy Nik.
And she’d come to like him. It was only during their nightly rendezvous that Nik allowed himself to relax, if but a fraction. Those times, it felt as if she was talking to the real Nik, the boy with charcoal under his nails who couldn’t stop talking when it came to art and architecture.
She’d learned a lot about him this week. After he came to Belleplace, he’d found blueprints fascinating and spent most of his time in the city archives; he liked to keep his house in order only because it helped keep his mind clear; he hated the color red.
If he learned she was actually working with a known rebel? Those nights would disappear. He would never open up to her again.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this complicated,” she muttered.
“That’s life as an artist.” Blai touched her shoulder.
Life was simpler when all she’d wanted was to focus on herself. Now she couldn’t get the image of Nik’s mouth wrapped around a spoon out of her head.
She was saved from those destructive thoughts by Fernand.
“Well?” Elara asked. “What do you have?”
“I guess we’ve moved beyond pleasantries.” He nodded at Blai. “Lozano.”
“Hero,” Blai shot back.
“If we’re jumping right in.” Fernand offered the folder beneath his arm. “I want to address my business first.”
The papers were stamped with the Arts Humains insignia, and several more were signed by Lafontaine himself.
“This is what you stole,” she said. “At the Exposé.”
“Yes, and it proves Lafontaine is up to something.”
“How?”
“I was working with Lisette.”
She looked up sharply. “Plouffe? How? When?”
“A few weeks before she died. She told me Lafontaine was planning something, and it needed to be stopped.”
“And rather than go to the police or tell the rest of the Counseil, she told you?” Elara laughed, but his face didn’t change. “No. No. See, this is what you do, Fernand. You reel people in with half-truths.”
“It’s true! All of it! How do you think I got that coat? Those papers?”
No. It didn’t make sense.
Lisette Plouffe was a Souverain. She would never be caught undermining her own power.
Besides, Nik said Lafontaine wanted to help the Restes. Why would Plouffe turn to the rebels to act against him?
“Elara.” Fernand was softer this time. “I swear. Everything I’ve ever done is to build a better future.”
“No.” She sliced her hand through the air. “You’ve been looking for revenge. There’s a damn big difference between the two.”
“Why does it matter?” he snapped.
“One is in favor of people,” Blai said darkly, “the other is in favor of your ego.”
For the first time she’d ever known him, Fernand fell quiet. It was a seething sort of silence that made his fingers twitch. The two of them stared the other down, and Elara wasn’t sure if they would fight or … something else.
“You’re living with Dupont, right?” Fernand asked her.
“This is our business. Leave him out of it.”
He snatched a single page from the folder and held it up. It was filled with scribbles, but the pattern of letters, lines, and numbers was another language.
“What is this?” she asked.
“A chemical equation. If Dupont is Lafontaine’s direct apprentice, he can decipher it.”
Elara wasn’t a fool. Nik might feel something toward her, but he would choose his Souverain over her every time. If she showed him this paper, he would recognize it as Lafontaine’s. He was smart. He would figure it out.
It would ruin everything.
“Get someone else.” She tossed the folder back at him.
For a second, he looked as if he might attack her.
He simply broke.
Head in his hands, fingers tugging his unruly curls, he heaved the sigh of a broken city.
“Please, Elara.”
“Nik is my Patron. I can’t.”
“He’s not who you think he is.”
She stiffened, tired of people underestimating Nik. Underestimating her. “He’s trying to help Lafontaine change the Sociétés for the better.”
Fernand’s head shot up. “That’s a lie.”
“It’s not. Maybe that’s what Lisette Plouffe was afraid of.
She turned to you to cause chaos because she wanted to protect her own power.
Lafontaine plans to give everyone a chance to enter a Société.
” She snatched the strange paper. “I don’t know what this is, but I know I have a chance to really make a difference. ”
“Let’s say you’re right,” he shot back. “Why not check the paper anyway? Be certain you’re getting in bed with the right people.”
Heat tinged her cheeks.
Fernand continued, “If he asks where you got it, tell him the truth. Tell him where to find me, and I’ll be waiting.”
The offer shocked her like lightning.
“Fernand,” she said gently.
“Things are bad. Worse than you can imagine.” He clenched his fists. “Please.”
If she wasn’t just as desperate to solve her own problem, she would’ve walked away.
In the breadth of a few days, she’d begun to consider a life as Souverain, a life where she had power to make things better without bloodshed.
If she had a chance to make it so what happened to Colin never happened to anyone else, she’d take it—even if it meant becoming the thing she hated.
“Fine,” she said. “Now what do you have for me?”
Fernand opened the door, and a once-familiar face wandered in. The last time she’d seen Alessia, she’d been marking Nicolette with the same match tattoo. Deep wrinkles carved her face, and she had a hitch in her step, but her smile was as bright as ever.
“Alessia.” Elara swept her into a hug.
“You taking care of the last mark I gave you?” She pried at Elara’s collar.
“Yes. I swear. It’s still like new.” She unbuttoned the top and revealed the match.
“Some of my earliest and finest work. Though what you’re asking of me today…” She let out a low whistle and patted the hulking case she’d dragged in. “I’ve only done it a few times.”
“What do you plan to do?” Blai asked.
“According to the boss here—”
“Boss?” Elara raised a brow.
Fernand shrugged.
“Still fighting like cats.” Alessia removed several items from her kit: bundles of small needles, a jar of black ink, rags, and alcohol. “Fernand says you need something to block people from your past memories. Best way to do that is to block them from yourself.”
“You mean I won’t be able to remember them either?”
Alessia mixed the ink and adjusted the needles in the instrument. “Anything relating to whatever it is you don’t want the Counseil to know.”
“They can’t know my mom was a rebel.”
“Then we hide that.”
“How?”
“It won’t be easy.” Alessia gave the instrument a few taps against the rag, then dipped it into the ink. “You’ll need to think about Corinne the whole time. Pour every memory into the pain, where it’ll be safe.”
“Every memory?” Elara asked shakily.
“All the ones that could lead the Counseil to the truth.”
The weeks of planning. The night of the murder. The days her mother hid away, sobbing in her bed after the explosion went awry. Even the memories of baking at Gaetan’s contained a shadow of her mother inching toward destruction.
They would be hidden.
Gone.
It was what Elara had wanted for so long. She could pack away the troubling parts of her mother and keep only the joy of baking. If all she had were mornings in the kitchen and late nights planning Café Divin by candlelight, she would be happy.
“Tattoos are permanent,” Blai said. “Are you sure about this?”
No, she wasn’t sure. Her mother would die all over again, except Elara would be holding the knife this time. Her mother had done awful things out of desperation, she’d made her mistakes, and she’d paid for them. Did that mean she deserved to be forgotten?
Amid the horrors, there’d been goodness. Watching the sunrise from a bakery window, late-night giggles beneath blankets and sheets to stay warm in the winter, and rare snacks shared with their feet dangling over bridges.
She had no choice. This was for herself and Chantal, for Blai … for Nik.
“Do it.”
Alessia guided her back onto the cot and propped her hand onto the case, where she could lean over it.
“We’ll place it around your finger, small enough that a ring should conceal it. And it will hurt,” she warned. “We’ll take breaks as you need, okay?”
Elara nodded.
“Think of Corinne. Something simple, a basic memory you don’t want anyone to see.”
Her thoughts were a jumbled mess. Blood spilled upon cobblestones. Late nights spent in foreign places. The way Elara had held her the night of the bombing as she fell apart.
All too big.
She settled on a flash of a memory. She’d been a child, barely seven, eavesdropping through a crack in the doorway to the front of Gaetan’s shop, where strange people gathered around tables. They all looked grumpier than her mother’s mentor, Gaetan.
To a child, it wasn’t a valuable memory.
To the Counseil, it was the first rebel meeting.
“Got it,” she whispered, eyes clinched shut.
The first tap came like a gunshot, over and over.
The needles pierced her skin and rattled off her bone.
The pain was immense, but the memory being torn away from her was worse.
It felt like falling, being devoured from the inside out.
The more she scrambled to hold on to faces or even the smell of Gaetan’s bakery, the more they fell away.
She screamed, reaching out for Blai, who grabbed her tight.
Alessia pressed a cold rag to her forehead. “You’re doing great. The first line is done.”
Elara cracked her eyes open.
Shock bolted through her at the sight of another hand in hers. Fernand had grabbed her, not Blai. He was breathing heavily, face pale as he stared down at her finger.
The wave was tiny, the skin around swollen and weeping. But it was done.
“Ready to start again?” Alessia asked.
Elara caught Fernand’s gaze begging her to stop.
She lay back.
“Ready.”
Each tap of Alessia’s needles hit like lightning, and the pain never ceased.
It only became a hum, driving her into darkness.
Her mother returning home from rebel meetings smelling of wine and cigarettes.
Secrets shared over learning how to make the perfect crust. Even a trip across the river to Belleplace, where they’d spent all afternoon wandering the shops.
It was more than she’d bargained for.
Fernand never let go. Even when she screamed and cried.
When Alessia finally set her needles aside, Elara was dizzy.
“Deep breath.” Alessia wiped her finger with a rag, sending another wave of fire through her body.
True to her word, the mark was small enough to conceal with a simple band. The circles wove around one another, like uneven icing or ripples in a pond.
Fernand released her and stumbled away.
Blai rushed to take his place. “Did it work?”
She removed a truth-telling cookie she’d baked this morning from her pocket and ate it. “Ask me something.”
“Where did you grow up?” Blai asked.
“The Restes,” she replied.
Alessia chimed in, “Who was your mother?”
Elara opened her mouth to respond.
But it wasn’t there. No name. No details.
All she could remember was, “She baked. And she taught me. Right?”
She looked to Fernand for confirmation.
He was hollow. Extinguished as if she’d doused whatever fire had been lit within him.
“Do you remember the night we met?” he asked.
“Of course I do. It was…” But that was gone too. “I…”
She felt as though she had the information stowed somewhere, she’d just forgotten where she’d placed it.
Fernand staggered backward.
“You got what you wanted,” he spat. “Feel better now? Your mother didn’t deserve—”
“Easy,” Blai warned. “You got what you wanted too. It goes both ways, hero.”
A muscle in Fernand’s jaw feathered, but he addressed her over Blai’s shoulder. “She loved you. She poured everything into you. I got you into the contest, but she’s the reason you’ve made it this far.”
Elara knew she should be angry, but she couldn’t justify why. She couldn’t defend herself if she couldn’t remember what she’d done. That might’ve been a blessing if it weren’t for the prickling of guilt.
“I had to do it,” she whispered.
“You’ve never been forced to do a thing in your life.” He snorted. “Don’t forget our deal.”
The door slammed behind him.
“Forget him,” Blai said. “You have to break ties in order to move forward.”
Elara didn’t want it to be true. And something deep inside her, something thicker than blood and memory, told her she’d made a horrible mistake.
Because if she couldn’t even remember meeting Fernand, what else had she forgotten?