Thank you so much to all of you reading and keeping me company with this story! I hope you're all having a great festive season and wish you a fantastic 2016! See you all next year ;)

PART IV

~§~

Treville navigated the labyrinth of Paris' city streets with an ease born of experience. He had walked that same path many times before.

Gaston was an old friend, a comrade in arms that had followed Treville's choices when he had been asked to lead the King's Musketeers. The two of them went a long way back, at a time when they, along with General De Foix and Belgard, formed a brotherhood of their own, inseparable in everything until life had forced them to go their separate paths. In some ways, the newly formed friendship between Athos, Aramis and Porthos reminded Treville of his own youth and the bond he had shared with the men he regarded as brothers in everything but blood.

Gaston had been one of the two men that Treville had trusted to travel alongside him when he had ridden to Savoy in search of his troop of Musketeers. He had resigned his commission shortly after returning from the site of the massacre, evoking that weariness of heart and soul had rendered him unable to serve. The other man, a Musketeer named Poison, had been killed on an ambush, one week after returning from Savoy.

Which left Gaston the only man alive, aside from Treville himself, to know exactly what had happened in those frozen woods and the name of the sole survivor they had brought back.

Treville didn't believed for one second that his friend had betrayed his trust on such a vital matter, but the missing papers from the mission pressed him to cover all possibilities. He could not stand to think of the implications his actions could bring if the Cardinal had even the slightest of suspicions on the subject.

Treville searched the empty street before knocking on the door and waited, eyeing the blue paint peeling from the wood. The windows on the floor above were broken, some boarded with planks of wood, the rest covered with cloth. There were no clothes hanging on the line outside and the chimney was devoid of smoke. If not for the sounds coming from inside the house, Treville would have believed that his friend was not home at all.

Gaston had retired from the Musketeers with a good sum of money in his pockets, enough to live the rest of his life in comfort. It seemed odd that the man would have left his home fall into such a state of disarray and poverty. Less than a year had passed, and yet, with everything that had been going on, Treville realized that he had not seen the man once during that time.

"Wha' do ya want?"

Treville looked down at the petit old woman peeking from behind the door. Her frizzy hair was abundant enough that the Captain couldn't catch a glimpse above her head to peek inside the house. "I'm looking for Lucien Gaston," he announced. "He used to live here."

"Still does, I s'ppose," the woman said, wrinkling her nose as if offended by some nasty smell. "Never see the bastard around when it's time to pay the rent anyway..." she added, one hand carding through her unruly hair, a futile attempt at composing herself. "You his friend?"

Treville nodded. "We used to serve together," he simply said. The woman seemed about ready to charge him with Gaston's rent money and he hadn't the time to waste on that. "Do you know where I can find him?"

The woman huffed, one bony finger pointing towards the end of the street. "He spends most of his days at the Les Dames... you'll find him there now, fer sure."

The Captain tipped his hat to the woman, even as she closed the door on his face with a bang.

Les Dames, despite the name, held no indication of any lady of any respectable sort ever stepping a foot inside. The only ladies Treville could see in the gloomy environment were of the working variety and even those seemed more burden by disease than beauty.

He found Gaston sitting alone in one of the tables, his face laying on the dirty table top, a bottle of wine hanging precariously from his senseless fingers where they brushed against the floor.

"Gaston... Gaston!" Getting no response from the man, Treville grabbed his shoulders and gave them a vigorous shake. Dislodged by the motion, the bottle rolled away, leaving a faint trail of watered down wine in its wake. "Gaston, open your damn eyes!"

Finally getting a response from the man, Treville stepped back and searched Gaston's one opened eye for recognition. "Tr'ville? Is that truly you?"

The Captain smiled encouragingly. "You never could hold your drink, could you, my friend?"

Gaston made an effort to straightened himself on his chair, mostly failing. His fumbling hands dragged across the table until perching on Treville's doublet. "You here about the Red Guards, aren't you?" he blurted out, guilt clouding his eyes. "I've been waiting for you since then, knowing you'd come looking for retribution..."

Treville's heart froze inside his chest. "What are you talking about?" he whispered, looking around in search of anyone who might be paying attention to their conversation.

The tavern was overflowing with people, most of them talking too loud to allow to make out individual conversations, a fact he was grateful for. Still, he moved closer.

"I hadn't meant to, Treville, you must know that," the older man went on, his unfocused eyes pleading as he peered into the Captain's face. "I was drunk... still am... but that night... they were talking nonsense about the honor and courage of the Musketeers and I just... I hadn't mean to, you must believe me…"

"What did you speak, Gaston? What did you tell them?"

"I...someone should be told about the brave young men who died there, someone should know how unfair it was… so young…most of them were just kids," the man went on, his eyes blurring with unshed tears as he lost himself in his memories.

Treville shook him again, the urgency of his doubts allowing for no time to comfort his friend. "Did you speak of Savoy? Did you tell them anything?"

The slight nod from Gaston's head made Treville' stomach turn. Such a small gesture, with so impossibly large consequences. His head dropped to his chest, not wanting to hear the rest. "Tell me you didn't."

Gaston's muffled sob was all the answer he needed. "They started paying fer the wine then and the man with them-"

"What man?" Treville cut in, wanting to know every detail about what he guessed had happened.

"He knew about..." Gaston looked around, lowering his head until he was bent over Treville's ear, "... he knew about Savoy, he knew about the troop of men and he knew about what happened there..."

The older man's breathing hitched, his head once more supported by the table. His conscience, it would seem, was making it too heavy for him to support.

"He knew everything... I thought he knew everything... and then my accursed mouth let it slip," the man confessed. "I told him about the two survivors... I told him all about that poor kid who came back... I told him about Aramis."

Treville tried to swallow, finding his throat closed and dry. He got up, needing the space to order his ideas and stop himself from yelling at the drunken man.

After the lengths they had gone through to make sure no one know about the survivors, Gaston had betrayed his trust because he had been too drunk to mind his tongue!

Ironically enough, Treville walked to the tavern owner and ordered a bottle of wine to take back to Gaston's table. He eyed the dejected man from afar, working to convince himself that Gaston was not at fault. He found himself failing. Like he had failed that man as a friend, Treville reminded himself.

"Tell me about the man who was with the Red Guards," Treville asked, rejoining Gaston.

Gaston looked up from the table, surprised to see him return, or maybe noticing for the first time that he had been gone at all. "He was a Comte," he whispered conspiratorially, eyes darting around. "I remember his ring, black, ugly thing."

"A Comte?" Treville pushed. "Of where, could you tell?"

Gaston nodded, turning slightly green as he did so. He put a hand over his mouth, trying to stay the flow of vomit threatening to come out. Instead of bile, words passed his lips. "Rochefort," he finally said. "He was the Comte de Rochefort."

~§~

A few days before, the King's hunt day

Treville looked at the man standing at attention in front of his desk, arms behind his ramrod straight back, gaze steady and unwavering at some distant point on the wall behind the Captain. He was the perfect image of the respectable soldier, spotless in his stance and behavior, if one was to ignore the dark shadows underneath those steady eyes.

It was hard to see him as the same man who had just publicly announced that he had been too drunk to tell reality from fantasy and had utterly embarrassed himself and the regiment in front of the King and court during a simple hunt.

However, despite what Aramis' tense pose suggested, Treville had not called him to his office to dress him down.

"I have a growing suspicion," Treville said after a while, finally coming to a decision. God helped him, this had to be the right thing to do. "One that would require your help in confirming."

Aramis blinked, the odd topic breaking his carefully maintained composure. "Captain?"

"What I'm about to tell you must not, under any circumstance, leave these walls. Am I clear?" the Captain asked, his voice imprinting the graveness of the situation. If whispered into the wrong ears, what he was about to suggest was tantamount to treason. For the both of them.

At Aramis' stern nod, Treville went on. "You are aware that the Cardinal took onto himself the inquiry over the garrison's attack, a couple of months ago, yes?"

The Musketeer fidgeted in his spot for the first time, his eyes averted for the briefest of moments before meeting the Captain's gaze head on, slowly nodding again. He had been the one to kill one of them and disarming the other, something that he would not easily forget. "As something come to light?" Aramis asked, his need to see justice done slipping into the eagerness of his tone of voice.

Treville rose from his desk, motioning for the soldier to follow him. Hidden under one of the floorboards, beneath his bed, there was a wad of papers. He handed them to the Musketeer.

Aramis read the papers carefully, one by one and Treville waited until the truth dawned on the young man's face. He blanched at the implications. "These men... all three of them?"

Treville nodded. It had been completely fortuitous the events that had led to those papers reaching his hands, and now that he had them, Treville would make sure that something would come out of it.

The King, absentmindedly, had given him a list of all the men in the Cardinal's personal guard, for Treville to deliver to the First Minister. It had been pure chance that had made the Captain's gaze drop casually to the rows of names and stumble across a familiar one, one of the men who had attacked the garrison. After that, it didn't take much effort for him to find the other two.

"Red Guards, all three of them, in the service of the Cardinal," Treville confirmed, taking the papers away and storing them back in the same place. It pained him to use the floor instead of his file cabinet, but he no longer believed the Musketeers' garrison to be a safe place, not until this plot was uncovered and stopped.

"But you cannot prove that they acted on the Cardinal's orders."

Treville nodded, thankful for the young man's sharp intellect. It had been one of the main reasons why he had invited Aramis to join the Musketeers.

"How can I help you prove the Cardinal's guilt?" the young man asked, the frown upon his face giving away the fact that he already knew the answer to his question.

Aramis searched his eyes, and suddenly Treville found himself doubting his resolve to go ahead with this. How could he ask the young man to do this, on top of knowing that Aramis was still struggling with the events of Savoy?

"You know about Maréchal de Caumont," Aramis finally whispered, his shoulders sagging against the weight that seemed to suddenly descend on the young man. It wasn't a question, just the sad statement that he couldn't escape the truth.

As the Captain of the King's Musketeers, Treville had access to all of the military and personal information on his men. It would not do to have someone of less integrity and suspicious intents serving so close to France's monarchy.

When he had received Aramis' military information, he had been surprised to find a sealed letter amongst the rest of the papers, one with specific instructions to be burned immediately after being read. In it, Treville found a description of the role Aramis had played in unmasking the Maréchal as a traitor to France and his allegiance to the Huguenots, a role that, like all spies, no one was ever to discover. "I know about de Caumont," Treville confirmed. "You were what? Eighteen, nineteen at the time?"

"Sixteen," Aramis whispered. "I was young, heartbroken...thought I didn't had much to lose at that point, so I accepted the mission to infiltrate his camp and gain the Maréchal's confidence..." he went on, his eyes lost in the memory. "His son had died the previous year and everyone thought that someone like me would be perfect to unmask his treason. A young boy to replace the one he had lost."

"Which you did, quite well, in fact," Treville pointed out. It had been one of the first triumphs of Louis XIII reign, one that, the Captain had realized then, had only been possible because Aramis had played his part flawlessly, finding strong evidence against the Maréchal and helping in his capture. What hadn't been on the letter but Treville had quickly realized upon getting to know the young man personally, was that the mission had not come without cost to his soldier. For all that the Maréchal had come to see that boy-spy as a surrogate son, Aramis, at such young age, had probably come to see the man as a father figure as well. It could not have been easy to form that bond and then see de Caumont fall into disgrace and be executed. "I need you do something of the sorts again," the Captain said, bluntly, before he lost his nerve in face of Aramis' sadness.

"He was a good man," Aramis whispered. Treville had no idea if he was reminding himself of that or trying to defend the man to his Captain. "He taught me so much..." he said, voice trailing off into silent memories. "His only crime was to believe in something different from the majority."

"You did your duty, no one can hold you at fault for that," Treville reminded him, recognizing the guilt in the man's words. He too had served under the Maréchal orders, when King Henry was still alive, before the military man had chosen the wrong side to stand for. Treville knew he had once been a man of character.

There had been a few other assignments after that, minor tasks, Aramis' commanders taking advantage of both his youth and wit to get them other targets, more information. Aramis had been twenty one when his numerous requests to become a part of the regular Infantry were finally accepted.

"I told myself that I would never do something like that again," Aramis said, his tone flat and resigned. "I was merely fooling myself, wasn't I?"

Treville stepped closer to the young man, his hand clasping his shoulder. Underneath his touch, Aramis was tense as a bowstring, muscles coiled and ready to snap if pushed any further. "I'm asking you to do this," he pointed out. "Not commanding you to. I could never command any of my men to risk himself in such manner."

Aramis nodded, taking a deep breath through his mouth. The air came out slowly, fogging the air as it passed. "If the Cardinal is the one responsible for the attack on the garrison, for the brothers that we lost, I wish to be of help. If this is the only way..."

Treville sighed, telling himself that it was not disappointment that he felt over the fact that Aramis had said yes, just like he knew the young man would. But had he said no, Treville knew that his heart would be more at peace. "I would not ask if-"

Aramis looked ahead, meeting his eyes, the mask of a perfect soldier once more slipping in place, like a warm blanket against the freezing coldness of reality. "I understand," he cut in. "What did you have in mind, Captain?"

Retelling the Cardinal's comments that same day, Treville didn't needed much for Aramis to understand why it had to be him for such mission, even if he were not the one with the most experience to do it. The Cardinal already thought him unstable and was seeking to blame him for the attack on the garrison. It was just a matter of waiting for him to play his hand and catch him in a compromising position.

"You do understand what this mission might entail, yes?" Treville asked quietly. In an idyllic scenario, the Cardinal would confront Aramis in his office at the palace and simply force the young man to sign a confession using nothing but the compelling strength of his words. The non-idyllic scenario, however, was one that the Captain was not comfortable sending any of his men into, least of all Aramis.

"I understand," Aramis answered with a nod, a sad smile across his lips. "It's nothing I can't handle, Sir."

Treville held his gaze. From the way Aramis lowered his eyes under his scrutiny, the Captain was sure the young man thought him to be judging his ability to perform his duties and dreading to be found wanting. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The Captain was judging himself, trying to convince himself to, once more, ask for too much from one of his men.

"It could be months until he makes his move," Aramis broke the silence, face lost in thought. "We can't afford to wait that long."

Treville raised an eyebrow, recognizing the look. Before, it usually meant that Aramis was up to some tomfoolery, probably in cahoots with Marsac. Now, after Savoy, he had no idea what that wild, pensive gaze meant and the thought left him uneasy. "What do you have in mind?"

Aramis eyes were like smoldering dark pieces of charcoal, staring unwavering at him. "You need to prove to the whole garrison and whatever spies the Cardinal has around, that you fault me for my actions today, that my behaviour has been a personal embarrassment to your honor," he said very quietly. "You need to make sure that no one in this garrison will lift a finger to defend me and fight his allegations; make him feel safe that there will be no retaliation if he comes after me."

Treville found himself nodding, even as the pit of his stomach burned like liquid fire. "And how do you purpose we accomplish all of that?" he found himself asking, even though he was mostly certain that he would not like the answer.

"You must make an example out of me and punish me accordingly to my actions," Aramis closed his eyes, preventing the Captain from glimpsing any residual doubt inside. "A proper military, corporal punishment."

Treville bit the inside of his mouth. He was a seasoned soldier, older and more experienced than Aramis. If the young man could utter those words in such a calm manner, fully knowing what he was implying, Treville would be damned to do him the disservice of wavering now. "Very well."

~§~

Now

Aramis figured he must have lost his senses at some time during the journey. He had no idea if they had travelled far or near, no idea if they were still in Paris or even France.

The silence around him was all-encompassing, making him doubt his own sense of hearing. His eyes, to his relief, managed to catch the fleeting light from a few candles, scattered around the place.

He was alone.

They had stripped him of his doublet and boots and left him bound between two stone pillars, iron chains around his wrists that kept his arms stretched out from his sides. His broken bone pulsed fiercely at the position, fingers numb under the swelling and odd angle. On his feet, a length of chain linked one ankle to another, assuring that he could not use his legs for much else than standing. Aramis go to his feet, relieving some of the pressure from his arms as the chains allowed his hands to reach about waist high.

There were more columns around, one every couple of feet, despite the low ceiling. At the back, almost at the edge of what the candles could light, there was a statue made mostly of deep shadows, a marble saint whose name Aramis couldn't find in his memory.

The entire place had an ancient feeling about it, of old religion, from the days when people needed to hide their prayers from the rest of the world. A Roman-era church.

"Quite fitting, wouldn't you say?"

The voice echoed across the space, making Aramis wonder just how much of it was hidden in the shadows. He couldn't see anyone.

"Given that you have been brought here to confess your sins, an old, decrepit chapel seemed like the appropriate place for someone of the likes of you."

"Who are you?" Aramis snarled. The faceless, eerie voice was much too theatrical for his taste. "Show yourself!"

Steps resounded from the darkness, calculated movement that slowly brought his captor into the light. Aramis had expected some Red Guard, or even the Cardinal himself, but the blond man walking towards him was a complete stranger.

"Let's get one thing perfectly clear from the start, shall we?" he said, politeness in every word even as he picked up one of the candles and placed the flame under the iron encircling Aramis' right wrist.

Aramis tried to pull away, but the motion only served to awaken a sharp pain in his broken bone.

The stranger's eyes, a shade of blue colder than Treville's or even Athos', never wavered from his face, enthralled by every emotion flickering there.

"I give the orders here," he went on, icy eyes searching for the first flicker of pain. The candle moved closer to skin by the barest of inches. "I'm the one who tells you what to do, not you."

Aramis bit the inside of his cheek, forcing himself to face the man's stare unflinching. His face felt hot and cold at the same time, sweat sliding down his neck. Although he dare not look, Aramis was sure that his right wrist was in flames, the iron around it growing hotter and hotter until his flesh could do nothing else but cook like pork on a pike.

"I'm the one in control."

The stranger pushed in, coming close enough that Aramis felt his eyes crossing. He closed them, taking comfort in the darkness void of those cruel eyes.

The slap across his face stung more than it hurt, taking the Musketeer by surprise. He yelped, his body taking the opportunity to voice some of the pain he was feeling.

"No! You do not close your eyes unless I command you to," the stranger said, voice rising in anger. "Now...scream!"

For one short second, Aramis entertained the idea of spitting in the man's face and telling him just how insane he thought him to be. But when the stranger grabbed his broken limb and twisted, Aramis found that he had no other choice but to obey him.

He screamed.

~§~

"What do you mean 'he was taken'?" Treville asked very collectedly, quiet anger seething just below the surface. "He was in the garrison's brig, MY brig...how on earth was he taken?"

The jailer' sense of self-preservation had him looking intently at the floor as he answered. "They had o-orders...from the Ca-Cardinal, Sir!" he stuttered, wriggling his hands behind his back.

Treville breathed slowly, nostrils flaring as he took a step forward. "And where are these orders? Why wasn't I summoned?"

The man seemed to shrink in front of his eyes, his hands coming out from behind his back to worry at the hem of his dirty shirt. His empty hands. "You were nowhere to be found," he explained. "They took the paper with them."

The man cowered away as every single item on top of Treville's desk flew under the force of the Captain' swiping rage. "You mean to tell me," he hissed, crowding into the jailer's personal space, "that we have no idea where they took him, why they took him and no proof of THEM EVEN BEING HERE?"

The man had no answer, other than the faint smell of urine that suddenly started to waft through the closed space.

"Get out of my sight!" Treville barked, turning his back on the trembling man.

He ran a hand through his thinning hair. The plan was to provoke the Cardinal into action and make him seek out Aramis in the open, feed him the bait and allow them to connect the First Minister with the garrison's attack. All of Treville's hopes that the Cardinal and Aramis met in the best of circumstances fled out the window the moment the keeper of his own brig allowed the Minister do take Aramis to parts unknown to do as he pleased.

His man being escorted away in the middle of the night meant that the plan could still be placed in practice but in a manner that did not sit well with Treville's peace of mind. How was he supposed to help Aramis and pull him out of the Cardinal's clutches after he'd played his part, if he had no inkling where the man was?!

Gaston's words came back to haunt him as Treville pondered his next course of action. After talking to the former Musketeer, the Captain had returned to the garrison with the full intention of telling Aramis that the assignment would not be going forward, not with the kind of information that he now knew the Cardinal to possess. It was one thing for him to ask Aramis to risk his life to bring to justice the man responsible for the Musketeers' deaths, it was another entirely to send the young man into the lion's den when said lion would not waste such an opportunity to kill the last survivor of Savoy. And that was exactly what had happened. "Damn it all to hell!"

"Captain?"

Athos' voice was, at once, inquisitive and demanding. Treville looked around at the mess he had created, both in his office and with this mission. He supposed that the sight did inspire some questions. "Is there anything you two wanted?" he asked instead, spotting Porthos just behind the other man. "As you see, I'm rather busy."

Both men's eyebrows rose in a synchronized motion that seemed practiced. "We have news," Athos simply said, wisely choosing not to comment on that state of the Captain's office.

"An' a few questions," Porthos added. His tone of voice wasn't quite menacing, but it came damn close.

"Report," Treville ordered dryly, disliking the tone. His temper had had no time to cool down. "And you would do well to remember who you're addressing."

The Captain was pleased to see both men stand at attention at his words. "Etienne Cussac's body was claimed by his mother in the aftermath of the events here. We spoke to Madame Cussac," Athos stated, his eyes fixed on some point on the wall behind Treville's face. "She was surprised to see Musketeers knocking on her door," he went on, his gaze finally meeting the Captain's, gauging his reaction, "given that her son have been a Red Guard."

Treville met his gaze steadily, appraising the delivery of those words. Athos was still looking at him, searching for a reaction, or maybe...recognition. Well, that would explain Porthos' barely concealed anger.

"This is not news to you," Athos finally concluded from his silence. The disapproval in his voice was all too clear.

Treville ignored him. The only one inside that room with the authority to draw conclusions and extract explanations was he, not a pair of newly minted Musketeers. "I send you out to find out who killed Gerard Gillion this is what you return with?"

"Do ya even have a care to help Aramis?" Porthos accused, his eyes fiery red. Athos' hand on his chest seemed enough to stop whatever else the large man wanted to say. Or do. "Or maybe beatin' 'im up in public was help enough for ya?"

The accusation stung, more than Treville would care to admit, but he would not back down in the face of angry words. Or maybe it was his own pride stopping him from recognizing the love and care that those words carried. "Close the door, Porthos," he ordered, a decision formed in his mind. "And sit down. Both of you."

Once the two were seated in front of his desk, chairs crushing discarded papers on the floor, Treville found himself lost for words. These two were too raw at being Musketeers, too new at the game. Certainly Porthos had the experience that came from fighting in the Infantry for years, but he lacked military strategy experience; and Athos, his education had certainly covered the art of war, but the man had been a soldier for less than a year. However, working together maybe the two of them could complete each other.

"You knew that the Red Guard was responsible for what happened here three months ago," Athos filled in for him when the silence became too much. "You suspected the Cardinal was behind it."

Such words, even whispered behind closed doors, could get all of them hanged, but the former Comte seemed to have no qualms about uttering them loud and clear. Treville respected that. "I did," he confirmed with a nod.

"An' what does all of this has to do with th' mess Aramis' in?" Porthos asked. From the aggravated look on the man's face, Treville was mostly certain that he knew the answer to his question pretty well too, even if he was reluctant to admit it to himself.

"I needed the Cardinal to feel comfortable enough with the situation that he would make a mistake," Treville told them. "Something that I could take to the King and prove that those Red Guards were under Armand's orders. Aramis..." he stopped himself, looking at the two men. Close as they had become, it was not his right to expose the other man's past like this. "...Aramis has some experience in these matters. I asked him to assist me."

"To see if the Cardinal would lure him to his side? Or make him his scapegoat?" Athos questioned, his mind already working through the details and realizing to what extent Treville and Aramis had gone. "The flogging?"

The Captain had to lower his eyes, lest they see the guilt there. "Aramis wanted the rift between us to be as wide as we could possibly make it," he confessed. "I agreed with his decision."

"The murdered man?"

Treville sighed. "Given the timing, I can only assume that he was a part of the Cardinal's plan," he asserted. He had known the man for years now, but the extent to which the First Minister would go to achieve his goals never failed to make his blood run cold. "If his plan is to discredit Aramis and make him the culprit for the garrison's explosion, making him the killer of the sole survivor of the attack would accomplish both with ease."

The parallels between the current situation and what had happened in Savoy were not lost on Treville. Quite the contrary.

"Wha' went wrong?" Porthos asked, leaning forward on his chair. How such a protective man had managed to remain seated throughout the whole conversation so far was surprising. "Somethin' must've happen' for you to be tellin' us all of this now."

Treville swallowed against the lump in his throat. "Aramis is missing...taken from the brig last night."

Those words were enough to accomplish what his entire speech had managed to avoid thus far. Porthos jumped from his chair, wood clattering as it collided with the floor. Athos, more contained, simply bit his lip, before rising up to pace the office.

"The Cardinal has him, somewhere," Treville went on, talking through the men's understandable distress. "Which means Aramis might have a chance to put our plan to work, but we need to find out where the Cardinal's men took him, as quickly as we can."

"He'll kill'im," Porthos whispered. His voice, rather than laced with fear, was heavy with anger and sure promise of retribution if Aramis was harmed in any way.

"No, the Cardinal has nothing to gain from that," Treville assured, even though doubt plagued him that the situation wasn't as linear as he was making it. "Not until Aramis confesses to crimes he did not commit."

The implications of his words were not lost on the two other men. Aramis needed to keep his mouth shut if he was to survive. But he still needed to give the Cardinal enough rope so that the man could hang himself.

"He can't do that," Porthos whispered, giving voice to what the others were thinking.

Treville walked to his bed, collecting a number of papers from a hideout underneath, conscious of the two men's eyes following his every move. "This is all the evidence I have so far," he said, selecting one piece of paper from the pile. "And this is the only thing that will keep Aramis alive for now, if he plays his cards right."

"What is that?" Athos asked.

Treville handed over the piece of parchment and waited as the young soldier's eyes raced through the few lines written there. It read as a signed confession, written by the dying hand of one of the assailants at the garrison. Treville knew that in detail, because he had been there when Aramis had written it, as both men recognized that the Musketeer's handwrite would be safer to use rather than one that the Cardinal might have recognized.

"This is a forgery," Athos stated, no shadow of doubt in his tone. "Jacques Bennoit died instantly. Aramis shot him. And Etienne Cussac never regained consciousness before passing away."

"A fact that, I'm sure, the Cardinal is unaware of," the Captain explained. "And he is the only one who must believe that this piece of paper not only exists, but is real."

It was a thin line. And they needed to be there to catch Aramis before that line snapped.

"That letter cannot remain here," Athos commented, fully aware that if that piece of paper was Aramis only leverage against having his throat slit, it had to be placed somewhere the Cardinal's people could easily reach.

The Captain nodded. Aramis had raised the same point. "Before you two start your search, I would have you deliver that letter to a this address," the Captain instructed. "Do not tell them of its importance, only that I'm to be warned as soon as it is taken from their hands. Are we clear?"

~§~