Read Chapter 18: The Second Stolen Art

The cold of the passage had leached into their bones by the time they stumbled out onto the quay. Dawn was still an hour off, the Seine a black ribbon under the streetlights, and Camille’s breath came in ragged clouds as she leaned against the stone balustrade. Laurent stood beside her, his hand pressed to the wound on his side where a splinter of the cabinet had caught him during their escape.

“He knew,” Camille said, her voice raw. “Vasseur knew we’d be there.”

“He knows everything the journal knows,” Laurent replied. “Or he’s been watching it long enough to guess.”

They walked in silence toward the Metro, keeping to the shadows, but the city felt different now—every passing car was a threat, every shuttered shopfront a place Vasseur might be waiting. Camille’s hand closed around the silver key in her pocket, the metal warm from her grip. It was all they had left of the cabinet, and it was useless without the lock it fit.

Laurent’s studio was a narrow walk-up in the Marais, three floors above a shuttered bookshop. He’d kept it deliberately anonymous—no name on the bell, curtains always drawn—but as they climbed the final flight, Camille saw that the door was slightly ajar.

“Wait.” Laurent held up a hand, his body tensing. “I locked this.”

He pushed the door open with the flat of his palm. The studio smelled of turpentine and cold dust, the way it always did, but there was something else beneath it—a scent of cheap perfume and burnt paper. Camille stepped inside and froze.

The easel that had held Laurent’s unfinished work stood empty. Every canvas that had leaned against the far wall was gone, leaving pale rectangles in the dust where they’d rested. Stacks of sketches, the studies he’d kept for decades, all vanished.

But on the floor at the center of the room, propped against a chair as if placed with care, was a single painting. Camille knew it before she saw the face. It was her—the portrait stolen from the gallery weeks ago. But it had been finished. The edges were moist, the brushwork fresh. She stood in a garden that didn’t exist, wearing a dress she’d never owned, and her eyes looked not at the painter but past him, toward something unseen.

“That’s not mine,” Laurent said quietly. “I never painted it.”

Camille’s throat tightened. She stepped closer, her own image staring back at her with unsettling accuracy. The curve of her jaw, the way her hair fell when she hadn’t pinned it—details only someone who had watched her closely would know.

“The curse,” she whispered. “You said it acts to protect itself.”

“It doesn’t paint portraits,” Laurent said. He knelt, touching the edge of the canvas. The paint was still tacky. “Someone was here. Recently. Someone who knows this studio.”

A sound from the back room made them both turn. Laurent moved first, crossing the space in three strides, and Camille followed. The small room where he kept his pigments and brushes was a wreck—jars shattered, powders scattered, a single canvas torn from its frame and slashed across the middle. But on the wall, scrawled in something dark and running, was a message:

*SHE DOESN’T KNOW YOU. NOT REALLY.*

Laurent read it and went very still.

“Who did this?” Camille asked, though she already knew he had no answer. “Someone who knows about us. Someone who knows the curse.”

“Or someone the curse is using,” Laurent said.

He crossed to the window and looked down at the street. A lone figure stood beneath the lamppost across the way, coat collar turned up, face in shadow. Laurent’s hands tightened on the frame.

“He’s been following you,” Laurent said. “Since the gallery. I thought I was imagining it.”

Camille pressed close to the glass. The figure shifted, and for a moment the lamplight caught his face—young, sharp-featured, with a familiar set to his mouth she couldn’t place. Then he turned and was gone, swallowed by the dark between buildings.

“I know him,” Camille said. The certainty rose unbidden. “I’ve seen him. At the gallery, weeks ago, watching me through the window. I told myself it was nothing.”

Laurent’s jaw tightened. “Did you see his eyes?”

“His eyes?”

“Describe them.”

Camille hesitated. The memory surfaced—green, but not like hers, not like anyone she knew. A deeper green, almost gray, the color of old moss under river water. A color she had seen before, in a photograph a hundred years old.

“Green,” she said. “Like.”

She stopped. The photograph in her grandmother’s album. Two brothers standing side by side, one in a soldier’s uniform, one in civilian clothes. The same jaw, the same mouth. Édouard.

“It’s him,” she breathed. “Édouard. He’s alive.”

But the name surfaced with a sickening twist, because the photograph had shown Édouard as a young man, and the account of his death had placed him in 1918. Yet the man below could have been no older than thirty.

“No,” Laurent said. “The journal said Édouard was placed under a foundation potion. Vasseur’s work. He was supposed to remain in the earth.”

“Supposed to,” Camille repeated. “But if Vasseur engineered the curse, he could have engineered his survival too. A loophole. A hidden piece.”

Laurent’s gaze moved from the empty easel to the portrait of Camille, still standing on the floor. His voice dropped. “If Édouard is alive, he’s been alive a very long time. And he’s been watching you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re Élodie’s blood.” Laurent’s hand moved to the back of his neck, a gesture Camille had learned meant he was thinking, calculating. “The curse binds Moreau women. If Édouard wants it broken—or maintained—he’d need to keep close to one.”

Camille thought of the portrait on the floor, her eyes looking past the painter. Not directed at her. Past her, toward something only the subject of the artwork could see.

“He painted that,” she said. “That’s not the same one stolen from the gallery. He recreated it. Finished it.”

“Because he needed you to see it,” Laurent said. He knelt again, examining the brushwork with a painter’s eye. “This is a message. Not a threat. He’s telling you what he wants.”

“What does he want?”

Laurent looked up at her, and for the first time since they’d fled the workshop, there was something like fear in his eyes. “He wants you to know what you look like to someone who’s watched you for decades.”

A sharp knock at the door below made them both go rigid. Laurent crossed to the window again, but the street was empty. The figure had not returned. The knock came again—three swift hits, insistent.

“Vasseur,” Camille said.

“Maybe.” Laurent’s eyes flicked to the portrait, then to the shattered back room, then to her. “Or maybe our new friend is coming to retrieve his work. Either way, we can’t stay here.”

He grabbed a bag from beside the cot and began stuffing it with brushes and paints—his palette knife, a bundle of rags, the half-finished canvas from the easel that had somehow survived. Camille watched him work, the efficiency of old habit, the economy of motion from a century of moving quickly.

“Where do we go?” she asked.

Laurent paused. When he looked at her, his expression had changed—something resolved, sharpened. “Suresnes. The place Élodie’s journal recorded.” He pulled the silver key from his pocket and weighed it in his palm. “If Édouard is alive, he’s not in the earth. He’s somewhere else. And if he’s been watching you, he knows where we’re going next.”

He moved past her toward the door, then stopped, turning back. “The portrait,” he said quietly. “Bring it.”

Camille bent and lifted the canvas from the floor. The paint was still warm under her fingers, and she felt the same wrongness she’d felt the first time she’d seen it in the gallery—a recognition that didn’t belong to her. Whoever had painted this knew her, but she did not know them.

Downstairs, the knocking had stopped.

The street outside was empty when they slipped through the back door into the alley, the portrait tucked under Camille’s arm, the silver key in her pocket, and the name Édouard ringing in her head like a bell she couldn’t silence. Somewhere behind them, the studio door swung open, but neither of them looked back.

Suresnes. Where the vines meet the water.

Whatever waited there, it had been waiting for a hundred years—and now it knew she was coming.