Chapter 12: The Confession
Louis went cold after the alley. Renée handled her archive visits for three days. The file updates stopped. When Cordelia called the number on his card, a man she didn't recognise picked up and took her message in a pleasant voice, and no one called back, but she continued her investigations. She cross-referenced the shell companies against the city assessor records and found three more financial links she hadn't had before, and she wrote them all down on the legal pad and drew lines between them, and she woke up at three in the morning four nights running each time Louis appeared in her dreams.
On the fourth day she went to 14 Rue Dauphine and told Émile she would wait.
"He may be some time," Émile said.
"I know," she said, and went to the study.
The chess board was as it had been the first time she'd seen it. The black queen was exposed to the same deliberate isolation. Weeks had passed; either Louis hadn't touched it or he was maintaining it on purpose.
Cordelia didn't touch the pieces. She sat in the chair that faced the door and looked at the board and waited. The three days of silence that had told her more than a conversation would have.
Louis came down at ten.
He looked the same, but underneath the surface — the set of his jaw, the quality of how he held himself, and the precision that was a shade too precise — he was a man who had decided to be very careful.
"You've been avoiding me," she said, eyes meeting his. He averted his gaze quickly.
"I've been managing a situation."
"I'm the situation."
He didn't deny it. He moved to the chair across from her and sat, and the firelight was behind him, and Cordelia looked at him directly, determined to stare him down.
"Are you a monster?" she asked.
All air left the room. Louis was quiet for long enough that she was willing to take back her question before he spoke.
"I have done monstrous things," he said uncharacteristically quiet. "Whether that makes me a monster depends on who is defining the term."
"I'm defining it," Cordelia replied.
"Then you already know the answer." His eyes finally held hers. "Or you wouldn't still be here."
Cordelia knew he was right; no, t hey both knew he was right, and them knowing had a weight to it that she was done pretending wasn't there. Cordelia had been coming back. She had been going to the archive and sitting in his study and sleeping with the chess piece on her kitchen table and waking at three in the morning with her hand pressed flat against her chest trying and failing to lie to herself that she felt nothing. And yet she was still here.
"Did you kill Élise?" she asked. She was scared to know the answer.
Louis turned his head to look at the fire. His hands were loose in his lap, but there wasn’t a twisting of a ring.
"Yes," he breathed out. Cordelia let out a gasp but she waited for him to continue.
"I was turned in 1789," he began, eyes still to the fire. "I didn't choose it. Someone made me and left. I had no guidance nor explanation — I had no framework for what I was, what I needed or how to manage any of it. The only thing I had was hunger and a revolution happening outside my door." He paused, thinking of how to reveal his inner self without sending Cordelia running for the hills. If he had a beating heart, Louis was sure Cordelia would hear it.
"I was feral for years. I killed indiscriminately. I was not — I was not what you see now. What you see now took a very long time to build.” His gaze stayed on fire, refusing no scared to meet hers.
Internally, Cordelia's mind was a mess, but she was a detective first and foremost, so she asked, "When did you meet her?"
"1809. I had been managing myself for twenty years by then. Barely. The discipline was new and fragile, and I knew it." He turned his ring once. "She was a neighbour's daughter. She was kind in the way of people who have never had cause to be otherwise. She accepted things without needing to understand them, and I mistook that for safety." A pause. "It wasn't safety. It was a quality in her that I loved and should have protected her from me by recognising."
"You were together for fifteen years," Cordelia said.
"Yes. I held myself at distance for most of them. I burnt letters. I left rooms when I needed to. I managed." He spoke like he was recounting something he had recounted to himself so many times the emotion had been filed down to the shape of the facts. "And then there was a night when she came to me knowing something was wrong, and she offered herself because that was who she was. She was the kind of woman who ran toward the thing that needed her."
Cordelia said nothing. She did not know what to say.
"I took more than I meant to," he said. "I know that is not an excuse. I am simply telling you what happened. I lost control and I took more than I meant to, and she died, and I have been—" He stopped. Started again. "I have been managing what I am through deprivation since 1852. Controlled feedings. Minimum necessary. Never from anyone I cared about. It was the only penance I could think of that fit the scale of what I did."
"And then I arrived," Cordelia said.
"And then you arrived." Something moved across his face — not the grief from what she had seen in the portrait room; it was something rawer than that. "Everything I had managed for two hundred years became considerably less manageable."
The fire moved. Outside, a car passed on the street, music bleeding through the window for a second and then gone.
"You look like her," he said. "In certain lights. It’s in the way you hold your head. I want to be honest with you about that because you deserve to know that my interest in you is not entirely clean." Louis held her gaze without flinching from it. "There is something in me that recognised you before I had reason to. I do not know how much of what I feel is you and how much is her. I have been trying to determine that. I am not certain I have," his voice became very quiet at the end.
The room was very quiet.
This was the most honest thing Louis had ever said to Cordelia. She could see what it cost him – the careful man sitting across from her with his hands loose and his face open and nothing managed, nothing curated, all offered without ornament.
Cordelia should leave. The writing on the wall was clear. Louis had killed his wife, and he had admitted she was partly a ghost in his eyes. He had told her, in direct language, that he couldn't be certain the feeling was about her at all.
She should have left, but she didn't.
Cordelia wasn't sure afterward who had moved. Maybe the distance had been closing since the café on Royal, and this was just where it arrived.
Louis was so close that she could feel the cold that radiated from him at this range — the temperature differential that her body had learnt to read as him. His mouth was inches from hers. His eyes were open and on her face and darker than usual with something she had long since stopped pretending she couldn't name.
Cordelia leaned forward. But Louis pulled back.
"Not like this," he said, voice low. "Not while I'm not certain what I'm reaching for."
Cordelia looked at him, embarrassed and furious with herself. His face was two inches away from hers.
"Find out," she said angrily. "Before I stop waiting."
She stood up quickly, picked up her bag and walked to the door with her face doing what she needed it to do, which was nothing. As she reached the doorway, she stopped. Cordelia hadn’t forgotten anything, but there was one more thing she needed to do.
"The Marguerite pattern," she said, without turning. "The women in your records. Dark-haired, attached to your orbit, gone before you left." She took in a deep breath. "How many were there?"
Silence from the room behind her.
"Six," he said. "Including Élise."
Cordelia chuckled to herself.
"And me," she said. "That makes seven."
She left before he could answer. Cordelia didn't allow herself to feel anything until she was inside her apartment with the bolt and the chain done and her back against the door. Then she slid down it and sat on the floor and let it move through her.
Louis had told her the truth. He killed his wife. He had cycled through six women in two hundred years, always dark-haired and who always ended before they could cost him more than he could bear. Cordelia was the seventh. Common sense told her to use her head, but her heart was willing to wait for Louis to find out what she was to him. She groaned to herself.
After a while she got up and went to her table to pick up the chess piece — a white knight, cool marble, the letter on the base worn smooth from handling. She turned it over in her palm.
Six women before her. All of them ghosts in his eyes and all of them standing at the border of something he couldn't let himself cross. All of them, presumably, are standing where she was standing now.
Cordelia set the knight down. She picked up her pen and added to the legal pad under Philippe's circled name. She wrote, 'What does he want from this, and who told him where to look?'
Under that she wrote, 'Why now?'
Under that, last, in smaller letters that she would tell herself later were just a note and not an admission.
He told me the truth. I should hate him for it and yet my heart calls to him
Cordelia looked at it for a moment. Then she closed the legal pad and went to bed. When she woke, she refused to acknowledge why she had spent the night dreaming of herself in blood-stained 19th-century regalia, dancing with Louis in a ballroom that had never existed