Damn.
Matt drew back, impressed. This guy and Damien might actually deserve each other as enemies. Be fun to watch them in the same room together, that was for damn sure. “Look, I don’t mean to play good cop,” he began.
Antoine Vallier gave that elegant snort again. “Don’t worry, you’re entirely failing to come across as one.”
“But you’d really be much better off telling me everything you know and making this easy on yourself,” Matt added. “All I’m going to do is strangle you if you don’t. Some of my family members, on the other hand…”
Antoine stubbed his cigarette out. Then put it in the ashtray, instead of tossing it through his window to pollute the cobblestone streets of Grasse below. Matt gave him one tiny point for that. He liked Grasse’s streets. “I’ll take my chances,” Antoine Vallier said. “Because there’s no way in hell I’m crossing your aunt Colette. You must agree, or you’d be talking to her and not me.”
Merde. Matt should have known a ninety-six-year-old Resistance hero who had ferried thirty-six children across the Alps must know how to pick a team that didn’t crack.
So then he didn’t really have any choice. Unless he wanted to get arrested for choking the information out of that damn idiot lawyer, he had to face his Tante Colette.
Every step up that medieval stair-street, lined with an ancient grape vine thicker than his wrist, brought Matt one step closer to the woman who had always been his refuge. Who had always let him sit in her kitchen or her garden, who had fed him soup or tea until his soul got addicted to the stuff and needed it to re-center.
He didn’t knock, because she didn’t like it when they bothered her with their knocking instead of coming in. She was in the old, walled garden, tucked up against the great medieval wall of the hilltop town of Sainte-Mère, this garden that had always seemed so magical that he and his cousins had invaded it once at night to steal raiponce, rapunzel, and Lucien had ended up with a broken arm.
The garden stole the last of his ability to growl and snap, as did the sight of his aunt, white hair pinned up neatly, sitting on the stool he had made for her when he was seven so that she didn’t have to kneel anymore when she gardened. “Tante Colette,” he said, and that lined, old face turned his way.
Twenty years ago, she would have spotted him long before this. How must that feel, to have once survived a war by not letting anyone ever sneak up on you, and then slowly lose your peripheral vision? Find your hearing dulling?
“Matthieu.” Cool, assessing dark eyes searched his face.
They made him feel sixteen years old again. The sixteen-year-old who had sat here and sat here until suddenly, into the quiet, he was talking about what it felt like to have Raoul, his top rival but also the person he hero-worshiped the most in the world, ditch the whole valley because Matt was heir to it. The way it felt to lose a cousin because of his existence, and the way it felt to have that same cousin say, with that one gesture, Your existence is worthless anyway. I’ve got a much better life waiting for me out in the world. The way it felt to have that same gesture that indicated his worthlessness be the very act that put even more pressure on him to be worth the valley. Able to carry it on his shoulders all by himself.
And yet never be by himself. The pressures from his family were relentless.
How could he roar or growl or argue with Tante Colette? The things he did to win or dominate or at least not let anyone mess with him—how could he do them with her?
“A—a woman came today.” He had to take a breath past that tightness in his chest. “She said you gave your house in the valley to her?”
Tante Colette’s head lifted, this little ah of a movement, as if she’d spotted some rare eagle flying in the sky. “Did she?” she said softly. “She finally came?”
After that morning’s already brutal blow, Matt wouldn’t have thought that one more mattered, but it turned out it did. “Finally?” How long had Tante Colette been planning this without warning him? Merde, five months at least. All the time he had been fixing up that house, she must have meant those repairs for someone else.
“What is she like?” Tante Colette asked hungrily. “Is she anything like her great-grandmother? She doesn’t look much like her in the photos.”
“I don’t even know who her great-grandmother is,” Matt said between his teeth.
Tante Colette stroked the lemon balm in front of her, a hint of its scent reaching Matt. “Bring her to see me, and I’ll show you both her great-grandmother’s photo. I’ll tell you her story.”