Read Chapter 16: A Double Offer

The discreet chime of her phone against the marble tabletop was barely audible over the salon’s low hum, but Camille felt it like a strike to the spine. She slid the device toward her, screen angled away from Victor, who was studying the yacht’s deck plans on his own phone beside her.

The message was from an unknown number, no preamble, no pleasantries.

*Mademoiselle Laurent. I have what you want. Fifty million euros, transferred to an offshore account I will provide, and the necklace returns to its case before anyone notices it’s a copy. Refuse, and it goes to a private collector in Dubai within 48 hours. Do not involve the police. They will only slow things down and alert Henri. And if you’re wondering whether your charming escort is truly on your side—ask yourself why he has never once mentioned the surveillance footage from the vault at the Hôtel de Paris. —L.V.*

Camille’s blood cooled to something close to glacial. Her thumb hovered over the screen, instinct screaming to delete it, to pretend she had seen nothing. But the words were already burned in. *Ask yourself why he has never once mentioned the surveillance footage.*

There was no footage from the vault at the Hôtel de Paris. There couldn’t be. Camille had reviewed the security protocols herself after the Bellamy affair—the cameras in that corridor had been on a rolling loop that overwrote every forty-eight hours. By the time anyone had thought to pull the files, they’d been gone.

Unless Lidia had her own copies. Unless someone had captured the moment Victor had entered the vault, the moment he had let Falk’s men in, the moment he had walked out with the case.

She angled her body away from Victor and typed a single response.

*Proof.*

The reply came in under a minute. A video file, muted, compressed. She tapped it with her thumb, heart hammering in her throat.

The image was grainy, shot from a ceiling corner—the service corridor behind the hotel’s main showroom. A man in a dark suit stood with his back to the camera, one hand pressed to the vault’s keypad. He moved with practiced ease, shoulders loose, fingers sure. He didn’t rush. He didn’t glance over his shoulder.

Then he turned, just slightly, to wave someone forward. The light caught his profile.

Victor.

Camille watched him hold the vault door open, watched a shadowed figure step inside, watched Victor’s head tilt toward the corridor—listening, waiting. The timestamp burned in the corner: 2:47 a.m., three nights before the necklace was reported stolen.

She had been at home that night. She had been asleep.

Lidia’s next message came as the video looped a second time.

*He was in on it from the beginning. He’s using you to learn the necklace’s authentication marks so Falk can fabricate a better copy. The real one was never meant to leave Monaco. It’s meant to be replicated. You are the last obstacle. Choose wisely.*

Camille locked the phone and set it face-down on the table. Her hands were steady. They had to be.

“What is it?” Victor asked, not looking up from the deck plans.

“Nothing. A wrong number.”

He did look up then. His gaze was quick, searching, the way it had been in the first days of their old life, when he could read her like a page of handwritten script. “You’re holding your shoulders stiff. You only do that when you’re lying or when you’re scared.”

“Maybe I’m both.”

She forced a small, brittle smile and turned to survey the room. The gala had thinned to a core of late-night drinkers and dealmakers, voices low and clinking with crystal. Lidia was no longer at the bar where she had been standing moments earlier. Camille scanned the crowd, then the archway leading to the deck.

Lidia stood there, glass of champagne in hand, watching her with the patience of a cat at a mouse hole.

Camille did not look away. She held Lidia’s gaze and lifted her own glass in a toast, then brought it to her lips without drinking.

Lidia smiled and turned, disappearing onto the deck.

“I need air,” Camille said, rising. “Stay here. Keep an eye on the crew entrance.”

Victor’s hand closed around her wrist—gentle, but insistent. “Camille. What aren’t you telling me?”

She looked down at his fingers on her skin. The warmth of them. The memory of that night in Marseille, when he had pressed the ring into her palm and told her it was his mother’s, his voice breaking in a way she had believed for years.

“When you gave me the ring,” she said slowly, “was it already in your hand before you opened the box, or did you take it out beforehand?”

His brow furrowed. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Humor me.”

He released her wrist and sat back. “I took it out of the box. It was wrapped in the velvet pouch. Why?”

“Because I found a scratch on the inside of the band. A hallmark. It’s Bellamy’s work, isn’t it?”

Victor’s jaw tightened. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t blink. He just looked at her with the expression of a man who had been cornered and was calculating the exit.

“Bellamy made it,” he said quietly. “But he didn’t give it to me. Henri did—before the job, as a sign of good faith. Bellamy’s rings are worth a fortune because he only makes a few. I thought it was payment. I didn’t know it was Henri’s until I saw the inscription.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me that before you claimed it was your mother’s?”

“Because you wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told you the truth. You barely believe me now.”

She did not disagree.

Camille turned on her heel and walked toward the deck, leaving Victor at the table. She could feel his gaze on her back, but she did not slow. She did not look back.

The night air hit her like a clean sheet. The sea stretched dark and glittering, and Lidia was waiting by the railing, her champagne glass catching the yacht’s soft glow.

“I knew you’d come,” Lidia said without turning. “You’re too meticulous to ignore a threat you can’t verify.”

Camille stood two paces away, close enough to talk, far enough to move. “Fifty million is a fantasy. The necklace was insured for eighteen. Even a black-market buyer won’t pay more than its weight in stones and narrative.”

Lidia turned. Her eyes were dark, unreadable. “The narrative is the value, darling. A necklace that was stolen from the Grimaldi Forum, vanished off a luxury yacht, and never seen again? That story adds twenty million on its own. And the stones are exceptional—you know that better than anyone. You authenticated them.”

Camille’s chest tightened. She had. Seven months ago, in the vault of the Hôtel de Paris, she had logged each stone of the Grimaldi Pendant with the kind of obsessive precision that had made her reputation. She had traced the provenance from a Russian oligarch’s mistress to a Saadiyat prince to a private collector who had never once shown his face.

The collector had been Falk. She realized it now with the queasy certainty of a puzzle snapping into place.

“You’re wasting my time,” Lidia said. “I offered you a deal. You didn’t come out here to negotiate price—you came out here to decide whether to trust me. So let me tell you something you don’t know.”

Lidia stepped closer, lowering her voice to a murmur. “Victor’s debt to Falk isn’t money. It’s a wife. She’s alive, and she’s in a clinic in Geneva, and she’s dying. Falk pays her bills. Victor does what Falk says because every month he gets a new invoice with ‘paid’ stamped on it, and every month he knows that if he stops running Falk’s errands, the invoices stop coming.”

Camille’s mouth went dry.

“He’s not using you to learn the authentication marks,” Lidia continued, almost gently. “He’s using you to get close enough to Falk to kill him. And when he does, either he succeeds and disappears—or he fails, and Falk will use you to make him cooperate. You’re leverage, Camille. You’ve always been leverage.”

The wind came off the water, cold and salt-bright. Camille stood very still.

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

Lidia tilted her head. “Because I want the fifty million. And I don’t want Victor to kill Falk before Falk’s network can be dismantled—I need it intact. So I’m offering you a double offer. Work with me to recover the necklace, and I’ll ensure Victor’s wife gets her treatment regardless of what Falk does. He won’t owe Falk anything. He’ll be free.”

“And if I choose the police?”

“Then Victor dies. Not by my hand—by Falk’s, within the hour, the moment he realizes you’ve turned him in. And your name goes on the list of people who owe Falk favors they can’t repay.”

Lidia stepped back, raising her glass in the same mocking toast Camille had given her minutes earlier. “You have until dawn to decide. My associate in Dubai is already preparing a bid. Tick-tock, Mademoiselle Laurent.”

She walked past Camille, heels clicking on the teak deck, and disappeared into the glow of the salon.

Camille stood at the railing, alone with the sea and the weight of an impossible arithmetic. A necklace worth more than her life. A man she had loved and never trusted. A threat she could neither prove nor ignore.

Her phone buzzed. A new message from Victor.

*Whatever she said, it’s not true. Not all of it. Come back. We need to talk.*

She read it twice, then locked the phone and slipped it into her pocket.

Dawn was three hours away. She needed to decide what—and who—she believed.