Read Chapter 29: The Plan

Paul unrolled the blueprint across the café table, his finger tracing the pencil-thin lines of the Pavillon de l'Horloge’s lower level. The coffee cups rattled as his hand passed too close.

“Vasseur’s security is layered like a funeral cake,” he said. “Motion sensors in the foyer, a biometric lock on the stairwell door, two rotating guards in the basement corridor. But the auction hall upstairs? That’s the soft belly.”

Camille leaned in, sliding her cup aside, creating a clean killing ground for the paper. “You want to distract him with his own vanity.”

“His own greed.” Paul looked up, dark eyes sharp with a family resemblance to Édouard that Camille had only started to notice in the last few hours. “Vasseur has been courting the private collectors for years. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, the whisper-network of men who buy art to burn it in their vaults so the worth goes up. If we announce a lost Moreau—a genuine sketch from his cursed period—he won’t be able to stay away. He’ll want to snatch it before anyone else can authenticate it.”

“A forgery,” Camille said.

“An entirely accurate one.” Paul almost smiled. “Édouard taught me more than how to hide. He taught me how to lie with a brush.”

Camille pulled her grandmother’s silver key from her coat pocket. It was cold and impossibly light in her palm, as if the metal had worn thin over decades of being handled and handed. She thought of the archival photograph—her grandmother’s face young and resolute, Vasseur’s hand extended toward her, the key already glinting between them. A bargain. Her family had been part of this for generations. And now she was continuing it, with better intentions and worse odds.

“The decoy needs to jam the mechanism, not trigger a seal,” she said. “If it locks the vault shut, Laurent stays in there until Vasseur decides otherwise. That’s not a rescue; that’s a burial.”

Paul’s finger stopped over a small rectangle drawn at the bottom of the chamber plan. “This is the socket. Three pins, arranged in an arc. The real key has notches cut at forty-degree intervals. The decoy needs to slip past the first pin and catch on the second—hard enough to shear the housing so nothing turns.”

“My grandmother never wrote that down.”

“She wouldn’t have known it.” Paul’s tone softened, carrying a weight he clearly hadn’t intended. “My father chronicled every detail of the vault’s construction. He was Édouard’s disciple, his witness. I grew up hearing about the brass socket, the iron housing, the way the mechanism clicks three times before it grants access.”

“Did he ever speak about my grandmother?”

Paul’s eyes flicked away. “Only to warn me about the Moreau women. He said you were all marked by the same bargain, and that none of you knew the full cost until it was too late.”

A chill ran down Camille’s arm, settling in the hand that clutched the key. “What cost?”

“He never said. He burned the last pages of his journal before he died, and I always assumed—" Paul stopped, shaking his head. “I assumed it was guilt. Now I think it was fear.”

The café’s window fogged with the afternoon rain that had begun to sluice down the glass. Camille looked at her reflection, faint and distorting, and tried to see whatever mark Paul’s father had seen. She saw nothing but herself—bruised from Vasseur’s grip, exhausted from two sleepless nights, stubborn to the point of stupidity. But her grandmother had seen something too, hadn’t she? All those cryptic warnings about art and time. All those years of refusing to look at photographs of Paris’s monuments. She had been trying to protect Camille from the same fate, even as she helped Vasseur set its foundations.

“We need Édouard’s confirmation,” Camille said, folding the blueprint back into its roll. “If the decoy has to catch at exactly the right angle, I need to know we’re not guessing. Your father’s notes are ash. Édouard is the only one who built that vault.”

“He’s also the only one Vasseur will expect to come.” Paul’s jaw tightened. “If we pull Édouard into the open too early, the whole diversion falls apart. Vasseur will smell the decoy from across the room.”

“Then we don’t pull him into the open.” Camille stood, stuffing the key back into her coat. “We bring him to the auction—as the seller. The Moreau brother, risen from obscurity, offering a lost piece of his family’s legacy. Vasseur won’t be able to resist claiming it. He’ll want to destroy the painting and its creator in one stroke.”

Paul’s face went pale. “You’re asking him to walk into the lion’s mouth.”

“I’m asking him to be the bait that keeps the lion’s mouth open while we take his treasure.” Camille met his eyes, steady. “Laurent is chained to a chair in a sealed vault. Édouard is the only man alive who knows whether my decoy will work. If he wants to break the curse, if he wants any chance at redemption—this is the price.”

Paul was silent for a long moment. Outside, a tram clattered past, its bell ringing twice against the rain. Finally he stood, folding his coat over his arm.

“There’s a flat in Montmartre,” he said. “Above a bakery that’s been closed since the 1980s. Édouard doesn’t answer the door. You have to knock the code for the vault—three slow, two quick—and then wait for the shutters to move.”

“You’ve been there before.”

“Once. When I was twelve. He told me not to come back until I had something worth dying for.” Paul’s mouth flattened. “I didn’t understand him then. I think I do now.”

They left the café together, the rain slanting across the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Camille’s mind was already racing ahead, assembling the components of the plan like a brittle model: the forged auction document, the planted painting, the decoy key shaped from memory and assumption. So many pieces that could shear off at any moment.

“Paul,” she said, pausing under the awning of a bookshop. “If my grandmother’s bargain is still alive in me—what did your father think it cost? What does it take?”

He turned to face her, rain darkening the shoulders of his jacket. For a moment she saw the ghost of that twelve-year-old boy, standing outside a shuttered bakery while his uncle’s voice drifted down from the window: don’t come back until you have something worth dying for.

“He said the Moreau women pay in blood,” Paul said quietly. “But not their own. Someone they love. Someone they'd trade the world to keep.” He paused, and she saw the calculation in his eyes—the thing he hadn’t told her until now. “Laurent isn’t just a painter to you, is he? He’s your payment. Vasseur knew it before you did.”

The rain hammered the pavement. Camille felt the key burn against her chest, cold as her grandmother’s hand in the photograph, and she understood at last why the old woman had never explained.

You can’t explain a debt you’re still trying to make someone else pay.

“Then we change the terms,” she said, stepping out into the downpour. “Take me to Édouard. We’re going to finish this before anyone else dies for it.”