Read Chapter 18: The Truth About Victor

The garage beneath the Hôtel de Paris smelled of exhaust and damp concrete. Camille pressed her back against a pillar, the engine of Victor’s borrowed Audi still ticking as it cooled. The text from Lidia glowed on her phone—an address in Fontvieille, a time, a warning. Henri was moving the pendant in less than four hours.

Victor stood three feet away, arms crossed, watching her the way he used to watch her across a crowded workshop—like she was the only fixed point in a room full of lies.

“You opened the vault,” she said. Not a question.

“Three nights before the theft. Yes.”

“And you didn’t think to mention that before I let you back into my bed, my car, my confidence?”

He ran a hand through his hair. The streetlight above caught the silver at his temples. “Because if I’d told you the truth three days ago, you would have walked. And I needed you to hear the rest of it first.”

“The rest of it.” She laughed, hollow. “What else could possibly—

“I wasn’t working for Falk.” He stepped closer. “I was never working for Falk.”

Camille’s jaw tightened. “Lidia showed me footage of you at the vault. You had the keys. You had the codes.”

“I had them because Interpol gave them to me.”

The words hung in the damp air between them. Camille felt the floor shift under her feet, or maybe that was just her stomach.

“Interpol,” she repeated.

Victor reached into his jacket. His hand emerged with a slim black case, worn at the edges, and he flipped it open. A badge glinted under the sodium light. Gold letters on dark enamel. A name she didn’t recognize.

“Alexandre Moreau,” she read aloud. “Economic Crimes Unit.”

“That’s my file name. Not my real one.” He snapped the case shut and returned it to his pocket. “I was undercover when we met, Camille. Eleven years ago. The operation was targeting a smuggling ring that ran art and antiquities through the Riviera. Falk was a person of interest even then. Bellamy was his fence.”

Her throat tightened. “You met me because of Bellamy.”

“I met you because of a necklace your father was restoring for a private client. We suspected the client was laundering stolen pieces through Bellamy’s workshop.”

“So everything—” Her voice cracked. She steadied it. “Every dinner. Every night. The way you looked at me. That was all operational?”

“No.” His voice was low, fierce. “That was the problem. The operation ended. I was pulled out. I had to disappear. You know what happened—I left without a word, and I’ve been trying to explain ever since.”

“A phone call would have worked.”

“A phone call could have gotten us both killed. My cover was still active for another year. If I’d made contact, they would have tracked me to you. And then—” He stopped, breathing hard. “You think I wanted to leave? You think I didn’t spend every night for six months staring at the ceiling in a safe house in Lyon, replaying your voice?”

Camille stared at the badge case, now back in his jacket. A prop. Or a truth. She couldn’t tell anymore.

“If you’re Interpol,” she said slowly, “why is Falk holding a debt over your head? Why does Lidia know about your wife in Geneva?”

Victor flinched. It was small, barely a twitch at the corner of his mouth, but she caught it.

“My wife,” he said carefully, “was an agent. Field officer. She was killed in an operation in Marseille three years ago. Falk’s network was involved. I’ve been trying to take him down since.”

“Lidia said she was dying.”

“Lidia lies.”

“And your debt?”

A long pause. The garage’s fluorescent light buzzed overhead. Somewhere above them, a car door slammed, distant and irrelevant.

“Falk has something on me,” Victor admitted. “A file. Evidence that I helped smuggle a piece across the Swiss border during my undercover years. It was sanctioned by my handler, but the paperwork was buried. If it surfaces, I go to prison. Falk knows this. He’s been using it to pull my strings for the past year.”

“So you did work for him.”

“I planted listening devices. I drove cars. I opened the vault to place a tracker on the pendant’s case so Interpol could follow it when Falk moved it.” He met her eyes. “I never took anything. I never intended for Henri to get the necklace. The plan was to let Falk transport it, then intercept. But Henri went rogue, and Lidia’s been improvising.”

Camille studied him. The badge could be forged in an afternoon. The story could be an elaborate scaffold erected on a foundation of half-truths. She’d seen enough con men in her father’s workshop to know that the best lies fit perfectly into the shape of what you wanted to believe.

“Show me the badge again.”

Victor hesitated. Then he pulled the case out and extended it to her.

She took it. Opened it. Ran her thumb over the embossed seal. Weighed it in her palm. It felt right. It felt wrong. It felt exactly like the kind of artifact a master forger would carry.

“What is your real name?” she asked.

He held her gaze. “Victor.”

“That’s a coincidence, then.”

“It’s not. I chose it. When I came back for you, I wanted to be the man you knew.”

Camille closed her eyes. Behind her lids, she saw the ring—the one he’d given her, the one that matched Bellamy’s presentation set for Falk. If Victor was the man she’d loved eleven years ago, he would have known its origin. And he’d let her believe it was sentimental.

“The ring,” she said. “You told me it was your mother’s.”

Something flickered across his face. Doubt. Or calculation. She couldn’t read him anymore.

“It was—”

“I traced it to Bellamy’s workshop, Victor. It’s part of a set commissioned by Falk eleven years ago. The same year you went undercover. The same year you were inside Bellamy’s operation.” She held the badge case out to him. “So which is it? You’re Interpol and you’ve been lying to me since the moment we met? Or you’re Falk’s man and this badge cost you five hundred euros in a back alley in Marseille?”

Victor’s mouth opened. Closed. For the first time since she’d known him—in either incarnation—he had no answer at the ready.

The pendant was moving in four hours. And Camille realized she had no idea which side of this fight Victor would be standing on when it mattered.