Read Chapter 35: The Collector's Heart

The office smelled of fresh paint and possibility. Camille stood at the threshold, running her fingers along the doorframe as if testing that the space was real. Her nameplate caught the morning light—*Chef de l'Unité des Crimes d'Art*—still crisp enough that the engraving felt like a dare.

Behind her, Vasseur let out a theatrical groan. "They gave you my view."

"Our view," she corrected, stepping aside so he could see the window facing the Palais Garnier. The gilded angels on its roof caught the sun like a promise. "I'll let you visit."

"How generous. And here I thought you'd be redecorating with stolen Picassos."

Camille smiled, a small, genuine thing. "The walls are white. I'm not in the mood to frame anything."

The job had materialized faster than she'd expected. A promotion born of her testimony at the trial, her recovery of the Caillebotte, and the quiet word of private collectors she'd never meet. They wanted someone who understood the world of secret vaults and off-the-books acquisitions—someone who had moved through it and chosen to walk back into the light.

Vasseur had written the recommendation. She knew the pressure he was under, knew his creative paperwork on her behalf had bent the edges of legality. Their deal was simple now: she would build a unit beyond reproach, and his mistakes would remain buried in archives no one would audit until long after both their careers were dust.

"Settling in?" Élodie's voice came from the doorway. The restorer leaned on a cane, her face fuller than it had been in weeks, scar healing clean along her jaw. She'd been released from the hospital a month ago, acquitted by the same tangled records that had cleared Camille. Safe, at last, under a sky that no longer waited to fall.

Camille gestured her in. "Testing the chair. It's more comfortable than my entire apartment."

"Everything is more comfortable than your apartment." Élodie crossed the room slowly, claiming the guest chair with the deliberation of someone still learning her own strength. "You kept it."

She meant the silver locket. Camille had placed it at the corner of her desk before the unpacked boxes had been cleared away. It sat now beside a small bronze bust of Hermes, gleaming in a shaft of light.

"It kept me," Camille said. "For a while."

Élodie's eyes ran over her face. There was sadness in them, but it had softened into something wearable. "You're going to keep it here. In this office."

"Yes."

"He's still alive, then."

"He was, when the train left Lyon." Camille hadn't spoken of Étienne since her last visit to the hospital. The promise had become a sealed envelope in her chest—unopened, but present. "I don't know if he made it to where he was going. He's careful."

"Or he's gone."

"Or he's gone." Camille let the words sit between them. April was two months away. Verona was a marker on a map she'd traced with her finger at odd hours, never quite deciding if she would go.

She asked instead, "Your hands? How are they healing?"

Élodie flexed her fingers, the tremor barely perceptible now. "Adequate. The restoration work is slower, but the touch returns daily." She paused. "They called me."

It took Camille a moment to realize what she meant. The auction house. The offer Élodie had been nursing during her recovery.

"You accepted?"

"Conditionally." Élodie smiled. "I told them I would only restore pieces with clean provenance. If they send me a forgery to touch up, I'll know where to send it."

"That's a threat."

"It's a job offer." Élodie leaned forward. "They asked if I knew any investigators who understood the underground. For authenticity consultations. Nonbinding."

Camille considered this, the shape of a future where her friend would speak for paintings and she would speak for the people who stole them—and the ones who kept them. She had known, when she accepted this post, that her greatest asset would be the unsanctioned knowledge she carried. The whisper networks. The collectors who bought on trust and kept their walls blank to the public.

Her unit would work in the space between those worlds. She would protect the legitimate collectors, the ones whose passion was clean. And she would know exactly where to find the others.

"I'll do it," Camille said. "For the right cases."

"Then it's settled." Élodie rose, leaning lightly on her cane, and touched the locket with one careful finger. "He left you something worth holding."

Camille watched her leave, footsteps fading down the corridor. Then she turned to the window. The garret below was thick with December grey, but spring would come. It always did, wearing the color of unfinished things.

She had burned her father's debt book herself, in a brass urn set on the grave of a man who died trying to tell the truth. The smoke had risen clean, unfettered. She had not watched it all the way out of sight.

Now, surrounded by the emptiness of a newly claimed space—her name on the door, her mandate clear, her ledger finally silent—Camille sat at the desk. She picked up the locket, ran her thumb over the worn silver surface. Inside, Étienne's mother smiled at her across decades. A woman Camille had never met, whose history had been stolen and returned. Whose son was somewhere beyond the border, living under a name she didn't know.

She closed the locket, set it down square beside the bust, and allowed herself, in the quiet of her new office, to believe there might be room in her life for both the work and the waiting.

April. Verona. The promise was not a weight; it was a direction.

Camille touched the locket once more, and smiled. Then she turned to the stack of case files on her desk, eager to begin the work of untangling the secret lives of beauty.