Read Chapter 30: Cat and Mouse at the Palace

The gala swelled around Luca like a fever dream. Crystal chandeliers hurled fractured light across marble floors where the wealthiest and most connected of Paris sipped champagne from glasses that cost more than his mother's apartment. He moved through them wearing Baptiste Moreau's face, a distant cousin's features settling over his own like a second skin, the bio-reactive mask humming faintly against his jawline.

Elodie glided ahead of him, resplendent in emerald silk that swept the floor as she worked the room with practiced ease. She touched a senator's arm, laughed at a minister's joke, and every eye in the Élysée Palace followed her stolen grace. She was Catherine Moreau's daughter tonight, not a resistance fighter with a dead man's blood in her veins.

Luca checked his watch. Twenty-two minutes until the gala's centerpiece performance. Twenty-two minutes to find Catherine's private office, access the memory bank, and begin the extraction.

He slipped away from the crowd as Elodie drew their attention toward the east terrace, her voice rising with theatrical delight at some architectural detail. A server passed with a tray of oysters; Luca palmed a napkin and used it to wipe a smudge from his borrowed cufflinks, buying himself two seconds of neutral observation.

The corridor beyond the grand hall was empty. Palace security was visible but predictable, their patterns imprinted in the stolen schematics Anouk's people had provided. Luca moved at a measured walk, not too fast, not too slow, the way a man with a legitimate reason to be here would move. The mask gave him Baptiste Moreau's patrician features, the DNA vial in his cheek had already passed the first biometric checkpoint at the gala entrance.

Catherine's office door appeared at the end of the west wing corridor. It was marked with the presidential seal, flanked by a single guard whose attention was fixed on a holoscreen displaying the gala's live feed.

Luca touched the comm bead in his ear. "East wing, north corridor. I need a distraction."

Elodie's voice came back, bright and brittle. "Give me three minutes. There's a senator who owes my mother several favors. He'll make a scene if I ask nicely."

The guard shifted, glanced at his holoscreen, and Luca saw Elodie appear on the feed beside a florid man in a military uniform strewn with medals. Her hand rested on his arm. She leaned close and said something that made him redden with pleasure.

The guard laughed at something on the feed, and Luca moved.

He was at the door in three strides, the vial of Catherine's DNA pressed to the biometric reader. The mechanism hummed, considered, and clicked open. He slipped inside as the guard's attention remained fixed on the screen where Elodie was now guiding the senator toward the buffet with theatrical reverence.

Catherine's office was exactly what he expected: meticulous, cold, and layered with the weight of decades. Every surface gleamed. The memory bank occupied the far wall, its brushed steel casing crosshatched with security filaments that pulsed with soft blue light.

Luca crossed to it and pressed his palm against the access panel. The DNA in his cheek hummed as the bank registered Catherine Moreau's genetic signature. A secondary prompt appeared, requesting a memory verification passphrase.

He didn't have one.

But he had Adrian. Not the man, but his methodology — the patterns La Taupe had taught both of them, the backdoors and skeleton keys that had been built into the system years ago by someone who'd wanted a way out. Luca pulled the interface cable from his implant and jacked directly into the bank's diagnostic port.

The world dissolved into streams of light.

He was inside Catherine Moreau's mind — or as much of it as she'd digitized, the memories she'd chosen to store rather than keep in her own skull. He rushed past her childhood, past her marriage to Jean-Pierre, past the carefully curated moments of political triumph. He was looking for something specific.

There. A memory flagged with a deletion protocol that made his stomach turn. He opened it and saw his mother's face.

Not young, not as he remembered her from childhood, but older, worn, sitting in a Marseille café with a cup of coffee growing cold between her hands. Catherine's voice spoke over the image, cold and administrative. "She's settled. No contact with anyone from her previous life. You'll leave her alone, or I'll make sure she disappears the same way Jean-Pierre did."

Luca's hands trembled against the console. The mother who'd vanished when he was twelve, the hole she'd left in his life — she'd been here all along, a bargaining chip Catherine had kept warm in case she ever needed leverage.

He forced himself to keep digging.

The murder memory was there, too, pristine and intact, the night Catherine Moreau shot the man whose death had paved her way to power. Luca began the extraction, routing the data through the diagnostic port toward Anouk's relay network. The progress bar crawled. Eighty percent. Ninety.

The office door opened.

Luca spun, hand going to the stunner at his hip. Adrian stood in the doorway, wearing the face of a palace aide, and recognition flickered in his eyes despite the mask.

"Baptiste Moreau," Adrian said slowly. "Catherine's cousin. Three generations removed. A man who hasn't left Monaco since he betrayed a business partner to the tax authorities." He smiled. "Except he's here, isn't he? Standing in the first lady's office with his hand in the memory bank."

Luca didn't waste time on words. He pulled the extraction cable free and lunged.

Adrian sidestepped, catching Luca's wrist and twisting it hard enough to send a shock of pain up his arm. The stunner clattered to the carpet. Luca drove his knee into Adrian's midsection, felt the other man's breath rush out, and they went down together in a tangle of limbs and borrowed identities.

Adrian was faster. He had been trained by the same people La Taupe had sent to break Luca, but he had been trained longer, more brutally. His fist connected with Luca's jaw, and the world wobbled behind a red haze.

"No hard feelings," Adrian grunted, slamming Luca against the memory bank's casing. "You understand. This is just business."

The keypad behind Luca's shoulder beeped as his weight triggered a security subroutine. The virus Anouk had provided was still in his implant, dormant, waiting for a command code he hadn't given it yet.

Luca spit blood onto the pristine carpet. "Your mother's proud of you, Adrian. Working for the woman who erased her."

Adrian hesitated.

It was enough. Luca slammed his skull forward, catching Adrian in the bridge of the nose, and scrambled free while the other man staggered. He hit the command sequence blindly, feeling the subroutine in his implant release, watching the extraction cable spark as the virus launched toward the memory bank.

An alert screamed through the office. Somewhere far away, klaxons began to sound.

The virus was uploading. The murder memory was transmitting. The extraction was compromised but operational, the data streaming toward Anouk's relay in fragmented bursts that might be enough, might not, might fail halfway across Paris.

Adrian lunged again, catching Luca's collar and yanking him backward. In the struggle, something clattered free from Luca's pocket, something small and gold, spinning across the marble floor until it came to rest against the wall.

His mother's locket. The one she'd left behind when she vanished, the only piece of her he'd ever had.

Luca reached for it.

Adrian's fist caught him in the temple, and the world went dark for a single terrible moment. When his vision cleared, Adrian was standing over the locket, his heel resting on its delicate chain.

"Give me the extraction key," Adrian said, "and I'll let you walk out of here with this."

Luca's palm was against the memory bank. The diagnostic port was still connected. The progress bar on the extraction showed complete.

"I've already sent it," Luca said.

Adrian's face went still. He looked down at the locket, then back at Luca, something unreadable passing through his eyes.

"I know," he said. "But I've just sent your face along with it." He tapped his own implant. "Every security system in this palace knows Baptiste Moreau is Catherine's spy. And they know you're wearing him."

Luca backed toward the window as the first security boots pounded down the corridor outside.