Read Chapter 22: The Second Victim

The text on Adrian's screen was the same image Luca had pulled from the data morgue three weeks ago—a smiling man in his fifties, wire-rimmed glasses, a press badge clipped to his jacket. Now the smile was gone, replaced by a police photograph taken at a morgue in the 11th arrondissement. The caption read: *Investigative journalist Henri Blanchard, 57, killed in apparent gas leak accident.*

"Apparent," Luca said, his shoulder throbbing beneath the bandage. "That word is doing a lot of work."

Adrian zoomed in on the photograph. "He was found in his apartment on Rue de la Roquette. Gas leak. Faulty stove. The kind of thing that happens to old men living alone." He paused. "Except Blanchard was forty-seven, not fifty-seven. The police report got his age wrong. And his neighbor says she heard someone in his apartment the night before—someone who wasn't him, because Blanchard was in Lyon covering a story."

Luca leaned over Adrian's terminal, the stale air of the safehouse pressing against his skin. They'd moved to Adrian's bolthole in the 20th after La Taupe's men had gutted Luca's place. A narrow room above a shuttered butcher shop, the windows painted black, cables snaking across the floor like dead vines.

"His memory files," Luca said. "What did you pull from him?"

Adrian tapped his keyboard. A cascade of data streamed across the screen—news articles, video transcripts, public memory manifests. "Blanchard was chasing a story about the clinic. Your mother's clinic. The one named in the journal."

"I know which clinic."

"He was investigating a pattern. Patients checking in for voluntary memory deletions who never checked out. Not because they were dead—just gone. Disappeared from every database. Social security numbers voided, family records scrubbed, lives deleted wholesale."

Luca's chest tightened. "How many?"

"Fourteen over the past six years. But here's the thing." Adrian pulled up a document, the typeface stark against the black background. "Blanchard found a connection to the Moreau campaign. Specifically to a shell company that leases the building next door to the clinic. The shell company's registered address is the same as La Taupe's operation."

The wound in Luca's shoulder burned. He pressed a hand against it, feeling the fresh scab through the fabric. "So Blanchard was getting close."

"Close enough that someone wanted him quieted permanently." Adrian closed the file. "The police ruled it an accident within hours. No autopsy ordered. The memory drive in his apartment was found corrupted—they logged it as a technical failure."

Luca felt his jaw tighten. "You have it."

"Have what?"

"Blanchard's memory drive. The corrupted one."

Adrian hesitated, then nodded slowly. He slid a small metal case across the table. "I know a guy at the evidence locker. Cost me a favor I wasn't ready to spend."

Luca picked up the case, turning it over in his hands. The drive was a standard issue neural backup—the kind journalists used to record interviews for verification. He'd handled a hundred of them. But this one felt different. Heavier, somehow, as if the weight of what it contained had physically sunken into the casing.

"Corrupted," he said. "That's what they want us to think."

"You can crack it?"

"I can try. But I need a rig with the right decryption stack." He looked around Adrian's cramped quarters. "This isn't going to cut it."

Adrian rubbed his eyes. "There's a broker in the Marais who owes me. Kami Zou. She runs an extraction lab out of an old print shop. If anyone can peel back the corruption layer, it's her."

"Does she work for La Taupe?"

"No one works for La Taupe. They work for him or they die. Kami has managed to avoid both." Adrian scribbled an address on a scrap of paper. "Tell her I sent you. She'll know what that means."

Luca pocketed the address and the drive case. He stood, wincing as his shoulder protested. "What about the girl? S.M.?"

"She's still where we left her. I've got a contact monitoring the villa remotely. No movement from La Taupe's men since yesterday."

"Good. Keep it that way."

Adrian caught his arm. "Luca. You need to know. Blanchard wasn't just investigating the clinic. He was looking into something else. Something older."

Luca paused. "What?"

Adrian pulled up another file—a scanned news clipping from twenty-nine years ago, the paper yellowed and cracked. The headline read: *Controversial Fertility Researcher Found Dead in Paris Apartment.*

"Julien Marchand," Adrian said. "Your father. Blanchard had a copy of the original police report. The death was ruled a suicide. But someone circled the word 'suicide' and wrote a question mark in the margin."

Luca felt his pulse quicken. His father's name was still new to him, a revelation that had reshaped everything he thought he knew about his own bloodline. Now, in this dim room above a shuttered shop, it surfaced again like a ghost refusing to stay buried.

"The handwriting," Luca said. "Whose was it?"

"I ran it through a handwriting analysis program. Best match I got was at forty-three percent confidence." Adrian hesitated. "It matched a known sample from Catherine Moreau's private correspondence."

The room seemed to contract around Luca. "Moreau knew my father."

"She may have known more than that." Adrian's voice was quiet, careful. "Blanchard was tracing the same threads you are. The clinic. Moreau. The memory deletions. Your father's death." He looked at the corrupted drive in Luca's hand. "He may have found the connection before someone found him."

Luca stared at the metal case. Somewhere inside it was a journalist's final work—a record of what Henric Blanchard had discovered before he was silenced. The man whose memory he'd pulled from the data morgue three weeks ago had been chasing the same ghosts that now chased Luca.

"Gas leak," Luca said flatly. "He was investigating a candidate for the highest office in the country, and he died of a gas leak."

"It's clean. Too clean. The kind of clean that takes resources." Adrian met his eyes. "This isn't La Taupe's work."

Luca looked up sharply. "What do you mean? You said you suspected him."

"I said I suspected him. But La Taupe kills with precision—a knife in the dark, a staged robbery, a memory wipe so thorough the victim forgets their own name. He doesn't orchestrate accidents. He leaves messages. Like the tattoo etched into your wall." Adrian's expression darkened. "This is different. This is someone who wanted Blanchard dead quietly, cleanly, without any sign of a struggle. The kind of kill that happens when you're protecting something bigger than yourself."

"Moreau's campaign."

"Maybe." Adrian shrugged. "Or maybe there's a second player we don't know about yet."

Luca weighed the drive case in his palm. Somewhere in the Marais, a broker named Kami Zou was waiting to peel back the corruption on Henri Blanchard's final memories. Maybe she'd find the proof that would bring down Catherine Moreau. Maybe she'd find the connection between his father's death and the clinic. Or maybe, like every other thread he'd pulled this week, it would lead somewhere darker, somewhere he wasn't ready to look.

His phone buzzed. An unknown number. A single message: *She's out. Meet me at the print shop on Rue des Rosiers. Come alone.*

Luca stared at the words. "Elodie's out."

"Out of prison?" Adrian's eyebrows rose. "That's not possible. She was transferred to La Santé three days ago."

"She was in La Santé." Luca stood, pocketing his phone. "She's not anymore."

"That's either very good news or very bad news."

"Only one way to find out." Luca headed for the door, pausing at the threshold. "If I'm not back in four hours, take the girl from the villa and disappear. Don't wait for me."

Adrian opened his mouth to protest, but Luca was already moving, descending the narrow stairs into the Paris night, the corrupted drive pressing against his chest. The streets were quiet, the rain that had haunted his arrival finally still. Somewhere in the city, Elodie was waiting. And somewhere in the corrupted memories of a dead journalist, the truth was waiting too.

Both of them, he suspected, were about to change everything.