Read Chapter 31: The Truth to Claire

The night air off the Vieux-Port carried the stink of diesel and dead fish. Étienne found Claire in the shadow of the ferry terminal, wrapped in a wool coat she’d bought from a stall two hours earlier. She looked exhausted, younger than her years, and when she saw him her face flickered through relief and then fear as she read his expression.

“Tell me,” she said.

He led her into a narrow alley between two chandlers, where the streetlight couldn’t reach. He kept his voice low even though nobody was near. “Aubanel is dead.”

Claire’s hand went to her mouth. “Dead? When?”

“Two days ago. Found in his car near the old abattoir. Shot twice.”

“The package?”

Étienne shook his head. “Gone.”

Claire stared at him. The wind pulled a strand of hair across her face and she didn’t brush it away. “Then everything we gave him—the account numbers, the photos, Lenoir’s names—it’s all in somebody else’s hands.”

“Or in the bottom of the harbor.” Étienne leaned against the damp brick wall. “I don’t know who took it. That’s the worst part. I know Paoli’s methods. I know Lenoir’s. This wasn’t either.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because Paoli would have made a point of it. He’d want me to know. And Lenoir—he’s a corrupt cop, but he’s not stupid enough to kill a journalist who might have already mailed copies.” Étienne rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “This was someone else. Someone who knew exactly when Aubanel had the package and didn’t care about the splash.”

Claire stepped closer. She put her hand on his arm, and the touch was so unexpected—so human—that Étienne felt his throat tighten. “Who else is there?” she asked. “You told me about Paoli. About Lenoir. About the Guérini brothers. Who’s the fourth?”

“I don’t know.” The admission tasted like ash. “Maybe someone in the bank. Maybe someone higher up than Guérini. Marseille is full of men who think they own the port, but there’s always somebody above them.”

Claire was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You’re not telling me everything.”

Étienne looked at her. The alley light was dim, but her eyes were steady. She’d always been able to read him, even in the early days when he thought he was being clever with his overtime stories, his late nights, his excuses.

“I lied to you,” he said. “For years.”

“About what?”

He pushed off the wall. “The overtime. The night shifts. All of it.” He forced the words out. “I wasn’t just checking manifests. I was forging them. For Paoli. For the Corsicans. For anyone who paid enough.” He let that settle between them. “Containers that needed to slip past inspection. Cargo that meant nothing on paper but everything below deck. I made it possible.”

Claire’s hand dropped from his arm. She took a step back, not from fear—from the need to see him clearly. “How long?”

“Five years.”

“And the watch? The story about your father?”

“That was real.” He pulled the watch from his pocket and held it out. “My father’s watch. He worked thirty-seven years in the port. He believed in an honest day’s work for an honest wage. And I—” He stopped. “I wanted to be more than him. And I ended up less.”

Claire didn’t take the watch. She looked at it, then at him. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because we’re about to run together. And I won’t have you run with a man you don’t know.” Étienne put the watch back in his pocket. “I’ve lied to everyone. My colleagues. The police. Paoli. Marius in the accounting office, who thinks I’m his friend.” He met her eyes. “But I won’t lie to you. Not anymore.”

The silence stretched. Somewhere in the port a ship’s horn sounded, low and mournful.

Claire crossed her arms. “Do you know what I thought, when you first started proposing marriage? I thought you were too good for me. A clerk with steady hands, a quiet life. I’d been with men who moved cargo that would never reach a store shelf. I thought you were the clean thing in a dirty world.”

“I’m not clean.”

“No.” She said it without cruelty. “You’re not. But you’re also not what they are. You’re trying to leave. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?”

Claire stepped forward again, closer this time. Her face was only a foot from his. “You forged papers that helped men profit—I know that. You looked the other way when you could have blown whistles—I know that too. But you didn’t pull a trigger. You didn’t kill a journalist. And you came to me with the truth instead of another lie.” She took his hand. Her fingers were cold. “That’s more than most men in Marseille can offer.”

Étienne closed his eyes. For a moment he didn’t speak. When he opened them, she was still there, waiting.

“We have four days before the shipment sails,” he said. “Four days before Paoli’s heroin leaves the port and he has no reason not to put a bullet in both of us. Four days before Lenoir can find a way to bury me under a false arrest or a contrived accident. And now there’s a fourth player—someone who already killed once to get that package. If they have the Ledger, they don’t need me. If they don’t, they’ll come looking.”

“So we disappear,” Claire said. “Now. Tonight. We take a train to Paris, then across the border to Italy. We don’t look back.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Ledger is still in my apartment.”

Claire’s brow furrowed. “The original?”

“Vidal’s ledger. The real one. I made copies for Aubanel, but those are gone.” Étienne lowered his voice even further. “The original has everything—the account numbers, the dates, the names. If Paoli gets it, he burns it, and every connection to Lenoir and the Banque du Sud disappears with it. But if I get it first, I have leverage. I have proof of what they did to Vidal.”

“Proof that could get you killed.”

“Proof that could keep us alive,” he countered. “Right now, all three sides want me dead. Paoli wants to silence me. Lenoir wants to erase me. And whoever killed Aubanel—they want whatever I have left. The only reason I’m still breathing is that I’m the only one who knows where the Ledger is. The moment I leave Marseille without it, I become a loose end.”

Claire was silent. He could see her working through it, the same way he had, weighing the cost of every option.

“Then we get it,” she said.

“No. I get it. You wait on the quay with a ticket to Genoa. I go in, I get the Ledger, I come back. Two hours, no more.”

“And if someone’s waiting for you?”

Étienne thought about the watch in his pocket. About Vidal’s throat being cut in a warehouse that still smelled of fish. About Aubanel, who’d taken the package because he believed in justice, and died for it.

“Then I’ll do what I should have done five years ago,” he said. “I’ll stop running.”

Claire searched his face. Then she reached up and placed her palm against his cheek. “I didn’t wait this long to lose you to that apartment. You come back to me, Étienne. You come back with the Ledger or you don’t come back at all.”

“That’s the plan.”

She smiled a little, but her eyes were wet. “You’re a terrible liar, you know. You always have been.”

He took her hand and kissed the knuckles. “Then it’s a good thing I’m done lying.”

He left her in the alley with a promise and a train schedule. Behind him, the Vieux-Port glittered under the streetlights, beautiful and dangerous, a harbor that had claimed more men than any storm.