Read Chapter 12: The Vanished Portrait

The gallery had that particular hush that only exists after closing hours, the air holding its breath beneath the vaulted ceilings. Camille unlocked the service entrance and stepped inside, Laurent a shadow at her shoulder. The space felt wrong before she saw it—too still, too empty where the new painting should have anchored the far wall.

"No," she breathed.

The easel stood bare. The canvas Laurent had finished only this morning, the one that had made her heart seize when she first saw it—a woman's silhouette dissolving into river mist, her features indistinct but achingly familiar—was gone. The tracking sensor on the wall blinked green. Untripped. Whoever took it knew where the alarms were and how to disable them without a trace.

Laurent moved past her, his footsteps echoing against the marble. He stopped at the easel, fingers hovering over the empty frame. "The paint is still wet."

Camille's throat tightened. "That's impossible. No one could have—"

"They didn't take it through any door." He touched the easel's crossbar, and a thin film of pigment came away on his fingertips. "It was pulled through the surface."

The cold that swept through her had nothing to do with the temperature. She crossed to her office, already knowing what she'd find, and there it was: a cream envelope propped against her grandmother's photograph, the paper so old it yellowed at the edges. The handwriting inside was Spencerian script, ink faded to sepia.

"To live, you must forget her."

The words swam before her eyes. Laurent read them over her shoulder, and she felt the air leave his body. He staggered back, one hand bracing against the doorframe, his face the color of bone.

"No," he said. "Not her. Anyone but her."

"What does it mean? Forget who—" But even as she asked, she knew. The painting. The woman in the mist. It had been her. Camille. His brush had caught her without her sitting for him, captured something essential that she hadn't known he saw. And the curse had noticed.

Laurent sank into the chair by her desk, head in his hands. "The bargain collects debts. I told you that. But it also takes precautions." His voice was raw, scraped clean. "It knows what I feel. It's always known. Elena—Sophie—she bound the curse to see through my heart. So when I painted you, when I let it show—"

"You painted me?" The confession cracked through her. "You didn't tell me."

"I didn't know I had." He looked up, and his eyes were wet. "The brush moved on its own. I thought I was painting the river at dawn. It's only when you came in that I saw your face in the water." He swallowed. "I destroyed it anyway. Burned it the moment you left."

"The gallery's security feed shows your canvas arriving yesterday evening. It was here. I saw it."

"And now it's gone." He stood, pacing the narrow office. "The curse took it back. Took the proof of what I almost did. And left this." He snatched the note from her hand, scanning it again. "To live, you must forget her. It's not a threat. It's an instruction."

"To who?"

"To me." The words came out twisted. "The curse doesn't want me to die. It wants me to continue failing, forever, in perfect misery. And now it knows you're the one thing that could make me break." He crumpled the note, then smoothed it out again, staring at it as if it might change. "If I forget you, the curse loses its leverage. I lose the only reason to fight it. And you live."

"You said you wouldn't run."

"I'm not running." His laugh was hollow. "It's offering to erase you from me. To make this pain and this want simply not exist." He held up the note. "All I have to do is say yes."

Camille stood very still. The gallery had gone colder still, the shadows pooling like spilled ink. Everything Laurent had told her—Édouard bound to the unfinished canvas, Sophie and her silver key, the debt that had followed her bloodline for a century—all of it funneled toward this moment. The curse had stopped trying to destroy her. It was now trying to make her disappear from his mind entirely.

She thought of the painting. That silhouette emerging from mist—had it been her grandmother, whom she'd always resembled? Marguerite, who made the bargain in 1900 and spent her life warning against the very man now standing in her office? Or had it been Camille herself, caught in the stroke of a brush that moved with its own will?

"It doesn't matter what the note says." Her voice surprised her with its steadiness. "You're not forgetting me. And the curse is not going to take this from us." She stepped into his space, close enough to see the war in his face, the centuries of loneliness fighting against what he clearly felt. "We find Sophie Marchetti. We find the silver key. We find Édouard and break this. And then you can paint me all you like."

A shudder ran through him. When he finally looked at her, something had shifted—a crack in the old stone of his composure, a glimpse of the man he'd been before the curse took everything. "Sophie is in the archives," he said. "The records of the 1900 Exposition Universelle. I know where they're kept."

From somewhere in the gallery behind them came the soft, deliberate sound of a canvas being cut from its frame.