Page 143 of The Dragon and the Dove

She noted his surprise with a wry smirk. ‘You’re not the only one who can creep around in the shadows, Dagger.’

‘I’m not a Dagger any more.’

‘Once a Dagger always a Dagger, Bastian.’

He hated that she knew his name. How she wielded it with such smugness.

‘You don’t know me,’ he said gruffly.

‘If only that were true.’

The old crone rose from the bench and leaned on her cane, skewering him with that unnerving milky gaze. ‘What kind of saint are you exactly?’

Ransom frowned. ‘You already know.’

Everyone in this damn city knows.

She looked at him blankly.

He summoned his most unsightly hound, sharpening its claws and elongating its canines. He made it prowl close just to see if she would flinch.

She did not.

He said, ‘I am a walking nightmare.’

Her eyes narrowed as she studied the hound. ‘Is this really the best use of your power?’

‘What would you like me to conjure instead, Madame Fontaine? Another dragon to sit on the steps of the cathedral?’

‘That is not what I meant.’

‘Then elucidate.’

Her scowl rivalled his own. ‘Is this all that you are, Bastian? Shadows and death? Beasts and brutality?’

His laugh was mirthless. ‘Why don’t you ask Andreas’s bannermen?’

She let the silence linger until he felt like he might choke on the memory of what he’d done, lose himself, at last, to the crush of his own self-hatred.

‘You know, I’ve been watching you since you were a boy, Bastian.’

His brow furrowed. ‘What?’

‘I’ve known about you since the moment you became Dufort’s heir. An orphan with a split lip plucked from the banks of the Verne. Gifted a new destiny like a cinder block around your neck.’ There was a note of tenderness in her voice, as though she could sense the storm of his pain. ‘It was dumb luck that he found you that day. Dumber luck that you hated your own father enough to kill him that night. You could have come to us instead and just as easily been a Cloak.’ She paused. ‘Or a corpse, I suppose. Fantome is no place for a runaway. I imagine that’s why you sent Fabian to us.’

And now the boy was gone too. Another casualty he would have to bear.

‘I was fascinated by you,’ Fontaine went on. ‘This child who killed and killed like a deadly weapon. So easy to mould. So eager to please. So terrified to be tossed out.’

‘Is there a point to this?’ he said with mounting unease.

‘I knew you before Seraphine Marchant ever learned your name, Bastian. Before Lark Delano set foot inside the catacombs. Before Nadia Raine gave herself to the same encroaching dark. I knew you before you ever knew yourself.’

Ransom bunched his fists. It was not a pleasant feeling to be watched. To be known.

Her words quickened, her gauzy eyes flitting back and forth like there was another world turning inside her head.

‘You, Bastian, are as unchanging as the seasons.’ She removed a card from her pocket.