Chapter 31
Zina
The glare of day wrenched me from sleep. I had been dreaming of shadow figures and ghostly missives.
I drew in a shaky breath, casting a look around.
I was disoriented for a moment, not knowing where I was or how I got there.
Then I remembered. But where was Gabriel?
All was quiet and empty. Maybe he had run out for cigarettes or a croissant.
My stomach rumbled, though I wasn’t hungry.
Flashes of our night together replayed in my head—our bodies entwining, our sharing a cigarette in bed, our laughter at something I couldn’t recall now.
I knew our time was nearly up. Tonight was the meeting at the Witch Rock, and hopefully the answers I sought.
I threw on my blouse and trousers before slowly circling the apartment.
It was on the top floor of the building—a garret, tight and tiny.
No larger than my loft and as spartan as a jail cell.
A small kitchen, a washstand, a desk, a divan, and a bed, all simple and in plain colors, all smelling of Gabriel.
I peered at the rare knickknack or photograph, the notepads and scraps of paper lying about.
Otherwise, all was pristine and barely used—that is, except for the writing desk, which was a hive of documents, newspaper clippings, and other papers, mostly organized by folders.
Don’t come any closer, warned a voice in my head. There will be no way back if you find something.
But I knew I would, just as I knew Gabriel was still keeping his secrets, judging by the sour taste of guilt that seeped into his energy and spoiled it.
I stood among the floating dust motes, torn between taking an illicit look and just asking Gabriel about it directly.
But then I wouldn’t be me. Baba Valya’s fake séances had taught me deception, which in turn taught me the art of clandestine deeds and decisions.
I dropped into the chair and lowered my hands to the files, ignoring that voice and its warnings. I thumbed through the folders with a leaping heart—until, in a sea of unfamiliar names, I caught one I knew too well. Hers.
Olga—
My eyes burned into the name. The file likely contained the details of the information Gabriel had shared with me at the park the night before, maybe other information he hadn’t.
I tasted bitterness on my tongue. Betrayal.
His. But I would know for sure only after I looked at the file.
I snatched up the folder before I could change my mind.
Inside, I glanced through newspaper clippings on the Grand Duke; old letters from him or about him; Gabriel’s notes on him, as well as on Olga and Alec.
It looked as though I knew most of the information.
Warm relief flooded me. I hastened to close the folder, call off the search, end the snooping—when a few sheets of paper slipped out.
I instantly caught the name written there in a looping, elaborate hand, and slowly bent to pick up the pages.
Dread shot through my veins. There was a letter from Olga to Gabriel, dating back to January of this year.
I had been right; Olga reached out to the inspector well before he had showed up at Samovar. I wondered why she had targeted him specifically. I scanned the letter eagerly, hoping it might hold the answer. But I had to be quick. Gabriel would be back at any moment.
Dear Inspector Gabriel Allard,
I received your name from a trusted friend and was hoping you could help me and my dear brother to set the wheels of justice in motion and revisit an old case.
My father, the Grand Duke—or Le Grand-Duc, as he had been called in Paris—disappeared more than twenty years ago, also in Paris.
I believe there was an investigation into his disappearance that went unsolved.
My brother and I have just arrived in the city, one of our goals being to find out what happened to our beloved parent. That is, what happened to his body.
We have reason to believe my father was murdered.
You see, Inspector, I have information that may be of interest to you. I was with my father the day he disappeared.
I was then visiting from Saint Petersburg. Suddenly, my father started complaining of his heart racing, his vision blurring. Of feverish hallucinations. Even of having seizures, something he had never had before.
I remember asking him if he had eaten or drank anything out of the ordinary that day.
He showed me a crimson tea tin, telling me he received it as a gift from Samovar, the tearoom on 13 rue Daru that used to be his town house.
By his symptoms and general behavior, I deduced that he must have been poisoned.
The last time I saw my father was when he told me that he was on his way to the tearoom to confront the women who had poisoned him and to demand they heal him or hand him the cure.
These women were and are Samovar’s so-called owner, Valentina “Valya” Lenormand, and her daughter, Svetlana Lenormand, who is by all accounts deceased.
(By the time my father made it to the tearoom, she was dead, though I had no idea at the time.
It is more than possible that she had a hand in the poisoning itself.) Svetlana had a daughter—Zinaida “Zina” Lenormand—who now works with her grandmother in the tearoom.
While she would have been too young at the time of my father’s disappearance, I believe the girl knows something she is refusing to divulge.
Valentina and Svetlana Lenormand were not friends of my father.
In fact, they stole from him and his friends.
I also believe they schemed their way into 13 rue Daru.
My father had allowed them to stay there out of the goodness of his heart.
He could not have given the building away, as it came with an inheritance he left there for me.
At the time, he was trying to force the women to leave.
It is possible the tearoom and my inheritance provided the motive for his murder, in addition to Valentina’s vengefulness against the man she believed had wronged her.
I waited this long to come forward because I was sixteen at the time of my father’s disappearance and was shipped off to Russia before I could blink.
It took many years for me to return to Paris.
I also did not believe I had enough evidence.
My father, you see, took the tea tin with him when he left our house that fateful day.
But his disappearance has tormented my brother and me to no end.
We decided that even without the tea tin, it is worth us reaching out and giving you all the information I possess no matter how circumstantial.
You may then decide, along with your superiors and any other members of Paris’s grand justice system, to reexamine my father’s case and the suspects I put forth in what I know was his murder.
If you are willing to meet in person, I will explain further. I shall be waiting patiently for your reply. Before you give it, please know I will pay handsomely for your diligence and any help you can give in convincing the right people to move the investigation along. No one need know.
Princess Olga
My breathing had turned shallow. So Olga had tried to pin it all on my grandmother—the Grand Duke’s murder, the loss of the tearoom, the mysterious inheritance.
Gabriel’s questions regarding the poisons made sense now.
Did Baba Valya and Mama poison him, scheme their way into the tearoom?
Conceal secret riches? The inspector and his superior had apparently not believed Olga.
And Gabriel had shared information with me that he was under no obligation to share.
I thumbed through the rest of the folder until I came upon another letter with Olga’s signature on it. The letter dated back to this past February and read:
Dear Inspector Allard,
I have sent the first payment to the account you provided.
Thank you for agreeing to help me. I would also like to ask a favor of you.
For this, I shall pay an additional sum to the one we agreed upon.
Keep an eye on Zina Lenormand. Work with her, humor and flatter her, if you need to.
I believe she may be the key to everything, including what I am convinced is my father’s murder, the theft of my father’s town house, and my lost inheritance.
Princess Olga
I had barely finished reading the second letter when I scrambled up, gasping like a dying fish out of water. The apartment seemed to have shrunk. Dropping the folder, I rushed to the window, pushing it open and taking desperate swallows of the brisk morning air.
My affinity never steered me wrong. It was right about Gabriel, too, even as I hadn’t quite been able to put a finger on why his energy was so dark and spoiled and plain wrong.
But a part of me had expected this ending for us, my finding out about something I shouldn’t, in a way I shouldn’t.
It reinforced who each of us was, and our incompatibility.
An anomaly, a conundrum, indeed. Did it also explain the watchfulness?
Had he or his fellow inspectors been trailing me all along—with Lucian’s blessing? Or had Lucian’s warning been genuine?
Either way, I felt spied on, my privacy violated, as if I were back on the streets, with the sting of watchful eyes on my skin.
The disappointment might have been expected, but it still twisted me up.
Though I had not trusted Gabriel, had admitted to his darkness, even craved it on some base level, I had given in to more than just his advances the night before.
All for the dream of our togetherness, me wanting it like I had wanted him.
Suddenly, a noise rose on the stair, then in the stairwell, then right by the door…
I darted to the desk, pushing the damning letters back into their damning folder, the folder back into the empty cavity where I had found it. I threw myself on the bed just as there was a fumbling, then the scratch of the lock before the door swung open.
“Zina?” Gabriel looked around with a smile—bastard! “Ma chérie?”
“I am here,” I said quietly, when I really wanted to shout at him, chuck that folder in his face. But by the unsettling swirl of the dust motes, I knew it was too soon for confrontations. “Where were you?”
Gabriel held up a wrinkled paper bag in one hand, a baguette in the other, and the doughy, buttery smell finally reached me. “I went out for breakfast. I knew you would be hungry.” He winked at me, and I felt sick.
All the things we had done in this bed, all over this apartment, started to resemble a farce, playacting, as if we were on some stage of some theater in Paris performing the part of a couple in love.
But we weren’t in love. Love didn’t feel like a dagger to the chest, twisting in so deep that it grew impossible to draw breath, not to lose hope, and yourself.
It didn’t feel like disappointment. Or maybe it shouldn’t but did.
The dream of togetherness just that. I wouldn’t know, never having been in love.
“Thank you,” I forced out. “But I must go. Katya will be worried.”
“She would have been worried yesterday, yet you said nothing.”
“Things look different in the light of day, don’t they?” I couldn’t help the note of bitterness that had crept in.
“Is something wrong?” Gabriel was watching me, ever the inspector.
“Not at all. It is only time to return to the real world, Inspector Allard.”
He chuckled. “Are we back to Inspector Allard and Mademoiselle Lenormand in this real world of yours?”
“I suppose so.” I grabbed my purse. It was imperative to leave and to leave now, even if I did forget something. I walked past Gabriel briskly, avoiding his eyes.
I was almost to the door when I felt him grab my hand. He had deposited his purchases on the floor and now pulled me to him, right against his body, kissing my cheeks, my lips, my neck. “Don’t go, Zina, not yet.” Then, lower, “I thought you said we had until tonight?”
I pulled away. His kisses felt like incendiary treachery on my skin.
Hollow, a sham, an actor’s pretend kiss, with all the pretend feelings that went with it.
“I am sorry, Gabriel.” His name, too, was again a foreign, strange thing on my tongue, better suited to Inspector Allard.
“But I really must go. I will see you soon, hmm?”
Resigned, he drew me to him one last time, into one last kiss.
His warm, very kissable lips pressed against mine, his tongue gliding into my mouth and traversing it as though it were a coveted secret discovered only very recently and not at all well.
The kiss was lingering, quite deliberate, utterly obliterating.
I hated how I sensed it reverberate deep inside me, the desire for him and our night together sparking to life low and hot in my belly.
My heart gave a traitorous thud that had my eyes burning with tears—for the dream of what we could have been if we were different people living different lives.
Before I could cry into his mouth, the last humiliating thing I needed, I broke away and hurried out the door—not a moment too soon. Tears pricked my eyes and started their descent down my cheeks, impossible to stop.
I was weeping as I took Gabriel’s stairs two at a time, desperate to burst outside, to breathe in the world’s air. To forget those letters and pretend they didn’t exist, or that I had read them. To live a little longer in the dream.