Die for Me by Amy Plum Page A

live?” I gasped.
    â€œI’ve already confessed to following around our neighborhood’s new American imports. Remember?” He flashed me a disarming smile. “Besides, who followed who into the Métro today?”
    I blushed as I wondered how many times he had seen me as I wandered, oblivious that I was being watched.
    And then the memory of Jules in the Métro returned and a tremor shook me. “Just don’t think. Don’t think,” Vincent whispered. At that moment, my emotions felt tugged in two opposite directions. I was frightened and confused by Vincent’s indifference to Jules’s death, but I desperately wanted him to comfort me.
    His hand lay casually on his knee, and I had the strongest desire to grab it and press it to my cold face. To hold on to him and avoid slipping deeper under the wave of fear that threatened to engulf me. Jules’s fate echoed too loudly of my own parents’ accident. I felt like death had followed me across the Atlantic. It was trailing along in my wake, threatening to take everyone I knew.
    And as if Vincent had heard my thoughts, his hand slid across the seat and pulled my fingers from where they were wedged between my knees. As he folded my hand inside his own, I was instantly enveloped in a feeling of safety. I leaned my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes for the rest of the drive.
    The taxi came to a stop in front of a ten-foot-high stone wall set with massive iron gates. Their bars were fitted from behind with black metal sheets that tastefully blocked any view of what was inside. Thick wisteria vines draped over the edges of the wall, and a couple of stately trees were visible behind the barrier.
    Vincent paid the taxi driver, then came around to my side and opened the door for me. He walked me up to a column embedded with a high-tech audiovisual security system.
    The lock clicked after he typed the security code into a keypad. He pressed the gate open with one hand and pulled me gently behind him with the other. I gasped as I took in our surroundings.
    I was standing in the cobblestone courtyard of a hôtel particulier , one of those in-town castles that wealthy Parisians built as their city dwellings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This one was built of massive honey-colored stones and peaked with a black slate roof with dormer windows spaced evenly along its length. The only time I had actually seen one of these buildings up close was when Mom and Mamie took me with them on a guided tour.
    In the middle of the courtyard stood a circular fountain carved in granite, its dark gray basin big enough to swim a few strokes across. Over the splashing water stood a life-size stone figure of an angel carrying a sleeping woman in his arms. Her body was visible through the fabric of her dress, which was worked so finely by the sculptor that the heavy stone was transformed into the finest gauze. The woman’s fragile loveliness was offset by the strength of the male angel carrying her, his massive wings curving protectively over the two figures. It was a symbol combining beauty and danger, and it cast a sinister aura across the courtyard.
    â€œYou live here?”
    â€œI don’t own the house, but yes, I live here,” Vincent said, walking me across the courtyard to the front door. “Let’s get you inside.”
    Remembering the reason we were there, the sound of Jules’s body being crushed by a ton of metal resonated in my ears. The tears I had been holding back began to flow.
    Vincent opened the ornately carved door and led me into an enormous entrance hall with a double staircase winding up either wall to a balcony overlooking the room. A crystal chandelier the size of a Volkswagen Beetle hung over our heads, and Persian rugs littered a marble floor inlaid with stone flowers and vines. What is this place? I thought.
    I followed him through another door into a small, high-ceilinged room that