Глория Голд – Black Widow (страница 3)

He woke up in a cold sweat. The line between the investigator and the one he was hunting had blurred. He understood that the Sophie Legrand case was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a system. A network. And to find the truth, he might have to descend into the very heart of this darkness. He walked up to the mirror and looked at his reflection for a long time. At the haggard face with a feverish gleam in its eyes.

"Who are you?" he whispered.

Somewhere in the city, in his office behind a stack of papers, Dr. Moreau was stamping a new medical record. And in a luxurious mansion on Avenue Foch, the old Comte de Laroche, the uncle of Sophie's third husband, was receiving a report. On his desk lay a photograph of Henri DuPont. He smiled. The game was just beginning. And the commissioner, unknowingly, was already at its very center.

Chapter 4. Blood on the Parquet of Memories

Henri DuPont left the Sainte-Anne sanatorium, and the rain, which had not ceased all these days, hit his face as if trying to wash off the sticky dust of madness clinging to his skin. The words "The Rule of Four" rang in his ears like an obsessive, insane tune. He got into his car, an old Citroën, and sat for several minutes, gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white, trying to regain a sense of reality.

He started the engine and drove not to the station, but to the Seine embankment, to the place where his parents had crashed many years ago. He often came here when he needed to think. Here, time slowed down, and the ghosts of the past spoke to him more clearly.

November 1985, Marseille. Eight-year-old Henri sits at the kitchen table, drawing a sailing ship with a pencil on an old newspaper. Outside, the same rain is pouring. A key clicks in the lock, but on the threshold are two strangers in uniform. "Parents… Car accident… Drunk truck driver…"

"Who did this?"the boy asks, and his voice is firm. At the funeral, he throws a drawn boat into his father's grave. "I will find him. I will find all who hurt people."

Henri exhaled, unclenching his fingers. Always return to the beginning. That was his rule. Sophie Legrand did not begin with the first murdered husband. She began in childhood.

He took out a notepad and began to write, connecting all the threads.

Sophie Legrand, née… No, not like that. A girl in a golden cage.

December 1985, Paris. Seven-year-old Sophie, trembling with fatigue, stands in the ballroom of the Legrand mansion. "Straighten your shoulders! The Legrands have no right to slouch!" – the voice of the etiquette teacher grates on the ears. Her mother's cold fingers, studded with diamonds, dig into her shoulder. "Your fatigue interests no one. The Comte de Saint-Simon will arrive in an hour. He must see the ideal."

In the evening,the fifty-year-old count squeezes her chin with his cold, damp fingers. "A fine specimen. Will be a worthy addition to my collection."

At night,she is locked in a room without light for eavesdropping on her parents' conversation with the count. "She will be yours in ten years… My estates are worth twenty million…"

Pressing her forehead against the cold glass,she watches the falling snow. "I hate them all." Her fingers clutch a porcelain doll – a gift from her mother. The porcelain cracks with a crunch, shards digging into her palm. Drops of blood fall on the doll's white dress. "I will never be anyone's property."

Two tragedies. Two children whose worlds collapsed in the same year. Henri, left with nothing, and Sophie, who became a bargaining chip. He chose the path of protection; she chose the path of destruction. Or self-defense?

He looked again at the words "The Rule of Four." What if it wasn't a code? What if it was a diagnosis? A description of a system? Four men? But there were three. Unless…

Henri flung the car door open and vomited right onto the wet asphalt. From the thought that had entered his head. He remembered her passionate embrace, her trusting tears, her story about the cruel count. He remembered how she took off her gloves and stockings, showing the scars. She had played on his greatest weakness – on his unhealed wound, on his mission to save.

What if the Comte de Saint-Simon was not the first? What if her father, Pierre Legrand, who had sold her like a thing, was the zero victim? A victim she couldn't kill physically but destroyed morally, becoming the monster he wanted her to be?

The Rule of Four: Father. Count. Englishman. Sarkozy.

Four. And he, Henri DuPont, was supposed to be the fifth. Part of the system. A new rule.

He started the car and drove to the archive. He needed old newspapers, society columns. He needed to find Pierre Legrand.

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