Read Chapter 20: The Ghostly Twin

The address in Suresnes had led them to a closed bistro, its windows papered over with faded menus and a sign that read *FERMETURE DÉFINITIVE*. Laurent stood before it, hands in his pockets, the Seine glittering behind him like a taunt.

“He’s not here,” Camille said. The silver key pressed cold against her palm inside her coat. “The vines and the water—maybe it was never literal.”

Laurent didn’t answer. He was staring not at the bistro but at the building beside it, a narrow four-story structure with a peeling green door. On the second floor, a light flickered on, then off, as if someone had just passed a window.

“Wait,” Camille said, following his gaze. “You know that place?”

“I know the name on the door.” He nodded. “F. Moreau. Restauration d’Art.”

Camille felt the air leave her lungs. *Moreau.* Her own family name, staring back at her from a brass plate in a suburb of Paris. She had assumed Édouard had hidden himself under a false identity, a new life, a new century. But to keep the name—even a disguised version of it—was either arrogance or grief.

They crossed the street. The door was unlocked.

Inside, the scent of turpentine and old varnish swallowed them whole. The ground floor was a workshop, long tables cluttered with canvases in various states of salvation: cracked Madonnas, yellowed landscapes, a half-cleaned portrait whose subject’s eyes had been scrubbed blank. Brushes stood in jars like dead flowers. A radio played static between stations.

“Paul Moreau?” Camille called out. Her voice echoed off stone walls.

A door at the back creaked open. A man stepped out, wiping his hands on a rag. He was older than Laurent—perhaps sixty—but his posture was straight, his eyes sharp and pale blue. The same eyes as the miniature painting. The same jaw as Édouard.

“You found me,” he said. No surprise. No fear. Just a quiet resignation, as though he had been waiting for this knock for decades.

Laurent stepped forward. “Édouard Moreau.”

The man tilted his head. “I’ve been called Paul for thirty years. But yes. That’s the name my sister gave me when she buried me on paper.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You’re the painter. Laurent Valmont. I’ve seen your work. Well—I’ve stolen some of it.”

Camille’s blood went cold. “The paintings taken from the gallery. That was you.”

Paul—Édouard—shrugged, wrapping the rag around his fingers like a bandage. “I needed your attention. Subtlety doesn’t work with the likes of Vasseur circling. You hadn’t found the journal yet. You hadn’t found *me*. So I left breadcrumbs. The portrait of Camille—that was supposed to make you angry enough to dig.”

“You painted me,” Camille said. “You painted me as if you knew me.”

“I do know you.” He set the rag down and walked toward them, stopping at arm’s length. The light from the single bulb overhead carved deep shadows under his eyes. “I’ve watched you since you were a child. Your grandmother wrote to me every year, even after I told her to stop. She sent me photographs. She said you had your great-grandmother’s stubbornness and none of her cruelty. She was right.”

Camille’s throat tightened. “You knew my grandmother?”

“I knew Élodie. Your great-grandmother. The woman who damned me to this half-life alongside Laurent.” He glanced at the painter, something complicated passing between them. “We were supposed to be brothers-in-arms against her curse, not strangers living parallel lives. But she split us apart. Separated the two halves of the problem so no one could ever solve it.”

“Separated?” Laurent’s voice was low. “You were supposed to have been killed. Élodie’s journal said you were placed—placed alive, but hidden.”

“Placed in an orphanage in Lyon under a false death certificate,” Édouard said. “She paid the nuns to raise me as their own. Gave me a new name, a new past, a new future. But she left me the one thing I needed to find my way back: a letter, sealed until my eighteenth birthday, revealing who I was and what she had done. And what I could do to undo it.”

Laurent’s hand found Camille’s wrist. “You know how to break the curse?”

Édouard laughed—a dry, hollow sound. “I know how *I* can break it. The curse binds two: the artist and the muse. I was neither. I was the witness. The brother whose death Élodie blamed on you, Laurent, even though you weren’t there. She twisted her own grief into a curse that needed two to undo—but she forgot that curses have loopholes, and I have spent a hundred years finding them.”

He gestured toward a back room. “Come. I have something to show you.”

They followed him into a narrow chamber lined with shelves. Dozens of small canvases leaned against the walls, each covered with a white cloth. Édouard pulled off one cloth, revealing a portrait of a young woman with dark hair and serene eyes. It was unmistakably Élodie Moreau.

“My sister,” Édouard said softly. “Painted the year before she died. She came to me once, after I was grown. Told me everything. Told me she had made a mistake—not the curse, but the trap she had built into it. She wanted Laurent to suffer for abandoning her brother to the alchemist’s war. But she never meant for him to suffer forever. She died trying to find a way to soften it.”

“The journal,” Camille said. “It says I must burn a portrait of true love. That’s the only way.”

Édouard turned to face her fully. In the dim light, his age seemed to melt away, and for a heartbeat Camille saw the young man from the miniature, bright-eyed and fierce.

“That’s the curse’s answer,” he said. “And it will work. But it will cost you something you cannot imagine. There is another way—a simpler way—but it requires a betrayal.”

“What kind of betrayal?”

“Vasseur,” Édouard said. “He’s not just an enemy. He is the descendant of the alchemist who first gave Laurent his immortality. The alchemist poured his own blood into the bargain. Which means descendents of the alchemist carry the key to unlocking it as well—not through the curse’s rules, but through the blood contract that underpins it. If Vasseur’s blood is spilled onto the canvas of the original pact, the curse will break. But not softly. It will break everything around it—the gallery, the memories, the love that grew from it. It would be a scorched-earth ending.”

Laurent stood very still. “And you want us to kill him.”

“I want you to choose,” Édouard said. “You’ve been running from Vasseur for weeks. He will never stop. He wants the power that flows from the curse—the power to make his own immortality. If he finds the piece of the original pact that the alchemist kept—if he gets it before we do—he will enforce the curse forever. Camille, you will burn the portrait, lose Laurent, and Vasseur will still become immortal.”

“Where is the original pact?” Camille said.

Édouard smiled, and the expression was almost kind. “You’ve been carrying it in your palm since you opened the cabinet. The silver key is not a key. It is the alchemist’s piece of the bargain—his blood, sealed into metal. That’s why Vasseur wants it so badly.”

Camille pulled the key from her coat. It glinted in the light, ordinary silver, but now it felt heavier. Dangerous.

“He kills to prevent the portrait from burning,” she said slowly. “And the key can end the curse—but only if used a way that destroys everything.”

“Yes.” Édouard touched her shoulder, light as a moth. “And there is one more thing you should know, child. I did not come back just to help you. I came back to take the key for myself. My sister’s curse made me a ghost, wandering for a century. I want to be free, too. And the only way I can be free is if Laurent suffers the same fate I have—alone, forgotten, watching everyone he loves die.”

Camille’s breath caught. Laurent moved between her and Édouard, tension radiating through his shoulders.

“But,” Édouard said, stepping back with a forlorn smile, “the moment I met you, Camille, I knew I couldn’t do it. You look like her, you know. Élodie. Same eyes. Same stubborn chin. And unlike my sister, you aren’t blinded by grief. You see people clearly.”

He pulled a small canvas from his pocket—a portrait no bigger than a postcard. It showed two figures, rendered in swift, confident strokes: Camille and Laurent, standing close together, hands almost touching.

“I painted this on the night you opened the cabinet,” Édouard said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I know whoever painted that threatening portrait of you wrong. They think Laurent sees you as a pawn. They don’t see that you’re the only thing real in this whole cursed century.”

He pressed the canvas into Camille’s hands. The paint felt warm, as if freshly dried.

“Keep it,” he said. “It’s the only honest thing I’ve made in a hundred years.”

Behind them, the front door of the workshop slammed open. Heavy footsteps echoed through the empty gallery, and a voice—Vasseur’s voice—boomed up the stairs.

“I can smell the turpentine, Moreau. And I know you have what is mine.”