Read Chapter 21: The Red Silk

The silk thread lay across Victor’s palm like a vein of dried blood. Camille held her breath, watching him turn it between two fingers beneath the service tunnel’s single buzzing bulb. It was barely three centimeters of fiber, plucked from the scuffed paint line where the crate had scraped against the wall. But it was everything.

“It’s not ordinary silk,” she said. “Feel it.”

Victor frowned. He rubbed the thread against his thumb. “Smooth. Almost waxy.”

“It’s khullu. Undercoat of the Mongolian khangai goat. It’s spun only in Ulaanbaatar, and the dye—that red isn’t synthetic. It’s cochineal, crushed insects, a process that hasn’t changed in four hundred years.” She took the thread back carefully, as if it might dissolve. “There’s a shawl maker in the old quarter who uses it. Exclusive commission only. I’ve seen exactly one piece in my life.”

“Where?”

“Around Lidia’s shoulders. At the Hermitage auction two years ago. She wore it like armor.”

Victor was quiet for a long moment. The tunnel smelled of damp concrete and stale air, the distant hum of the casino’s generators threading up through the walls like a heartbeat. Above them, somewhere in the marble halls, Henri’s men would be preparing the decoy pendant for its journey to the marina. They had four hours. Maybe fewer now.

“So she touched the crate,” Victor said. “She supervised the swap herself.”

“Or she was close enough to brush against it.” Camille slipped the thread into a small glass vial from her pocket, the kind she used to store loose stones. “But this isn’t incidental contact, Victor. Look at the back.”

She angled the vial toward the light. The strand’s end was blunt, uniform, not frayed or torn. Victor’s eyes narrowed.

“Cut,” he said.

“Clipped. Deliberately.” Camille’s pulse quickened. “Someone placed this here. Lidia didn’t accidentally leave it—she left a marker. A signature.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because she wanted us to find it.”

Victor leaned against the tunnel wall, folding his arms. His face was half in shadow; the new scar along his jaw, hard to see in daylight, caught the bulb’s glare. Camille still didn’t know if that scar was real or another layer of the mask he wore. The badge in his breast pocket—if it was real—said Interpol. But the ring in her own pocket, the one he’d given her weeks ago, said something else entirely.

“If she wanted us to trace the thread to her,” Victor said slowly, “then she’s not just trying to shake us off. She’s telling us she was there. Personally.”

“She wants us to know we’re outmatched.”

“Or she wants us to know where to look.”

Camille shook her head. “The shawl doesn’t tell us where the real pendant is. It tells us she was present at the swap. Which we already suspected.”

“But now we can prove it.”

“Can we?” Camille’s voice sharpened. “I’m flagged by the Monaco police. If I go to them with a strand of silk from a shawl that’s probably still hanging in Lidia’s wardrobe, they’ll laugh me out of the station—if they don’t arrest me first.”

Victor pushed off the wall. “Then we don’t go to them. We go to Lidia.”

“And say what? We found your thread? She already knows. She put it there.”

“Then we use it against her.” He stepped closer. His voice dropped, intimate and urgent. “Lidia is a collector of beautiful things. Precision. Craft. She left that thread because she wanted to be certain we understood the craftsmanship of her plan. She’s proud of it.”

Camille studied him. The way he held her gaze. The slight tension in his jaw. She had seen that look before—in Paris, years ago, when he’d stood across a café table and told her the emerald he’d sold her was genuine when every instinct had screamed otherwise.

“You’ve worked with her before,” Camille said quietly. “Haven’t you?”

Victor hesitated. A flicker—there and gone—of something she couldn’t name. “Not worked. Observed.”

“From Interpol.”

“From a distance.”

“Which is it?”

The bulb above them buzzed and dimmed for a beat, then steadied. In the flicker, Victor’s face changed. The charm dropped away, leaving something harder beneath. Older.

“There’s a workshop,” he said. “In the mountains above Monaco. A forger who works for Lidia exclusively. Bellamy’s original plans went through him—the technical drawings of the pendant’s internal mechanism that Falk commissioned eleven years ago. That workshop is where the fake was made.”

Camille’s breath caught. “Who told you that?”

“I found it in Falk’s file. Before he cut me loose.”

“The file he holds against you.”

Victor didn’t answer. He just watched her, waiting.

Camille considered the thread in its vial. Considered the man in front of her, who claimed to be an agent, who claimed his wife had been killed in the line of duty, who claimed Lidia’s story of a dying wife in Geneva was a fabrication. She didn’t know which story was true. Maybe neither. Maybe both, twisted together like the fibers of the silk she held.

“The shawl maker,” she said. “Her name is Amara Batchuluun. She keeps records of every commission, every client. If Lidia’s shawl was made for her, the record will show it. And if we can prove Lidia owned it, we can prove she was at the swap.”

“We already know she was at the swap.”

“Knowing and proving are different things.” Camille pocketed the vial. “But you said it yourself—this is a collector’s game. Lidia wants to be *recognized*. Recognized and admired. If we can show her we understand her craftsmanship, she might slip. Give us something she hasn’t yet.”

Victor raised an eyebrow. “You want to compliment her.”

“I want to make her underestimate us.” Camille’s jaw set. “She thinks I’m Lund’s ruined apprentice. She thinks you’re a desperate man playing both sides. Let her keep thinking that. But we go to her wearing her thread—and we ask about the shawl. About the maker. About her taste.”

“And if she doesn’t answer?”

“Then we remind her that the thread is physical evidence. That when this is over and the police come looking, I can place her at the scene. She might outrun Monaco’s finest, but she can’t outrun her own vanity.”

Victor’s lips curved into a slow, reluctant smile. “You’ve gotten sharper.”

“You taught me to be suspicious.”

The smile faded. Something passed between them—regret, maybe. Or the ghost of it.

“The workshop,” Camille said. “You said it’s in the mountains. You know where?”

“I have a general location. The forger keeps himself hidden. If we find him, we find the real pendant’s trail. Lidia may have moved the fake, but she would have kept the original close. A piece like that—she won’t have shipped it out. Too risky.”

“Unless it’s already gone.”

Victor shook his head. “She wouldn’t. The pendant isn’t just a jewel to her. It’s a trophy. A vindication. Falk humiliated her once. This is her revenge. She’ll want to see it, touch it, gloat over it.” He paused. “We have time. But not much.”

Camille looked at her watch. Three hours, forty-one minutes until Henri moved the decoy. The window was closing.

“Then let’s not waste it.” She turned toward the tunnel’s exit, then stopped. “Victor. The badge.”

His hand twitched toward his pocket. “What about it?”

“If we’re doing this together, I need to know it’s real.”

He held her gaze for a long moment. Then he pulled the badge out and held it up. Gleaming gold, embossed with the Interpol seal. It looked perfect. Too perfect.

“It’s real,” he said.

“That’s what you said about the emerald.”

The words hung between them. For a moment, Camille saw something crack behind his eyes—genuine hurt, or the finest imitation of it she’d ever seen. Then he tucked the badge away and gestured toward the grimy stairwell leading up to street level.

“After you.”

Camille started climbing. Behind her, she could feel his presence, steady and constant, a shadow she couldn’t quite shake. Whatever Victor was—agent or con or something in between—he was still the only ally she had.

And in less than four hours, the false pendant would leave. The real one would remain hidden. And Lidia would be watching them both.