Page 63 of Under Her Protection

"Yes, Madame."

"Do not call me that."

"Yes, Vivienne."

"Better."

The car slowed for the gate on the rue de Chaillot. Beaumont, out there in a wet coat, opened the iron work and closed it behind them, and the gravel of the courtyard hissed under the tyres, and Leo, on top of her, still with her hand at the side of Vivienne's face, said into her earpiece, "We are inside the gate."

A pause.

"Copy."

Leo lifted her head, slow, and looked down at her.

Vivienne, on her back in the back of her own car in her own courtyard with her fingers at the back of a woman's neck and a chip of Maison Noire limestone somewhere on the rue de Sévigné that had her name on it in the record the police were now, she assumed, collecting, looked up at Leo and said, "Do not let go of me yet."

"I will not."

"Good."

"Vivienne."

"Mm."

"I have you."

She did not answer that. She closed her eyes for half a breath and let it sit in the space above her, and let her hand stay at the back of Leo's neck, and let Leo's breath stay at her temple, and she let herself, for the first time in twenty-five years, be held.

The door opened.

Beaumont, out there in the gravel, did not look in.

Leo eased off her, slow, and took her hand, not her arm, which was a decision Vivienne registered and did not remark on, and helped her up, and out of the car, and into the gravel of her own courtyard. The gravel hissed under her heels. The cream limestone of her own façade, lit from below, was the cream limestone it had always been. Her breath was loud in her own ears. Leo's hand, around hers, was a small warm rigid thing that she was not, tonight, going to let go of until she was behind her own front door.

They went into the house.

12

Leo went room by room because rooms by rooms was what the training said to do, and because moving was, tonight, the only thing keeping her from noticing what her hands were doing.

Her hands were not shaking. She had clocked them in the gravel in the courtyard and they had not been shaking then and they were not shaking now, which was a thing the body did that had almost nothing to do with what the body was registering. The body was registering, under the training, quite a lot.

The body was registering that a woman it had been inside of twice in twenty-four hours had been two feet from a bullet tonight.

Leo set it down behind the left lung where the others of its kind lived, and she moved on.

There were three already. The front room of the terrace house in the Midlands had been the first; she had been nine. The Sunday afternoon when Leo was twelve had been the second, and the woman who had raised her had been on that one. The third had given her the pale line at her collarbone, and she had told one person about it in thirty-eight years and not told any of the others who had asked. Tonight's made four.

Ground floor. Entry hall. Front door bolted, chain on, Beaumont outside the front door in a wet coat on a folding stool he had carried out himself, earpiece live, eyes on the gate. Kitchen — the kitchen Vivienne made tea in at 10:55 every morning, kettle cold, Guérin gone home to her own flat in the fourteenth at eight as she had been gone home every Wednesday night for nineteen years. Dining room — the room neither of them had set foot in in five weeks, unused. Library. Oxblood chairs. The faint undertone of beeswax. The fire in the grate in the main living room on the first floor was, tonight, out, which Leo had asked for before they had come home from Maison Noire. The rug in front of the hearth was the same rug, and Leo permitted herself to look at it once, and looked away.

First floor. Her earpiece clicked.

"North roof camera clean."

"Copy."

"South clean."