Read Chapter 13: Interrogation at the Dôme

The room was cold in the way only underground spaces are—sterile, still, dead air that hadn't moved in years. Adrian flicked a switch and humming fluorescents buzzed to life above a long metal table, revealing a space that smelled of ozone and old concrete. The Dôme des Invalides was a monument up top. Down here, beneath the gilded dome and the tomb of emperors, it was a bunker.

Luca's wrists were zip-tied to the arms of a steel chair. His shoulder still ached from where Adrian's men had wrenched him out of the pavilion, and the last traces of the memory bleed were fading from his frontal lobe like a receding tide. He blinked hard, trying to clear the ghost-images of Moreau's hands around Christophe's throat.

Adrian sat across from him. Not behind him, not standing over him. Across, like a colleague. The security chief had removed his jacket and rolled his sleeves, revealing forearms tattooed with what looked like serial numbers—old military ink, faded blue.

"You're not going to kill me," Luca said. It came out rougher than he intended.

Adrian tilted his head. "No."

"Then why am I still tied to this chair?"

"Because you're a thief, and thieves lie." Adrian slid a thin tablet across the table. It lit up, displaying a series of financial documents—shell companies, transfer ledgers, timestamps. "But I'm going to show you something that might make you want to tell the truth."

Luca's eyes moved over the data. Company names he didn't recognize. Amounts in the six figures, routing through the usual offshore havens. And then one name that made his breath catch: *L'Architecte*. It appeared in the metadata of every transaction, a ghost signature riding the encrypted rails.

"That's La Taupe's operational name," Adrian said. "L'Architecte. He's been funding opposition campaigns for eight years. Not just against Moreau—against anyone who threatens certain interests. But Moreau was his masterpiece. He built her from nothing. Took a nobody prosecutor with a dead-end career and made her a presidential candidate."

Luca glanced up. "So why is he trying to destroy her?"

Adrian's lips pressed into a thin line. He tapped the tablet, bringing up a new screen—a news feed dated three weeks ago, showing photos of a man in his fifties with silver hair and a widow's peak. Jean-Paul Vernet. Independent candidate. Polling had him at fourteen percent, now climbing toward twenty-three after a series of debates Moreau had mysteriously missed.

"This is the endgame, Luca. La Taupe doesn't build to keep. He builds to dismantle." Adrian let the screen hang. "He created Moreau to be the frontrunner, the target, the lightning rod. She's been taking fire so Vernet can slip in under the radar. And the memory you stole? That's the final blow. If it goes public before the election, Moreau is finished. Vernet wins. And La Taupe owns him exactly the way he owned her."

Luca's mouth was dry. He thought of the memory cube, of Moreau's face caught in the strobe-light flashes of the pavilion. Guilt, terror, hands slick with another person's life. "Why would he make her commit a murder if he wanted her to win?"

Adrian's eyes flashed something—respect, maybe, for a quick mind. "Because he needed insurance. A lever he could pull whenever she stepped out of line. But Moreau did something he didn't anticipate. She deleted the memory. She had no idea what she'd done, but somewhere deep inside, she knew it was a weapon. And she fired it into the void."

This was the part Luca had already guessed—Moreau had no memory of the killing. The forensic wipe at the clinic had done its job. And La Taupe, with his network of spies, had discovered the deletion was incomplete. One copy had survived in the Bois de Vincennes backup server. Which was why he'd sent Luca to retrieve it.

Luca's pulse quickened. "He didn't hire me to steal the cube. He hired me to *find* it."

"Clever boy." Adrian leaned back. "The decoy cube you're supposed to deliver to Sabine Delacroix? It's a dummy. He's been using her as an unwitting courier for years. The real prize was always the backup file, hidden in that pavilion. You found it. You played it. And now you know the truth."

Luca swallowed. "And my mother."

Adrian's expression shifted. The clinical distance cracked, and for a moment Luca saw something raw underneath—a grief that had been buried but never processed. "Your mother was never a victim of La Taupe's games. She was a witness."

"A witness to what?"

Adrian stood and walked to a small panel in the wall, opened it, and extracted a manila folder. He laid it in front of Luca, flipping it open. Inside were photographs—grainy, surveillance-style—showing a woman with dark hair cut in the same sharp bob as Luca's own. His mother, Camille Vidal. She was standing in a café, talking to a man whose face was partially obscured by a pillar.

Luca's chest tightened. "Who is that?"

"That's Christophe." Adrian let the name hang. "Before he was murdered, he was a freelance data broker. He discovered that La Taupe wasn't just building candidates—he was building a judicial network. Judges, prosecutors, a whole infrastructure of legal corruption. Moreau was going to be his crowning achievement, but she decided to run for president instead of staying on the bench. La Taupe didn't like losing his grip."

Luca's mind was racing. "Christophe found the evidence. He tried to sell it to my mother."

"Your mother was an investigative journalist before she went dark. Does that track with what you remember?"

Luca frowned. His mother had been a data archivist. That was the cover story, the life she'd built to keep him safe. But now that he thought about it—the late nights, the encrypted calls, the way she'd never let him see what she was working on—yes. It tracked.

"She confronted La Taupe," Adrian continued. "She threatened to expose him. And she had leverage: Christophe's research, hidden somewhere she never disclosed. When La Taupe realized he couldn't find it, he made a choice. He deleted her."

A cold knot formed in Luca's stomach. "Deleted her how?"

"The same way they made Moreau forget her murder. Memory wipe, then a staged life. Your mother isn't dead, Luca. She's living out a fabricated existence somewhere, with no idea she was ever Camille Vidal."

Tears burned at the edges of Luca's eyes. He forced them back. "You know where she is."

Adrian didn't confirm, didn't deny. He simply closed the folder and slid it back into the panel. "You've been chasing ghosts, Luca. La Taupe gave you a thread, and you pulled it all the way to the truth. But you can't finish this alone. You don't have the access. You don't have the manpower. And you don't have the time."

The deadline. Forty-eight hours to deliver the decoy cube. Now probably less.

"You want me to help you bring him down," Luca said.

"I want you to help me clear Moreau's name and put Vernet in a position where La Taupe can't use him." Adrian's voice dropped, quieter, more human. "And I want whoever erased Camille Vidal to answer for what they did."

Luca studied him. The man across the table was a professional—a soldier turned watchdog, loyal to a candidate who was being destroyed by her own creator. But there was something else in his face, a personal investment that went beyond duty. "Why do you care so much? Moreau's just your employer."

Adrian was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was rough. "I was there the night she killed Christophe. I was her driver. I got her to the pavilion and I got her out. But I didn't know what she was doing. I thought it was a date, a rendezvous. I didn't ask questions, because she never asked me to lie for her before."

Luca saw it then—the guilt that had been driving Adrian all along. He hadn't just been tracking Luca to protect Moreau's campaign. He'd been tracking Luca to find the memory and face the truth he'd been avoiding for years.

"If I help you," Luca said slowly, "I need three things. Elodie gets out safe. My mother gets found. And La Taupe gets what he deserves."

Adrian nodded. "Agreed."

"The zip-ties," Luca said.

Adrian produced a knife and sliced through the plastic. Luca rubbed his wrists, feeling blood rush back into his hands, and stood. His legs were unsteady, but he didn't let it show.

"There's something you need to know," Adrian said. "La Taupe isn't just a voice on a phone. He's a man with a face, and he's been embedded in this campaign from the beginning. He walks the same halls as Moreau. He eats at the same tables."

Luca looked up. "Who is he?"

Adrian pulled up a photograph on the tablet—a man in his sixties, distinguished, wearing the sash of a parliamentary official. Luca felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. He'd seen that face before, watching the news feeds with his mother as a child.

"His name is Claude Renard," Adrian said. "And he's the man who built everything you've ever touched."