Read Chapter 3: The Locket's Secret

The marble staircase was a river of champagne silk and black tailcoats, the air thick with jasmine and the low thrum of a string quartet. Camille had managed to slip away from the gala’s crush for only a moment, finding a shadowed alcove behind a towering fern to catch her breath and steady her trembling hands. Philippe de Montfort’s voice still echoed in her skull—*walking among wolves*—and the way his pale eyes had lingered on her, not with desire but with something closer to recognition, made her skin prickle beneath the borrowed corset.

She was adjusting the lace at her throat when it happened.

The silver chain snapped.

Her mother’s locket—the one thing she never removed, the one constant through her childhood hunger, her father’s debts, her rise through the grimy ranks of the Parisian press—slipped free and clattered onto the polished marble floor. The sound was small, swallowed by the orchestra, but to Camille it rang like a bell.

She knelt quickly, snatching it up before the swarm of dancing heels could crush it, but when she rose, Philippe was there.

He had moved without sound, materializing from the crowd like smoke. His gaze wasn’t on her face. It was fixed on the locket cradled in her palm.

“Where did you get that?” His voice had lost its amused veneer. It was low, tight, the voice of a man forcing calm through a locked jaw.

Camille closed her fingers over the silver oval. “It was my mother’s. She passed years ago.”

“Your mother.” He repeated the words slowly, tasting them. His eyes, the color of winter storms, did not lift from her hand. “What was her name?”

“I don’t see how that concerns you, Monsieur le Marquis.”

He stepped closer, and the air between them seemed to compress. “The design. The filigree on the clasp. Where did she get it?”

She thought of her mother’s thin hands, always cold, always working—sewing, mending, scrubbing other people’s floors so that Camille could have bread and ink. The locket had been the only thing of beauty her mother had possessed, and she never spoke of where it came from. Only that it had been given to her by someone who loved her. *Once.*

“I don’t know,” Camille said honestly. “She never told me its history.”

Philippe’s jaw tightened. For a moment, something unguarded flickered across his face—pain, or memory, or both. Then the mask slid back into place, smooth and untouchable. “Keep it safe, Mademoiselle Delacroix,” he said quietly. “Some things are worth more than the hands that carry them.”

He turned and was swallowed by the crowd before she could ask what he meant.

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The gala ended at two in the morning. Camille slipped out through a servant’s entrance, ignoring the frostbite sting of the October air on her exposed shoulders, and walked the twenty minutes back to her garret apartment on the Rue de Verneuil. The city was quiet, lamplit, the Seine a black ribbon sliding between stone bridges.

She did not undress. She sat on the edge of her narrow bed, still in the borrowed emerald gown, and held the locket up to the gaslight.

The snap of the chain had not been the only thing that broke tonight. She had felt it—the faint click inside the locket itself, a sliding mechanism that had not been there before, or perhaps had always been there and she had never had cause to disturb it.

Her mother had worn this locket for thirty years. Camille had handled it a thousand times, pressed it to her lips during prayers, clutched it through fever nights. She had never once thought to examine the back. Not closely.

She turned it over now.

The silver backing was engraved with a delicate latticework of vines and tiny moths—the same moth motif that had been branded into the flesh of the dead woman dragged from the Seine. Camille’s blood went cold.

She pressed her thumb against the center of the lattice.

There was a soft *click*, and the back plate swung open on a hidden hinge.

Inside was a recess, no larger than her thumbnail, lined with faded velvet. And within that velvet lay a miniature painting on ivory, so small and so exquisitely detailed that it might have been the work of a master of the old court. The face it depicted was oval, pale, with dark hair swept up in an elaborate coiffure decades out of fashion. The eyes were large and dark, the lips curved in a knowing smile.

The face was her own.

Camille’s breath stopped.

It was not merely similar. It was exact—the same tilt of the brow, the same sharp line of the jaw, the same mole at the corner of the mouth. She could have been looking into a mirror painted a hundred years ago. The woman in the portrait wore a gown of deep violet silk, a pendant at her throat that matched the locket’s filigree exactly. And behind her, barely visible in the shadows of the miniature, stood the faint outline of a man with pale hair and winter-storm eyes.

Camille’s hand trembled. The locket slipped, swung on its broken chain, and she caught it against her chest.

Her mother had never spoken of her family. She had died when Camille was eighteen, of consumption and a broken heart that no physician could name. Her last words had been to press the locket into Camille’s palm and whisper: *“Do not let them find it. Do not let them find you.”*

Camille had always assumed *them* meant the creditors, the landlord, the men who had broken her father.

Now she was not so sure.

She stared at the miniature until the gaslight made her eyes water. The woman in the portrait smiled at her with a serene, terrible certainty, as if she had been waiting all this time to be found.

A knock at the door made her jump.

Camille shoved the locket into her bodice, heart hammering, and pulled a knife from under her pillow before crossing to the door. She did not open it. “Who’s there?”

A pause. A young voice, breathless and afraid. “Mademoiselle Delacroix? I’m sorry to disturb you. I brought a message from the Marquise de Montfort.”

Camille cracked the door an inch. A maid stood in the hallway, thin and pale, clutching a folded piece of paper. She wore the dark livery of the Montfort household. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

“The Marquise?” Camille repeated. “She doesn’t leave her rooms. She hasn’t been seen in public in years.”

“The message is not from the Marquise,” the maid whispered, glancing both ways down the corridor. “It’s from the household. From someone you met tonight.” She pressed the paper into Camille’s hand. Her fingers were trembling. “He said to tell you that the locket was not the first.”

Before Camille could ask what that meant, the maid turned and fled down the stairs, her footsteps quick and fading into the dark.

Camille closed the door, locked it, and broke the wax seal with shaking fingers.

The note contained a single line, written in a hand that was elegant and old:

*Your mother did not die of consumption. She died of us. She was supposed to be the last.*

*He is still looking.*

Camille lowered the paper. The locket was warm against her skin, as if it had a pulse of its own.

The portrait of the woman who looked exactly like her burned in her memory, and the face of Philippe de Montfort rose up to meet it—the recognition in his eyes, the pain in his voice, the way he had frozen at the sight of the silver oval.

*Some things are worth more than the hands that carry them.*

She had come to the Montfort gala to expose a killer.

She was beginning to understand that she might be hunting her own blood.