Read Chapter 23: The Cuckoo's Egg

The warehouse stank of damp burlap and rat droppings. Lucien stood in the dim morning light that filtered through a cracked skylight, counting crates with his fingers moving like a man praying the rosary. Forty-one. He counted again. Forty-one bars, each one a brick of impossible weight, stacked in three neat rows on a pallet he'd commandeered from a bankrupt textile merchant.

He had left the atelier with fifty-eight.

Seventeen bars missing. Nearly a third of the hoard. He knew the weight of what Sabine had taken—not just in gold, but in leverage. Seventeen bars could buy a lot of silence, or a lot of bullets.

Lucien removed his coat and draped it over a crate, then ran a hand through his hair. His fingers came away tacky with dried sweat and smoke. He'd been awake for thirty hours, and his body was beginning to betray him with small tremors in his hands.

"Seventeen," he said aloud. The word hung in the stale air like a curse.

He needed to think. Sabine had taken her cut and framed him for the firefight, leaving that newspaper-wrapped bar with his name written across the front page like a signature on a confession. And now she wanted the rest. A dawn meeting, she'd said. Come alone, or the Germans get the photograph.

But it wasn't Sabine's photograph that worried him now.

Lucien reached into his pocket and pulled out the folded slip of paper that had been shoved under the warehouse door sometime in the night. He didn't need to read it again. The words were burned into his memory: *You left ash in your wake, Marchand. The fire did not spare the camera. But the man behind it did.*

He'd found the note taped to the inside of the door when he'd arrived, and beneath it, a small black-and-white photograph. Grainy, shot from across the street. Lucien's profile, illuminated by the flames of the burning atelier, his silhouette unmistakable against the orange glow.

Major Brandt.

The name surfaced in Lucien's mind like a body breaking the surface of the Seine. Brandt was Kohl's adjutant, a precise, humorless man who wore spectacles and kept a leather notebook in which he recorded the names of every black market operator he suspected in the city. Lucien had never met him face to face. He'd made sure of that. But Brandt had a photographer on his payroll, and that photographer had been standing in the shadows when Lucien had made his escape.

The photograph was a message. *We know who you are.*

Lucien folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. He paced the length of the warehouse floor, his boots echoing against the concrete. Forty-one bars sat behind him, and seventeen more were out there somewhere, in the hands of a woman who had already demonstrated her capacity for betrayal. And now the Germans had his face.

He stopped pacing.

He thought about the meeting. Dawn. The old tram depot on Rue de la Roquette, gutted by fire in '40 and never rebuilt. A neutral ground, Sabine had called it. A place where deals were made and debts were settled without interference from the police or the occupation.

It was a trap, of course. Sabine wouldn't meet him alone. She'd bring her mercenaries—the same men who'd helped him haul the gold out of the atelier, or what was left of it after the firefight. They'd be waiting in the shadows with guns drawn, ready to take the rest of the hoard and put a bullet in his skull for good measure.

But Lucien had something Sabine didn't know about.

He walked to the far corner of the warehouse, where a rusted oil barrel stood against the wall. He lifted the lid and reached inside, his fingers closing around a cold, familiar weight. The second bar he'd taken from the horse. The one Sabine didn't know about, because he'd palmed it into his coat pocket before the firefight had even started, while she was still barking orders at her men.

He set the bar on the workbench and stared at it. One bar. Not enough to buy back the seventeen Sabine had stolen, but enough to make a point.

Lucien began to move. He didn't have time for elaborate plans. He had hours until dawn, and every minute that passed was a minute Major Brandt's men spent combing the city for the source of that photograph.

He needed a counterweight.

Camille.

The thought formed in his mind unbidden, and he pushed it away. She didn't know he was alive. She was operating her own network, her women scattered across the city like seeds in the wind. He'd gone to her once, back when the gold was still inside the horse, and she'd refused him. Too risky, she'd said. Her people were more valuable than any treasure.

But this wasn't about the treasure anymore. This was about survival.

Lucien had forged papers, three sets of them, hidden in a false panel in his apartment. He had cash, enough to buy a new identity and passage to the coast. He had the bar of gold in his hand, which could fund a man's escape to Lisbon or Zürich or anywhere else the war hadn't reached.

But he didn't want to run.

He'd built his empire in this city. The contacts, the network, the reputation that made people hesitate before crossing him. If he fled, he lost all of it. He became a ghost, hunted by the Germans and the Resistance alike, a man with no home and no future.

Lucien looked at the forty-one bars behind him.

He looked at the one in his hand.

He thought about Sabine, waiting at the tram depot with her men and her smug, satisfied smile. She thought she had him cornered. She thought the photograph of Brandt's photographer would make him compliant, that he'd show up with his tail between his legs and hand over the rest of the gold like a beaten dog.

She didn't know about the second bar.

She didn't know about the note Brandt had sent, the photograph that proved the Germans were watching from both sides of the chessboard.

And she didn't know about the third player in this game.

Lucien slipped the gold bar into his coat pocket and buttoned it shut. He extinguished the lantern, plunging the warehouse into darkness, and made his way to the door. The lock clicked behind him, and he stepped out into the cold Parisian dawn. The streets were empty, the city holding its breath before the day's occupation began.

He walked east, toward the tram depot, but he didn't take the direct route. He cut through alleys, doubled back on himself twice, and paused at corners to listen for footsteps behind him. Old habits. They'd kept him alive this long, and they'd keep him alive a little while longer.

Sabine wanted a meeting at dawn.

Lucien intended to give her one.

But first, he needed to pay a visit to a burned-out atelier, where a plaster horse lay shattered and a German major's photographer might still be looking for a story. Brandt had his photograph, but photographs had negatives. And negatives could be bought.

One bar of gold could buy a lot of silence.

He smiled grimly as he turned a corner and the tram depot came into view, its skeletal frame black against the pinkening sky. Sabine thought she had him where she wanted him.

She had no idea.