Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,174

painted us to be. I don’t know whether or not she believed me.

“I just want to find a quiet life,” she said. “A life away from everyone and everything. Just the two of us.” She stroked her belly again.

I warned her the world wasn’t safe for her or her child. I told her she could never have the quiet life she wanted. Trouble would follow her wherever she went. That seemed to stir something inside of her. She gazed out the broken window, looking distant and haunted and hopeless. She must have realized that I was right. That we were her and her child’s only chance. Because she gave the tiniest, most fragile of nods.

“Okay,” she whispered. “I’ll come.”

I told her to take a day to settle her affairs. I promised to return tomorrow to take her to safety. But just in case anything should happen to me, I gave her instructions on how to signal us.

I know that she has made the right choice. For her own sake and the sake of the child. We can protect them. We must protect them.

An electricity thrummed through Alouette. “She was pregnant,” she said quietly, her mind struggling to make all the pieces fit. “She must have been pregnant before she left the Palais.”

Using her finger to mark her place in the book, Alouette hastily flipped back through the pages until she reached the first set of reports. Her gaze slid over the handwritten words, stopping only a little below the top of the page. She quietly reread the lines aloud. “I rushed into the hallway to find Lisole fighting with a handsome auburn-haired Palais guard. Her eyes were puffy and red. Her hair was a mess, and across her cheek, I saw an angry red mark. I knew, immediately, that she’d been struck.”

“Do you think … ,” Marcellus began, clearly coming to the same conclusion as Alouette.

Alouette thought about her mother’s titan box, still tucked away in her couchette. About those intertwined locks of hair. One dark and curly, the other a luminous shade of auburn.

“Did she try to tell him?” Alouette wondered aloud as she turned back to her marked page. “Did she tell him about the baby, and he wanted nothing to do with it, so he had her arrested? Made up some story about her stealing from the Palais?” Perhaps that was what Mabelle had meant before, when she wrote that she feared Lisole had “gotten herself in too deep.”

“Look,” Marcellus said. He had flipped forward a few pages and was now pointing at a new report, dated the very next day. “Her name appears here too.”

Month 7, Day 5, 488

Operative: Mabelle Dubois

Location: The Frets, Vallonay

Today, I knocked on the door of her couchette, but all I heard were cold, empty echoes and the skittering feet of vermin. I waited. I knocked again. I called her name. But still, there was only silence behind the door.

Finally, a neighbor peeked out from the next couchette and told me that Lisole had left yesterday.

“Good riddance,” he snarled. “I didn’t want some baby screaming and wailing all night.”

I asked if he knew where she’d gone, but he shook his head and shoved the door closed in my face.

It was then I realized that she never intended to come with me. She only agreed so that I would leave her alone. Our name—and every falsehood that has been tangled up with it—has become our downfall.

Obviously, we must look for her. We must never stop searching. She is my friend. We were once as close as sisters. I care for her. And obviously, I care for the welfare of the child. The baby will be like a daughter to me. To all of us.

Wherever she has gone, we will attempt to bring her back to Vallonay. But I fear, deep in my heart, that we may never find someone who doesn’t want to be found.

When Alouette glanced up from the page again, she had tears in her eyes. She now understood why Principale Francine had given her this specific book. It was the beginning of a story. The story of how Alouette had found her way to the Refuge twelve years ago.

“Mabelle,” she whispered wistfully. “She was my mother’s friend. She … saved me.”

And suddenly, the rest of the story unfurled before her like a long-buried path emerging from the mist. “She invited my mother to live in the Refuge. She gave her instructions on how to signal the sisters. At first, my