Read Chapter 31: The Repayment

The banker’s office smelled of stale coffee and old leather, the kind of place where time moved slowly and money moved faster. Julien sat across from a man named Paul Renard, who had been processing loans for rugby players for two decades—mostly to buy boats, houses, or to cover gambling habits that got out of hand. This one was different, and Renard knew it.

“You’re asking for three hundred thousand euros,” Renard said, sliding the paperwork across his desk. “For a club expense. But the club isn’t borrowing. You are.”

“That’s right,” Julien said.

“Why?”

Julien glanced at Camille beside him. She had her arms crossed, her jaw tight, but she gave him a small nod.

“Because the club has a problem that needs solving quietly,” Julien said. “And I need time.”

Renard studied him. “Your contract is up for renewal. What if you get injured in the final? What if you walk away tomorrow? You’d be left with a personal debt to a bank on a physio’s salary, and you wouldn’t even have the physio.”

Julien smiled, a thin edge to it. “Then I’ll just have to win.”

The loan took two hours to process. Julien didn’t blink when he signed his name. Later, with a cashier’s check burning a hole in his jacket pocket, he drove them to a small café outside the city, where Moreau was already waiting at a corner table with an espresso cooling in front of him.

Moreau looked worse than the last time Camille had seen him. His shirt collar was loose, his eyes ringed with dark circles. He stood when they approached, then sat back down when Julien didn’t offer a handshake.

“This is it?” Moreau asked, eyeing the envelope on the table.

“Two hundred thousand,” Julien said. “Cashier’s check. It’s not the full amount, but it’s enough to show good faith. Enough to buy you a conversation with Aubert. Time to negotiate the rest.”

Moreau reached for it, but Julien put his palm flat on the envelope first.

“No,” Julien said. “Not yet.”

“Then what?”

“You called me. You said you were afraid. You said Aubert’s men came to your house. I’m here to help you. But help cuts both ways.”

Moreau’s eyes darted between them. “What do you want?”

“The books,” Camille said.

Moreau flinched like she’d thrown ice water on him. “What books?”

“The real ones,” she said. “Not the ones you’ve been showing the board. Not the ones that got you into this mess. I want the truth about how much this club is bleeding, where it’s bleeding, and who else knows about it.”

Moreau stared at his espresso. A long silence stretched—long enough that Julien began to pull the envelope back. That did it.

Moreau’s hand shot out, not grabbing, but pleading. “Wait.”

“Speak,” Julien said.

Moreau took a breath. “The club is insolvent. Has been for eighteen months.” He spoke the words flatly, as if saying them aloud made them less real. “The sponsorship deals you see on the jerseys? Fake. The ‘premium partner’ from Monaco? A shell company I set up. The board approved a new medical wing last year that doesn’t exist. I took the money, inflated the budget, and covered the shortfall with revolving credit from three different banks. When that stopped working, I took the only offer I could find.”

“Aubert,” Julien said.

Moreau nodded. “First it was a hundred thousand. Then it was two. Then he wanted a player pipeline. Boys from the south, the banlieues, the former colonies. Kids with no papers, no agents. He’d place them, groom them, own them. I thought I could control it. Feed him the ones who wouldn’t make it. But he wanted stars. He wanted Vincent.”

Camille felt the air change. Julien’s knuckles went white on the table’s edge.

“He had Vincent,” Julien said.

“He tried,” Moreau said. “Vincent was clean. He refused. I don’t know what happened next—that part I didn’t want to know. But Vincent started acting strange. Nervous. He had a new agent who came out of nowhere. That agent was one of Aubert’s men.” He paused. “And then Vincent had his accident.”

The silence that followed wasn’t just awkward. It was wet, heavy, like standing at the bottom of a pool.

“Are you telling me,” Julien said slowly, each word a stone, “that my brother was killed because he wouldn’t work for your loan shark?”

“I’m telling you what I know,” Moreau said. “I didn’t order it. I didn’t orchestrate it. But I gave Aubert the opening. I showed him the club’s horses. He picked the ones he wanted. Vincent was the best of them. And the best ones are the hardest to break.”

Julien was on his feet before Camille could grab him. The chair scraped across the terracotta tiles, drawing the glances of two old men at the bar. Julien’s hands were on Moreau’s collar, lifting him halfway out of his seat.

“You sold him,” Julien hissed. “You sold my brother to men who break people.”

Moreau didn’t resist. His hands stayed flat on the table. “Kill me,” he said. “Go ahead. But then the bank calls my loans tomorrow, the club goes into receivership, and Aubert walks away clean with everything he’s built. Is that what Vincent would have wanted?”

Julien’s grip trembled. Seconds passed. Camille placed a hand on his forearm, not pulling, just resting there. She could feel his pulse hammering through the muscle.

“Don’t,” she said quietly. “He’s not worth it.”

Julien let go. Moreau collapsed back into his chair, straightening his collar with shaking fingers. Julien didn’t sit back down. He stood over Moreau, breathing hard, a tower of barely contained violence.

“Tonight,” Julien said, “you will make the call to Aubert. You’ll tell him the first payment is coming. And you will bring me everything you have—every ledger, every shell company document, every digital file. Names, dates, transfers.”

“I can’t—,” Moreau started.

“You will,” Julien said. “Or I walk away, and the bank takes the club, and Aubert comes to collect from you personally. Not the club. Not the team. You.”

Moreau swallowed. He looked at the envelope, and then at the two of them. Finally, slowly, he nodded.

“I’ll need until tonight,” he said. “The files are on a drive. I kept it hidden. You’ll get it before the board meeting.”

Julien pushed the envelope across the table without another word. Moreau took it, stood shakily, and slipped out the back door of the café.

Camille sat back down, her legs unsteady. “He killed Vincent,” she said. “Not directly, but—he opened the door.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Julien said, but his voice was hollow. He was staring at the door Moreau had just gone through, as if trying to see through it to everything that lay on the other side.

“We will,” she said.

Julien turned to her. For a moment his face was raw, open—the boy who had lost his brother, not the star who had rebuilt himself out of rage and leather and sweat. Then he closed it down.

“The board meeting is in less than two hours,” he said. “If Moreau doesn’t deliver that drive, we go in with nothing. And Delacroix will eat us alive.

“He’ll eat us alive anyway,” Camille said.

Julien almost smiled. A sad, tired twist of the lips. “Then at least we’ll have eaten first.”

They left the café together, the afternoon sun too bright for the weight of what had just been learned. On the street, the sound of a motorcycle backfire made Julien flinch—a full-body, primal reaction that startled even him. He shook it off, but Camille saw. Something else had changed. He wasn’t just fighting for his career anymore. He was fighting for the truth about Vincent’s death.

And the truth, whatever it was, was still buried somewhere in the mess Moreau had left behind.