Read Online Before Ever After by Samantha Sotto - Free Book Online

Four
Daughters and dragons
    PARIS
    May 21, 1871
    I sabelle slipped from Julien’s arms. She was falling, but not as fast as one might expect a small girl to fall to the ground. But she was not four anymore. She was six, or perhaps seven. No, not seven. She was older now. Nine. Twelve. Seventeen. She fell, beyond his grasp, beyond saving, shattering his heart into pieces. A fragment flew up and slashed his face, waking him from his nightmare.
    Julien touched his cheek. It was wet. Sticky. His fingertips found a glass shard. He pried it from the paste of sweat and blood on his skin. He wiped his hand on the bedclothes and rose. Heat sliced through the ball of his foot. Blood trickled from his sole, hiding the sliver embedded in it. He squinted through the weak light. The floor glittered with the jagged pieces of a broken dawn. Screams poured through the shattered windows. He stepped around the maze of glass and peered outside. The Versailles army was swarming through the streets. Julien whispered her name:
Isabelle
.
    This was the first time since he had stolen her from her father that he regretted his decision. That night, seventeen years ago, had been rancid with her mother’s misery. It had soured the air with a stench worse than milk left in the sun. It was on her breath, on her skin, and in the tears shespilled over her newborn’s cheeks when she abandoned her at the door of a once grand home. Julien could not blame her. The house belonged to her daughter’s father and its wet stone steps were still better than the lice-infested bed her baby was born in. Leaving her child in the rain was a mercy. She could never offer her daughter more than that.
    But Julien knew that Isabelle’s father would give her even less. He had made choices that made Julien forget that he had once been bound to him, however distantly, by blood. The man was a gifted drunkard, but a far worse gambler—an unfortunate assemblage of talents that Julien correctly predicted would, sooner rather than later, send him to the bottom of the Thames with a rusty knife twisted in his back.
    She had been so small, Julien remembered. He thought he would break her, as he ran from her father’s house, through the cold night rain, to the ship waiting for them at the dock. Once they were safely onboard, sailing toward Paris, Julien looked into Isabelle’s bright brown eyes. She was all that he had left and that was more than enough.
    He grasped for the chain he wore around his neck and slipped it off. A crude locket made of two small half-shells of beaten gold dangled from it. It had been another child’s once, a token of protection. Julien could no longer recall when he last believed in any shape of superstition, but in his daughter’s eyes he found a new reason to have faith. He tucked the locket inside her coarse blanket. Tiny pink fingers reached out and grazed the tip of his slightly hooked nose. He breathed her in. Spring and promise. Untainted. He nuzzled her cheek, hoping to remember the smell of her skin forever.
    Tonight, however, as the streets of Paris ran with blood, a part of Julien wished that he had never intervened. If he hadn’t saved her that night, she would now be hungry and hard—a whore like her mother. He could live with that kind of guilt. At least in London his precious girl would be somewhere else, anywhere else, but here.
    Julien dressed, clothing himself in the thin hope that the army had not yet reached Isabelle’s home. He tucked two pistols into his coat and a dagger into his waistband. He raced downstairs. The courtyard was still dark. He called for Alessandra. She emerged, happy to see him. Julien gathered her in his arms. His fingertips found a passing calm in the softnessof her feathers. Her eggs had been better currency than gold during the war when Paris was living off rats and moldy bread. He squeezed his eyes shut, tightened his fist around her small neck, and snapped it. He took his dagger and slit her throat. Blood