Read Chapter 17: Pieces of a Puzzle

The workshop smelled of metal dust and solvent, the familiar sharpness settling Camille’s nerves the way nothing else could. She had not turned on the overhead lights. A single lamp pooled amber light across the worn leather bench, and in that pool lay the ring.

Henri’s ring. The worn Bellamy inscription caught the light at an angle, the letters almost too faint to read. She had seen that hallmark a thousand times—on clasps, on settings, on the undersides of bezels that bore her mentor’s quiet signature. Bellamy had taught her that a hallmark was a fingerprint. No two tools ever struck the same way twice.

She lifted the ring with steel tweezers, not her bare fingers. Old habit. Evidence, she reminded herself. Though evidence of what, she still could not say.

The loupe pressed to her eye, and the world shrank to a circle of magnified brass. The inscription was worn nearly smooth, but her fingers remembered the shape of Bellamy’s lettering before her eyes did. The *B* with its slightly overlong bottom curve. The way the *y* dipped lower than the rest, a quirk of a tired hand late on a commission. She had watched him engrave pieces like this when she was an apprentice, breathing through her mouth to keep from fogging his work.

She set the loupe down and reached for the reference folio on the lower shelf. Her fingers found it by touch—a battered ledger of her own making, dating from her years in Bellamy’s atelier. She flipped past sketches of bracelets and preliminary drawings of pendants, past notes in her own careful hand about stone settings and prong angles, until she found what she was searching for.

Page 412. A presentation set commissioned for a private collector. Five pieces—cufflinks, a signet ring, a tie pin, a pendant, and a smaller companion ring. All in the same heavy gold, all marked with the Bellamy hallmark, all designed to be given as a matched collection to seal a business arrangement.

The smaller companion ring had been designed as a woman’s piece. Bellamy had drawn it with a soft hand, unusual for him, and annotated the margins in his cramped script: *To be worn by the collector’s wife at the presentation dinner only. Returned to the vault afterward.*

Camille turned the ledger toward the lamp and studied the drawing. The proportions were wrong, she thought, and then she corrected herself. The proportions were perfect—they matched the ring in her tweezers perfectly. The band thinned slightly at the bottom, allowing for the inscription to be placed flush against the inner curve without weakening the structure. She had watched Bellamy make that adjustment three times before he was satisfied.

The client’s name was not in the ledger. Bellamy had never written client names there, only descriptions and dates. But the date was there, in her own hand: eleven years ago. The same year she had left his atelier. The same year Falk had first approached the shop, asking for provenance paperwork on a historical piece.

Camille’s hand went still.

She reached for her phone and opened the photograph Lidia had sent—the grainy freeze-frame of Victor’s hand opening the vault. She zoomed in on the cuff of his jacket, then the glint of the key. No ring visible. She flipped to the other photograph, the one she had taken through the window in Larvotto. Henri, packing the necklace into its case. His left hand rested on the table beside the pendant, and there—on his third finger, a dull gold band.

The same band.

She laid the photograph beside the ring on the bench and let her eyes move between them. It was the companion ring from Bellamy’s presentation set. Henri had worn it, and then Henri had lost it, and Victor had taken it off his body, and Victor had given it to her. A chain of hands, each passing the ring along like a stone skipped across water.

But who was Henri in that original commission? The presentation set was made for a private collector. The ledger did not say who, but Camille knew. She had known since Lidia first whispered the name. Falk.

Falk had once been Bellamy’s client. Falk had commissioned the matched set. And now, eleven years later, pieces of that set were surfacing in connection with the theft of the Grimaldi Pendant—the pendant whose provenance Falk himself had paid Bellamy to authenticate.

Camille turned the ring over again, letting the cold weight settle against her palm. A pattern was forming in her mind, pieces slotting into a shape she did not like. Not random. Not opportunistic. The Gala Méridien was supposed to be the pinnacle of the social calendar, a chance for the jewelry house of Aubert & Fils to show off its newest acquisition. She had been invited because of her reputation, because of her expertise, because of her connection to the Restoration Committee that had authenticated the pendant’s chain.

Because of her connection to the pendant’s provenance.

Falk had known. Falk had always known. And Falk had sent Henri—not a stranger, but a man wearing a ring from a set Bellamy created for Falk himself—to take the pendant from under her nose.

The shop’s doorbell chimed, and Camille’s head snapped up. She pocketed the ring and closed the ledger, sliding it back onto the shelf before she turned. Victor stood in the doorway, rain gleaming on his shoulders.

“You left without saying where you were going,” he said.

“I needed to check something.”

“Something you couldn’t check in front of me.”

It was not a question. She met his eyes and did not answer.

He stepped inside, closing the door behind him. The workshop was small, and his presence filled it—the width of his shoulders, the weight of his attention. “What did you find?”

Camille’s fingers brushed the ring in her pocket. She could show him. She could ask him about Henri’s past, about the presentation set, about whether he had known whose commission the ring belonged to. But the photograph Lidia had shown her flickered behind her eyes—Victor’s hand on that vault, sure and practiced, three nights before the pendant vanished.

“Just inventory,” she said. “Confirming the stones in a bracelet I’m repairing.”

He studied her for a long moment. She could feel him weighing her words, deciding whether to press. Then his expression softened, almost imperceptibly. “You’re a terrible liar, Camille.”

“I’m an excellent liar,” she said. “I just don’t enjoy it.”

A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “That I believe.”

He moved past her toward the rear of the workshop, pausing at the window that overlooked the harbor. Rain streaked the glass, distorting the lights of the yachts moored below. “Lidia will expect an answer by dawn.”

“I know.”

“Do you trust her?”

Camille thought of the ring in her pocket. She thought of Bellamy’s ledger, of the date that matched her last year in his atelier. “No.”

“Good,” Victor said. “Neither do I. But she’s the only one who knows where Henri is right now.”

Camille pulled the ring from her pocket and held it up. The metal caught the lamp light, a small, steady gleam. “She’s not the only one who knows Henri,” she said. “Henri works for Falk. And Falk commissioned this ring eleven years ago.”

Victor’s face went very still. “How do you know that?”

“Because I helped authenticate the commission when I was an apprentice.” She set the ring down on the bench between them. “The same year Falk paid my mentor to verify the provenance of the piece now called the Grimaldi Pendant. The year I left Bellamy’s atelier and never asked why he stopped taking private commissions.”

The silence stretched. The rain filled it, steady against the glass.

“Henri wasn’t just a guard,” Victor said slowly. “He was Falk’s man from the beginning.”

“And Falk has been watching me for years,” Camille said. “This was never just a theft. It was a message. The pendant’s provenance was supposed to protect its value, and that provenance ran through my mentor. Through me.” She looked at the ring. “Falk is showing me what he can take.”

Victor’s hand moved toward hers, then stopped short of touching her. “Then we should not give him the satisfaction of taking anything else.”

“No.” Camille picked up the ring, slipped it back into her pocket, and turned to face him fully. “We should give him something worse. We should give him what he wants, and make it a trap.”

For a long moment Victor just looked at her. Then something shifted in his face—respect, and beneath it, a flicker of the man she had met in Antibes, before the lies had begun.

“What do you have in mind?”

Camille opened her mouth to answer, but the phone in her pocket buzzed. She pulled it out. Lidia’s name lit the screen. The message was four words:

*He’s moving the case tonight.*

And beneath it, an address. The Monégasque harbor. The dry dock, where salvage boats were hauled for repair.

Camille tilted the screen toward Victor. The rain kept falling outside the window, and somewhere in the dark harbor, Henri was carrying the Grimaldi Pendant toward a new hiding place.

“We go now,” she said. “Or we lose it forever.”