Ettie’s face crumples. She breaks into little sobs.

The first night I brought her back to the inn, she looked around and promptly burst into tears until Thénardier’s reprimand left her cheek a mass of blue-black bruises. When the last customer was gone and dawn was peeping through the wooden shutters, I crawled up to my bed and found her curled in a ball, shivering under the bedsheets. She was half frozen with fear and sorrow. I should have given in to my exhaustion, ignored her, and fallen asleep. But she stared at me entreatingly with those enormous blue eyes. So I lay down beside her, put my arm around her for warmth, and told her a story.

“Stop crying,” I say shortly, and grab Ettie’s hand. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” She sniffles.

I smile. A smile that she should never trust.

“Somewhere he will not be able to find you,” I say, which is only partly a lie.

We rush down a tangle of back streets, keeping to the shadows.

She’s breathless and struggling along behind me, but at least she’s stopped crying.

She thinks I’m going to save her. When I’m sending her to a fate far worse than the seven hells.

But sometimes we must pay a terrible price to protect the things we love.

7

The Black Cat’s Choice

After the revolution failed, the city was carved into two parts. Half of Paris is rigid, boxtree-lined avenues haunted by the aristocracy. The other half is a murky jungle of crime and misery.

I wear this city like skin wrapped around my bones. I know each street by the feel of the stone beneath my feet. It speaks to me; it shows me where to go. It would have been safer to go the long way, cutting through the manicured streets of the sheltered nobles, but we don’t have time. And it would have been faster to go over rooftops, but Ettie doesn’t know a Cat’s way of racing along tiles and leaping sure-footed from one house to the next.

So instead, we run down the villainous-smelling streets, weaving between wagons and Those Who Walk by Day. Dodging an old lady sitting on a crate with a sign that says she’ll mend clothes for a few sous; darting down an alley, throwing out a prayer that we’ll find it empty. We skitter along the alley’s length before ducking into another one.

Ettie’s boots are too big, and she can’t run fast. But I bring her along at breakneck speed. We have to keep moving. The city assumes that anyone hesitating too long in one place is issuing a challenge.

Ettie pulls on my arm to slow me down.

“Nina, if we could find a carriage, I could go to my maman.”

I shake my head. Her maman stopped sending letters months ago; we both know what that probably means.

So we hurry along till we get to a ramshackle factory in the Gobelins, shut down by the banks for debt.