Read Chapter 10: Aftermath in Monaco Vieille

The café was called Café de la Fontaine, tucked into a crooked street in Monaco Vieille where the buildings leaned toward each other like old confidants. Lamplight pooled amber on cracked stone, and the hiss of an espresso machine was the only sound that mattered. Camille chose a table in the back corner, her back to the wall—a habit she’d picked up somewhere she didn’t want to remember. Victor slid into the chair across from her, the USB drive pinched between his fingers like a poison pill he was deciding whether to swallow.

A waiter drifted over. Camille ordered two cafés crème without asking Victor what he wanted. When the waiter left, she pressed her palms flat against the checkered tablecloth and counted to five before she trusted herself to speak.

“You brought Thomas Falk to my door.” Her voice was quiet, sharpened by the hours of running across rooftops and watching shadows move where there should have been none. “You brought a man who sends ambushes after careless debtors. And you didn’t think to mention him before I found a car full of his men waiting for us?”

Victor didn’t flinch. He set the USB drive on the table between them and kept his hand on it, thumb brushing the metal casing. “Falk isn’t the story. Falk is a window.”

“I don’t want poetry, Victor. I want the truth. The whole truth, and I want it before I decide whether to walk out of this café and let you drown in whatever sea you swam into.”

He held her gaze. In the low light, his face looked older—the architecture of it gone soft around the edges, worry doing its slow work. “I owe Falk money. That part is true. Not for gambling. Not for coke or women. For securities. Bearer bonds I got paid to move twelve years ago, back when I was a driver with a fast car and no questions.”

“How much?”

“Two million. With interest. He bought the paper from the original fence and now he wants it back. But the bonds were already cashed, long gone. I can’t unspend someone else’s profit.”

Camille pulled her hands off the table and folded them in her lap. “And running from him was your plan? Stealing a necklace you didn’t steal to pay a debt you can’t pay?”

Victor shook his head slowly. “The USB—it’s not mine. I told you I didn’t know what was on it. That was a lie. I know what’s on it. I just don’t want it to be true.”

“What’s on it?”

The waiter returned with two small cups of crème, steam curling upward. Neither of them touched their cup. Victor watched the coffee as if it held the answer to a question he hadn’t yet asked out loud.

“Falk’s client list,” he said finally. “Every fence, every buyer, every dealer who’s ever laundered art or jewels through him. Names I’ve heard in back rooms across Europe. Bank accounts, shell companies, storage numbers. Twelve years of records.”

Camille’s mind flickered through the implications, sorting them like cut stones against a loupe. “And you think Bellamy forged the necklace for Falk. That the heist was commissioned. That the real Cœur de Neptune isn’t being smuggled to a private collector—it’s being delivered to Falk’s network as payment for a larger scheme.”

Victor lifted his cup and took a sip, wincing at the heat. “Falk doesn’t do single jobs. He builds portfolios. A stolen necklace is just one asset in a diversified account. But this—” he tapped the drive “—if this information came out, it would dismantle his operations across three countries. Every client would scatter. Every name would burn.”

“So who gave you the drive?”

“I don’t know. It arrived at my flat in Nice via courier three days before Bellamy’s death was announced. No note. No return address. I thought it was a trap, so I didn’t open it. Then the ambush on the rooftop—I picked it up because Moreau’s notes said to grab it if anything went wrong.”

“Moreau’s notes said to retrieve a USB drive you didn’t even know the contents of, and you just grabbed it?”

“I grabbed it because Moreau wrote it down. The man had been watching Bellamy’s movements for months before he vanished. He knew things he shouldn’t have. I trusted that.”

“You trusted a dead security guard you never met?”

Victor set the cup down with a soft click. “No. I trusted that if someone wanted me to have this drive badly enough to put it in Moreau’s notes and Murphy’s hands, they didn’t want it in Falk’s. That was enough for me.”

Camille exhaled slowly, forcing her shoulders to drop from where they’d crept toward her ears. The caffeine hadn’t reached her yet. She needed it. But more than that, she needed to understand the geometry of what they were facing. A forger who had faked his death. A security guard who had documented that fraud. A database of criminal clients lying on a café table like a grenade with the pin half pulled.

“You think Falk commissioned the theft,” she said, working it out aloud. “You think Bellamy forged a perfect replica, swapped it during transport, and handed the real stone to Falk’s people. But Bellamy was supposed to be dead. Why come back? Why be seen at the loading bay by Moreau?”

“Because someone inside the operation made a mistake. Or someone wanted him to be seen.”

Camille frowned. “The ticket to Nice. The photocopied forgery. Someone is leaving evidence for us to find. Not accidentally. Deliberately.”

Victor nodded. “And if the evidence points to Bellamy alive, and Bellamy was working for Falk, then Falk is the orchestrator. But Falk doesn’t do his own legwork. He has people for that. People like the man who ambushed us on the rooftop.”

“Then why didn’t Falk’s people kill us? They could have. We were outnumbered, pinned down, on a roof with nowhere to go. They let us escape.”

Victor’s jaw tightened. He didn’t like that question. “Because they weren’t sent to kill us. They were sent to scare us into holding onto the drive. Falk wants me to keep it safe. If it were destroyed, he’d have no power over his clients. If it were public, he’d be ruined. He needs someone to hold it for him—someone he can control, someone with something to lose.”

“You.”

“Me. I’m the vault. I can’t go to the police because I’m wanted in Nice for outstanding warrants I can’t clear. I can’t sell the information because Falk would burn every name I’ve ever met. I can’t destroy it because he’d kill me the moment he found out. So I hold it. And I run. And every time I get close to finding a way out, he tightens the walls.”

Camille looked at him across the narrow table, the steam ghosting between them. She’d spent the years after he vanished convincing herself she knew who he was—a charming liar who took what he wanted and left before the debt could be called. But this version of Victor was different. This version was trapped. She could see the weight of it in the way he held his shoulders, like a man perpetually braced for impact.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. Her voice came out softer than she intended.

Victor looked down at his hands, broad and scarred from years of work that didn’t involve necklaces. “Because I didn’t want you to think I needed saving. I came to you for the necklace. I told myself I needed your expertise with the metalwork, the signatures, the authenticity of it all. But that was half the truth. The other half was that Falk told me he’d forgive the debt if I brought him the Cœur de Neptune. He thinks I’m working for him. He doesn’t know you’re involved.”

“You used me.”

“I planned to. But that was before.”

“Before what?”

He met her eyes. “Before you found the tool signature in the fake. Before we pieced together Bellamy’s survival. Before I saw you run across a rooftop with a USB drive that could get us both killed and not once complain about the dust on your coat.”

Camille let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I’m a jeweler, Victor. Dust is the lesser concern.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, barely there before it vanished. They sat in silence for a moment, the noise of the café filling the space around them. Two old friends who had become strangers, now learning each other again from scratch.

Camille reached for the USB drive and closed her hand around it. It was warm from Victor’s grip, the metal smooth and unremarkable. A piece of plastic and copper that could end an empire or start a war.

“We can’t give this to Falk,” she said.

“He’ll kill us.”

“He’ll kill us anyway. The moment we find the real necklace, the moment we expose the heist, you become a liability. He’ll burn you and the drive together.”

“So what do we do?”

Camille turned the drive over in her palm. Somewhere inside it were years of names, transactions, crimes committed in the name of beautiful things. Falk had built an empire on the appetite for stolen beauty, and Bellamy had built his life forging the illusions that fed it. She thought about the workshop with its master molds, the shipping manifest, the sealed container leaving Monaco at dawn. All of it was connected. All of it was a system designed to move precious objects through invisible hands.

And somewhere in that system was a man who had faked his death and come back to see his work through.

“We find Bellamy,” she said. “If the orchestration is deliberate—if someone is leaving us breadcrumbs toward this moment—then Bellamy is the center of it. He made the fake. He knows where the real one is going, who’s carrying it, and what Falk wants in return. We find him, and we find the network.”

“And then?”

Camille looked at him. “And then we decide what to do with what we know.”

She slipped the drive into her inner coat pocket, close to her heart. Outside, the last of the evening light filtered between the old stone walls of Monaco Vieille, painting the narrow streets in gold and shadow. The café hummed with quiet conversation, the ordinary lives of ordinary people unfolding around them. For a moment, Camille let herself sit in that ordinary world—the one where she was just a jeweler, and the hardest problem she faced was a flawed setting or a grift gone minor.

But she knew this world was temporary. The drive pressed against her ribs like a second heartbeat. Whatever was inside it had already begun to change the shape of her life—irreversible, like a stone cut and set with no going back.

Victor signaled the waiter for another round. When the fresh cups arrived, he held his up to her in a gesture that was not quite a toast.

“To unfinished accounts,” he said.

Camille raised her cup. “To keeping them open.”