He laughed—a dry, rattling sound. "My word? Child, my word is a key that opens any cage. The lock is your belief in it."

The stable boy ran off alone. The Marquis found Justine in the hayloft, weeping. "You could have gone," he said, genuinely puzzled. "Why stay?"

"No," she said. "God sees. Virtue is its own shield."

But Justine pulled away. She walked back to the Marquis, stood on her toes, and kissed his cheek. "Thank you," she said, "for proving that cruelty cannot kill kindness. Only kindness can kill cruelty. And you have none left to give."

The village took her in. She became a seamstress, mending clothes for pennies. Juliette fled to Italy, where she became a courtesan and died rich at forty. The Marquis de Gernande was found in his château five years later, dead of a fever, surrounded by untouched instruments and a single phrase scratched into the marble floor: "She was right."