Read Chapter 14: Rings of Truth

Camille’s hand was still tingling where Victor’s thumb had brushed her knuckle when Lidia led them into the aft salon of the yacht, all smoked glass and cream silk, and gestured toward a screen mounted on the wall.

“I thought you might want to see this,” Lidia said, her voice carrying the particular smoothness of someone who enjoyed delivering bad news slowly. “Before the night gets away from you.”

Camille didn’t ask how Lidia had gotten access to the yacht’s security feeds. That would have admitted she was surprised Lidia had access at all. Instead, she folded her arms and watched the screen flicker to life.

The footage was grainy, timestamped two nights earlier. It showed a narrow service corridor below deck, the kind used by crew and catering staff. A man walked through it—broad shoulders, a slight limp favoring his left leg, a cap pulled low. He paused outside a door marked with a small brass plaque, glanced both ways, and slid a keycard through the reader.

“That’s the storage locker,” Lidia said, almost lazily. “Where the display case was kept before installation.”

Camille’s throat tightened. The man turned his head as he pushed the door open, and the cap shifted just enough for the security light to catch his face.

Henri.

The missing guard. The one Falk had ordered killed—or so Victor had claimed. The man who had supposedly vanished along with the original pendant, the one whose disappearance had set the entire chase in motion.

But here he was, alive, moving with purpose, walking into a locked room as if he owned it.

“He meets your definition of alive, I take it?” Lidia asked, the faintest smile on her lips.

Camille forced her voice steady. “Who is he to you?”

Lidia tilted her head, studying Camille with the same amused patience she had displayed on the deck. “He’s a man who made a choice. Same as anyone.” She tapped the screen, freezing the frame on Henri’s profile. “The question is whether you’re willing to make yours.”

Victor moved to stand beside Camille, close enough that she felt the heat of him through his sleeve. “What do you want, Lidia?” he asked, his voice flat. “You didn’t bring us here to warn us. You could have let security find us wandering the upper decks.”

“True,” Lidia conceded. She crossed to a small bar, poured herself a glass of water, didn’t offer them any. “But I find that people are more cooperative when they understand the geometry of the situation.”

“Geometry,” Camille repeated.

“Who’s aligned with whom.” Lidia took a sip. “You two are here for the Bellamy pendant. That much is obvious—a woman who holds herself like an artisan, a man who watches the exits like a career criminal. You’re not the first pair of scavengers to sniff around this boat. But you are the first to make it this far without being thrown overboard, which suggests you have something more than greed motivating you.”

Camille didn’t flinch. “And you have something more than curiosity.”

Lidia’s smile widened, just a fraction. “I have a business to protect. The Gala Méridien is my venue, my clients, my reputation. When a piece of my inventory gets stolen—even a piece I was merely hosting—it reflects poorly on me.” She set the glass down. “So I hedge my bets. I watched Henri. I watched the footage. And I watched you two argue about a ring like it was the most important thing in the world, which tells me you’re either deeply in love or deeply in trouble. Possibly both.”

Victor’s jaw tightened. Camille felt the heat rise to her cheeks and hated herself for it.

“The guard,” Camille said, redirecting. “You have footage of him entering the storage locker. Did he leave with the pendant?”

Lidia raised an eyebrow. “Now we come to it.” She tapped the screen again, advancing the footage. Henri emerged from the locker four minutes later, a flat, black case under his arm. He walked down the corridor, turned a corner, and disappeared from frame.

“He didn’t leave the yacht,” Lidia said. “I checked the manifest, the gangway cameras, the tender logs. He’s still aboard. Or he was, as of an hour ago.”

Camille’s mind raced. “Then the pendant is still here.”

“Or Henri is very good at hiding things.” Lidia shrugged. “Either way, the two of you are standing on a boat with a dead man walking around the lower decks, and the only person who knew he was alive was me. Until now.” She let that hang in the air, then added, softly, “You should decide who your friends are before the tide turns.”

She left without another word, her heels clicking against the polished deck. The salon felt abruptly smaller without her.

Victor exhaled slowly. “She’s playing us.”

“She’s playing everyone,” Camille said. She turned to face him, the footage still frozen on the screen behind her—Henri’s face caught mid-stride. “But she gave us something real. Henri is alive. He’s on this boat. And if Lidia knows where the display case was stored, she knows more about this operation than she’s admitting.”

“Or she’s feeding us a story to see what we do with it.”

Camille studied him. In the low light, the angles of his face were harsher, older—or maybe that was just the accumulated weight of the night. They had been running for hours, from the rooftop to the café to this floating palace of lies, and every step had been measured by someone else’s clock.

“Victor,” she said quietly, “when did you know Henri was alive?”

He didn’t answer immediately. That hesitation—that sliver of a breath before he chose his words—told her more than any confession could.

“I didn’t,” he said finally. “I knew Falk had people looking for him. I knew the guard was supposed to be dead. But I didn’t know he’d made it to the yacht.” His eyes met hers, and for once, there was no deflection in them. “I’ve been lying to you, Camille. Not about everything. But about enough.”

Her chest tightened. “Start talking.”

Victor moved away from her, pacing the length of the salon with the restless energy of a man who had spent too long in one place. “Falk pulled me into this three months ago. Not because I was his best driver—there are a hundred drivers better than me. He pulled me in because I owed him.”

“Owed him what?”

“Money,” Victor said. “A lot of it. My father took out a loan from one of Falk’s front companies to cover his gambling debts. He couldn’t pay it back, so he signed over the debt to me.” He stopped pacing, facing the window, his reflection ghostly against the black water beyond. “I couldn’t pay it either. So when Falk came to me with this job—a simple transport, he said, just move a payload from one port to another—I took it. I told myself I was just a driver. I wasn’t the one stealing anything. I was just moving it.”

Camille felt something cold settle in her stomach. “The night of the original heist. You drove the getaway.”

“Not for the pendant.” Victor turned to face her. “For Falk’s people. The ones who cleaned out the storage facility, the ones who made the replacement. I didn’t know what was in the payload, and I didn’t ask. That was the deal I made with myself.” He laughed, bitter and short. “I’ve been making that kind of deal for years. Take the job, don’t ask questions, keep your head down. It works, until it doesn’t.”

“Until you met me,” Camille said.

“Until you,” Victor agreed. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small leather pouch, worn at the seams. “I took this off Henri two nights ago.”

Camille’s breath caught. He opened the pouch and let its contents slide into his palm: a ring. Gold, weathered, with a dark stone at its center—not a diamond, but something deeper, almost black in the light.

“You said it was your mother’s,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I lied.” Victor held the ring out to her. “It was Henri’s. He was supposed to hand it over to Falk as proof of the job. But when I saw it, I recognized the craftsmanship. The way the band is tapered, the setting, the stone—it’s Bellamy’s work. The same style he used on the pendant.”

Camille took the ring from him. It was heavier than she expected, cool against her skin. She turned it over, running her thumb along the inside of the band, and felt the faint groove of an inscription.

“There’s a mark,” she said. “It’s too worn to read, but it’s there.”

“I thought you would recognize it,” Victor said. “I’ve been carrying it for two days, trying to figure out how to tell you. Trying to find the right moment.”

“There is no right moment for this,” Camille said, but her voice had lost its edge. She held the ring up to the light, squinting at the faint scratches inside the band. “Henri wasn’t just a guard. He was a courier. He was moving something for Bellamy—something other than the pendant.”

“Or he was moving the pendant itself,” Victor said. “And Lidia’s footage is his way of getting it off the boat without being searched.”

Camille closed her fist around the ring. She looked at Victor—really looked at him, past the charm and the easy lies and the careful distance he kept between himself and everyone who got close.

“Why are you telling me this now?” she asked.

Victor was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was low, almost rough. “Because I’ve spent three months doing what Falk told me to do, telling myself it was just a job. And then I spent two days watching you decode messages and plan infiltrations and refuse to give up on a piece of glass and gold that most people would have written off as lost. You don’t do any of that because you’ve been paid to. You do it because you care.”

“I care about my reputation,” Camille said, but the words sounded hollow even to her.

“No,” Victor said. “You care about doing it right. Even when it costs you something.” He took a step closer. “The debt to Falk—it’s not going to go away. He’s going to call it in, one way or another. But I’m tired of being his man. I’d rather be yours.”

The words hung in the air between them, fragile and unexpectedly honest. Camille looked down at the ring in her palm, then at the frozen footage of Henri on the screen, then back at Victor.

“You have a strange way of showing it,” she said softly. “Stealing my necklace. Lying to me about your mother.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m trying to make up for it.”

She tucked the ring into her pocket, feeling its weight settle against her hip. The night was not over. Somewhere below deck, Henri was moving through the shadows with Bellamy’s work in his hands, and Lidia was watching them both from some unseen corner, waiting to see whose side they chose.

But for a moment, standing there in the quiet of the salon, Camille allowed herself to believe that she was not doing this alone.