Read Chapter 24: Aftermath: On the Run

The cab dropped them in the eleventh arrondissement, in a narrow street of shuttered workshops and graffiti-scarred shutters. Étienne paid in cash, then led Camille through a passageway that smelled of cat piss and damp stone, past a row of dented metal doors, until he stopped at one painted the color of dried blood.

He produced a key from inside his boot—a habit, she noted, that spoke to a life lived in flight—and shouldered the door open. The room beyond was small and utilitarian: a mattress on a low frame, a camp stove, a sink, a table with two mismatched chairs. The walls were bare concrete. The only window was set high, near the ceiling, and covered with a heavy grate.

“Cozy,” Camille said.

“It’s safe.” He locked the door behind them, threw the bolts, and pulled a chain that cut the single overhead bulb. The dark felt immediate, then receded as his eyes adjusted. He crossed to the window and peered through the grate at the street below.

Camille did not move. She stood with her back to the door, arms crossed, listening to the distant hum of the city and the nearer sound of her own heartbeat.

“You knew,” she said.

Étienne turned. “Knew what?”

“The workshop. The fakes. The operation.” She forced the words out flat, clinical. “You didn’t just stumble into this case, did you? You were already in it. Up to your neck.”

He said nothing for a long moment. Then he crossed to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat. The bulb above him cast hard shadows across his face, sharpening the hollows beneath his cheekbones.

“I suspected,” he said slowly. “For months. Before I met you, before all of this. There were patterns I recognized. Signatures. Little tricks of the hand that only a forger would know.”

“Because you’re a forger.”

“Because I trained with one.” He looked at her, and the admission sat between them like something heavy. “My mentor. Old man in Lyon. Taught me everything—the chemistry of aging varnish, the way crackle patterns form under stress, the pigments that were available in each century and those that were not. He’s dead now. But the trade died harder.”

Camille felt something crack inside her chest, a fissure running through the careful sculpture she’d built of her own certainty. “So when you called me, when you approached me about the Morisot…”

“I needed a partner with access to the insurance world. Your world.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands open. “Not to use you. Not knowingly. I needed someone who could see the forest while I was drowning in the trees. And then I met you, and the forest was—complicated.”

She wanted to be angry. She had been angry—a hot, clean fury that had carried her through the gala, through the confrontation with Petiot, through the flight from Delorme. But that fire was guttering now, replaced by something colder and more honest.

“You put me in the frame job,” she said. “You pulled me into your world because you needed cover. You needed someone who could get into places you couldn’t.”

“Yes.”

“And you never told me.”

“I’m telling you now.”

She laughed, a short, hollow sound. “Because you had no choice. Because we’re cornered.”

“Because I trust you.” His voice was quiet but certain. “I trust you, Camille. Not because we’re cornered. Because I’ve watched you choose right every time the universe gave you the chance to choose wrong. Because you walked into Legrand’s gala to face a monster with nothing but a forged invitation and your own conviction. Because you kept the locket.” He reached into his jacket and pulled it out, silver glinting in the lamplight. “You gave this to the wrong person once, and you trusted me to fix it. I failed you then. I won’t fail you now.”

The locket lay in his palm, small and unassuming. The microchip within it—Roussel’s final gift—held the names of twelve museum pieces marked for forgery. But the thought of it brought Camille up short.

“Petiot,” she said. “He knew about Roussel. He knew about you. He knew about my father’s debts, about Vasseur’s vulnerabilities, about Delorme’s little file. How?”

Étienne shook his head. “The deeper question is how long he’s known. Roussel was his insider, planted in the lab to flag authenticate pieces. But Roussel turned on him—copied the data, tried to sell it. Petiot had him killed for it. The question is whether Petiot has other eyes inside the police, inside your firm, inside everything.”

The thought settled between them like sediment in still water. Camille moved at last, crossing to the table to take the chair opposite him. She rested her forearms on the scarred wood and looked at him directly.

“I suspected you,” she admitted. “The night we met. The forger’s hand on the Morisot copy was too clean to be amateur, and you were too curious about the authentic side of the trade. I told myself you were a fence, a broker, someone with peripheral knowledge.” She paused. “You were always peripheral to the truth.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m wanted for crimes I didn’t commit, running from a cop who’s been fed a poisoned file, and the only person who can help me clear my name is sitting across the table looking at me like I’m the one holding all the cards.” She turned her palm up on the table. “I don’t trust you because you’ve earned it. I trust you because the alternative is trusting no one, and I’ve seen what that looks like. My father believed in no one. It cost him everything.”

Étienne was silent for a long moment. Then he reached across the table and clasped her hand. His fingers were warm, calloused at the tips—painter’s hands, she thought, though they’d held guns too.

“Then let me earn it,” he said.

“How?”

He pulled out his phone and laid it on the table between them. On the screen, a small red dot pulsed against a map of the city’s northern edge.

“That’s Petiot’s tracker. Still live. He hasn’t found it yet, or he hasn’t thought to look.” Étienne traced a line from the dot toward a cluster of industrial blocks. “The signal’s stationary now. It’s been stationary for twenty minutes. Which means he’s either stopped at his flat, or he’s gone to ground somewhere with walls thick enough to mute the signal.”

“How far is it?”

“Four kilometers from here. Industrial zone. Warehouses, cosmetics distributors, a few perfumeries.” He looked at her, and something shifted in his eyes—a spark of the recklessness she’d come to recognize in her own reflection. “I know a man who owes me a favor. Access to the building’s blueprints. Security codes.”

Camille raised an eyebrow. “So you’re proposing what, exactly?”

“We finish this. We go in, we find the storage facility, we get the evidence—the originals, the audit trail, whatever Petiot has that ties him to the ring—and we get it to someone who can actually use it.”

“Clean authority?” she asked.

“Your people in Lyon. The DNIPP. The art squad, not the local branch Delorme has poisoned.” Étienne’s grip tightened around her hand. “We can’t clear our names through the system, because the system has been compromised. So we have to go around it.”

Camille looked at the red dot on the screen. Somewhere out there, in the dark of the industrial zone, Petiot was sitting on stolen masterpieces, a captive girl, and the evidence that could destroy them all. And somewhere behind them, Delorme was likely tapping their numbers, filing warrants, closing net.

“He has watchers on you,” she said. “Petiot said so. People with orders to kill if I step out of line.”

“He was lying.”

“Was he?”

Étienne’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “I’ve been watched for a long time. If his people haven’t found me yet, they’re not going to find me between now and tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night.” Camille repeated the words like she was tasting them. “That’s the plan? We break into a vault under a warehouse, guarded by God knows what, and we do it tomorrow?”

“Tonight,” he said. “We rest for two hours. Then we move before dawn, when the security shifts change and the eyes are tired.”

She looked at the hand holding hers. Then she looked at the red dot on the screen. Then she looked at Étienne, at the man who had once been a ghost to her, a suspect, a threat, and now was the only landmark she had in a city that had turned against her.

“One condition,” she said.

“Name it.”

“When we find Élodie—if we find her alive—she comes out first. Before the evidence, before the originals, before any of it. She’s a person, not a trophy.”

Étienne nodded slowly. “Agreed.”

They sat in silence, hands still linked across the table. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance, and Camille felt her pulse spike before the sound faded, swallowed by the indifferent hum of the city.

“Two hours,” she said. “Then we go.”

“Two hours,” he confirmed.

She released his hand and rose, crossing to the mattress in the corner. She didn’t lie down, merely sat with her back to the wall, knees drawn to her chest, eyes fixed on the bolted door.

Two hours. In the morning, she would be a thief again—but this time, she would be stealing the truth from the man who had stolen it from everyone else.

It wasn’t justice, exactly. But it was a start.