Read Chapter 11: A Second Look

The café smelled of burnt sugar and old wood, a relic tucked into the stone warren of Monaco Vieille where the tourists rarely wandered. Camille had chosen the corner table with sightlines to both doors, a habit she'd developed in the last forty-eight hours that she couldn't shake.

Victor slid the USB across the table like it was a live round. "Your show."

She pulled a battered laptop from her bag, one she kept for workshop accounting and nothing else. Not pristine, not connected to her atelier's network, clean enough for this kind of work. The drive clicked into the port with a soft, final sound.

"Let's see what Falk's been hiding," she said.

The drive mounted immediately. No encryption on the outer layer—that was the first surprise. A simple folder structure, painstakingly organized by year. Financial records, offshore accounts, client lists with coded initials. Victor watched over her shoulder, his breath shallow, and she caught him flinch more than once at what scrolled past.

"Recognize any of these?" she asked.

"Too many." His voice had gone flat. "That one—the S-group entries—that's Falk's tier-one buyers. Auction houses, private collectors. I only ever ran packages for the middlemen, but those names..."

"Those names are the reason someone wanted you to have this."

She opened the most recent file. A transaction ledger, dated three weeks ago, with a single entry logged in red ink: *Compensation — liquidation authorized. Item: MIRAGE.*

"The necklace," she breathed. "Falk authorized the sale before it was even stolen."

Victor's jaw tightened. "He's not pressuring me to recover it. He's pressuring me to take the fall while he moves it to a buyer who doesn't care about provenance."

The weight of that landed between them. Camille stared at the red text, at the cold efficiency of the notation, and felt her professional outrage harden into something more dangerous.

"There's more."

She dug deeper into the drive's directory structure, past the clean folders, looking for anomalies. Files at the root level were timestamped weeks ago, but one subfolder had been modified within the last seventy-two hours. Hidden—not encrypted, just deliberately buried three levels deep.

"Someone added this after the fact," she said. "This isn't Falk's work."

She opened it. A single document, no header, no formatting. Just a string of characters that resolved into something familiar when she tilted her head.

"Bellamy's cipher."

"You're sure?"

"His workshop journals had margin notes in this pattern. I catalogued every one of them after the fire." She ran her finger along the screen, translating the repeating structure. "It's coordinates. Segmented into three offsets."

Victor pulled out his phone, fingers moving over the map application. "Give me the first set."

She read them off slowly, feeling her way through the translation. The first resolved to a location in the harbor. The second refined it. The third—she stopped, checked her work, read it again.

"Victor. This is a live signal."

He looked up from his phone. "Live how?"

"The cipher includes a temporal marker. Whoever encoded this expected it to be read within a specific window." She checked the table she'd built from Bellamy's journals. "We have—" she calculated quickly, "—fourteen hours before the coordinates become meaningless."

He turned his phone toward her. The map showed the Grimaldi Forum on one side and a cluster of anchored vessels in the harbor beyond. A single red pin marked a luxury yacht, moored and immobile.

"*Le Phénix*," Victor read. "Three hundred feet. Belongs to a shell company registered in the Caymans."

Camille zoomed in on the satellite image. The yacht was enormous, gleaming white, with a helicopter pad on the aft deck and what looked like a swimming pool that converted into a dance floor.

"He's not running," she said slowly. "Bellamy is still here. He's been here this whole time, watching us dance around his trail."

"Or he was here." Victor's skepticism was a familiar scrape in his voice. "Coordinates twelve hours stale and we're chasing water."

"Temporal marker says otherwise. He wanted us to find this now." She closed the laptop, heart beating faster than she wanted to acknowledge. "Whoever orchestrated the ambush on the rooftop, whoever signaled us after we escaped—they wanted us to pull this data. And they wanted us to find the yacht before its window closes."

Victor leaned back, folding his arms. His shirt was still damp at the collar from their rooftop scramble, and there was a cut along his cheekbone he hadn't bothered to clean. "Let's say you're right. Bellamy's been playing puppet master from a yacht in his own harbor while half the criminal network in Monaco thinks he's dead. Why leak Falk's files to expose himself?"

"Because Falk isn't the target." The realization settled into place like the last piece of a jeweler's setting. "Falk's a piece on the board. The real game is the necklace, and whoever bought it from Falk is the one Bellamy's after."

"Or the one he's selling to."

She shook her head. "He didn't need to fake his death to sell a necklace. He faked his death to reset the board. To draw the players out into the open." She looked at the pinned yacht on Victor's phone. "That gala on board tonight—the charity auction for the Oceanographic Museum. It's the perfect venue for a dead man to watch his handiwork move through the crowd."

Victor stared at her. A long silence stretched between them, punctuated by the hiss of the espresso machine and the murmur of old men playing cards in the corner.

"You want to walk onto a yacht that might belong to a forger who's been one step ahead of us since we started."

"I want to walk on with a cover story." She straightened, adjusting the cuff of her jacket. "The Gala Méridien is invitation-only, but it's also a buying event. I know the families who collect from my atelier. I can pass as a client looking to commission something exclusive."

"And me?"

"You're my escort." A ghost of a smile touched her lips. "You've been playing a role for years, Victor. One more night shouldn't strain your talents."

He didn't laugh. His eyes tracked her face with an intensity that made her skin prickle. "If we board that yacht and Falk's network spots me, it's not a conversation. It's a swim back to shore with a bullet in my spine."

"Then we'd better make sure Lidia doesn't see you before we see her." Camille packed the laptop carefully, sliding the USB into the inner pocket of her jacket. "She'll be there. She never misses a gala with auction potential."

"The art dealer from Nice? She's worse than Falk."

"Which is why I want her there." Camille stood, feeling the weight of the drive against her ribs. "She knows where the high-end pieces move, and she's not loyal to anyone but her commission. If Bellamy wants to watch the necklace surface, Lidia is the kind of person he'd contact to broker its public return."

Victor rose, his hesitation resolving into a grim resignation. "If we're doing this, we need to look the part." He gestured at her practical travel clothes. "You can't walk into the Gala Méridien in a workshop jacket."

"I know a place in the Carré d'Or that owes my family a favor." She pulled out her phone, already calculating timing. The afternoon was burning away, and the window Bellamy had left them was shrinking with the sun. "We have six hours to get outfitted, get in character, and get on that boat before the coordinates go dark."

"And if Bellamy isn't there?"

Camille paused at the door, looking back at him. The café's warm light caught the wary resignation in Victor's face, and for a moment, she saw the man he'd been before the lies—or the man she'd wanted him to be.

"Then we find out who is," she said. "And we ask them why they wanted us to find that drive."

She pushed through the door into the narrow street, the ancient stones of Monaco Vieille surrounding her with their thousand years of secrets. Behind her, Victor followed, and she heard him mutter something that might have been a prayer or might have been a curse.

Either way, the yacht waited.