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Crispin Kramer would not be one to call himself a coward. But when he had seen Evangeline Moreau picking wildflowers a few kilometres away from Le Vallon, prickly fear had instantly overwhelmed him.

That fear had turned into outright panic when Belle Baudelaire leaned in close to his ear and whispered, “Why not kill her, Crispin? Write a message in her filthy blood. Lucian would be proud.”

He didn’t want to tell her what he thought. He was sure Lucian already doubted Crispin, and sent him as the leader of the revolt in Auvergne to test his loyalties. Lucian Abendroth was no fool. In fact, he was a downright genius, of the insane psychopath variety.

Outright panic morphed into sweaty palms and shallow breaths when Samantha Boulanger and Genji Lee captured Moreau with ease and brought her to the rebels’ small campsite.

When that goddamned harlot Baudelaire circled him with that heated dark gaze upon him, silently taunting him. When Ivan Petrov and his wife, Katarzyna cooed taunts in English and Russian, prodding their prisoner with long, unwashed claws.

And when he felt a hand slide slowly up his back and curl over his shoulder, and when he felt breath kiss his face when Belle murmured, “Kill her, Crispin. Show the Arsenaults just who they’re dealing with.”

He couldn’t bear to look at Moreau. He could hear her stifled cries, her desperate pleas in a choked mixture of English and French. And when she struggled against her captors, Regina Carter had viciously slapped her, hard enough to shut her up and make Manfred Gottschalk grunt something about how pitiful she was.

Standing stock still, unable to move or speak, Crispin had done nothing when the aptly named Jezebel Baudelaire slithered up to him and lightly touched his cheek, gently grazing his skin with her pointed nails.

“You can’t do it?” she had breathed, giving him that pouty look that made every man—even Lucian Abendroth—melt and become a doting puppy to her every whim. “Too bad.”

And sweaty palms, shallow breaths, terror at what in the hell he was doing—it all became an indifferent haze when Belle ruthlessly kicked down Evangeline Moreau and crushed her skull with a single well-aimed stomp


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