Read Chapter 23: The Alpine Workshop

The road turned to gravel before it turned to switchbacks, and the rented Fiat’s engine whined in protest as Victor guided it up the final steep grade. Below us, Monaco had shrunk to a glittering smear of gold against the dark sea, a postcard from another life. Above us, the Alpes-Maritimes clawed at a bruised violet sky, their slopes crowded with scrub pine and the skeletal bones of winter.

I gripped the door handle as the car lurched over a rut the size of a grave. “You’re sure about this road?”

“It’s the one the forger uses,” Victor said, not taking his eyes off the narrow track. “Or the one he used, anyway. It’s how he got the plaster casts down without passing customs.”

“Plaster casts.” I shook my head. “We’re hunting a ghost who makes copies of museum pieces in a mountain cave, and you didn’t think to mention that detail earlier?”

Victor’s jaw tightened. “Because I wasn’t sure he was real. Falk’s file on him was half rumor, half legend. ‘Le Petit Fantôme,’ they called him. The little ghost. Supposedly died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in the thirties. Supposedly still working commissions for the right price, sixty years after his own funeral.”

“Charming.” The car crested a ridge, and the headlights swept across a stone structure half-swallowed by ivy and time. It wasn’t a cave—it was a chapel, its bell tower sheared off at the second story, its stained-glass windows long since shattered and replaced with boards. A single thread of smoke rose from a crooked chimney, thin and almost apologetic against the darkening sky.

“He’s home,” Victor said.

We got out. The air was thin and cold, carrying the scent of woodsmoke and something metallic, like old coins or fresh-cut metal. Victor led the way to the chapel door—a heavy oak slab banded with iron that had probably been old when Napoleon was young. He knocked once, a rhythm that sounded deliberate. Two quick, one long.

Silence. Then a bolt scraped, and the door opened a crack, revealing a sliver of yellow lamplight and a single pale eye.

“Pas de clients,” a voice rasped. “Not tonight. Go down to the village.”

“We’re not clients,” Victor said. “We’re here about the silk thread.”

The eye blinked. The door opened wider, and the man behind it resolved out of the shadows.

He was not the skeleton of legend. He was short and round, with a bald head fringed by tufts of white hair and hands that were surprisingly delicate for a man his size—the hands of a watchmaker or a surgeon. He wore a paint-stained apron over a wool sweater, and his fingers were stained with something darker than ink. He looked at Victor, then at me, then back at Victor.

“You brought a woman,” he said. “That’s bold.”

“She’s the one who found your work,” Victor said. “The red thread. She knew what it was.”

Pierre’s gaze settled on me, and something shifted in his expression—not recognition, but assessment. The way a jeweler looks at a rival’s setting. “Mongolian khullu,” he said. “Rare. Very hard to source. But the lady who wears that shawl—she has taste. Good taste is a kind of arrogance, you know. It leaves clues.”

“You made the pendant,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

Pierre looked at Victor for a long moment, then stepped back and gestured us inside.

The chapel’s interior had been gutted and reborn as a workshop. The pews were gone, replaced by long wooden workbenches cluttered with jeweler’s tools: gravers, burnishers, a small polishing wheel, and crucibles that had cooled long ago. In one corner, a glass case held a row of finished pieces—a Fabergé egg replica so perfect I had to squint to confirm it wasn’t the original, a Cartier panther brooch, a tiara that might have belonged to a Romanov. Each piece was flawless, and each was a lie.

In the center of the room, on a velvet pad, sat the pendant. My pendant. The fake that had nearly ruined me.

Pierre saw where my eyes had gone. “The real one was already gone when I finished,” he said. “I never saw it. I only got the photographs and the measurements. It’s protocol—I work from documentation, never from the piece itself. Keeps me safe.”

“Who commissioned it?” Victor asked.

Pierre wiped his hands on his apron. “The signature on the paperwork was a man named Auguste Moreau. But Auguste Moreau died in 1943, so I knew that was a fiction. The real buyer—I never met them. I dealt with an intermediary.” He paused, and his eyes flicked to me with something like apology. “A woman. Young, but not too young. Dark hair, cut sharp like a blade. Very French, very precise. She wore a perfume I couldn’t place—something with a note of amber and gunpowder.”

My stomach dropped. I remembered the woman who had stood beside Lidia at the auction preview, the one who had never spoken but had watched the room like a hawk watching a field of mice. The one who had handed Lidia a glass of champagne and then vanished into the crowd.

“Did she have an accent?” I asked. “Anything distinctive?”

Pierre thought. “She was careful. Too careful. But she made one mistake.” He reached into a drawer beneath the workbench and pulled out a scrap of paper, crumpled and yellowed. “She needed to pay in tranches. For the second payment, she gave me a bank reference. I wrote it down because I didn’t trust her to remember it herself.”

He handed the paper to me. The ink was faded, but the letters were still legible: a Swiss account number, and beneath it, a name.

Eloise Marchand.

I looked up at Victor. “Lidia’s assistant.”

Victor’s face went still. “You’re sure?”

“Her name’s on the preview credentials. She manages Lidia’s schedule. And she has a scar on her left wrist—I noticed it when she adjusted Lidia’s shawl at the opening gala. If Pierre could see her hands, we could confirm.”

Pierre shook his head. “I never saw her hands. She wore gloves. Every visit.” He paused. “But I remember something else. The last time she came, she was nervous. She kept looking at her phone, and when she thought I wasn’t watching, she made a call. She said—and this I remember exact—‘The package is leaving the mountain. Make sure the tunnel is clear.’ ”

The tunnel. The service tunnel beneath the casino.

“Leaving the mountain,” Victor repeated slowly. “Not leaving the country.”

Pierre shrugged. “That’s what she said. I didn’t ask questions. I never ask questions.” He gestured to the workshop around us. “That’s how I’ve stayed alive this long.”

I stared at the paper in my hand. Every thread was converging on the same point—not an exit, but a return. The pendant had been made in this chapel, high above Monaco. It had been swapped in the tunnel beneath the casino. And if the real one had never left the city, then it was still there, hidden somewhere between the service corridors and the postal tunnel, waiting for Lidia to retrieve it at her leisure.

“You said the real one was already gone when you finished,” I said. “Gone where?”

Pierre’s mouth tightened. “I don’t know. But I did one job for the intermediary before the pendant. A smaller piece—a ring. Gold, with a particular setting. Unusual design. I was told it was a test piece, to see if my work was good enough for the main commission. She gave me a photograph, and I recreated it.”

He reached into another drawer, this one locked with a small brass key he produced from his apron pocket. Inside was a single velvet box. He opened it.

The ring sat on black silk, catching the lamplight. A thin band of gold, set with a single dark stone that seemed to drink the light rather than reflect it. The setting was distinctive—a twisted vine pattern that wrapped around the stone like a serpent.

I knew that ring. I’d worn it for two years, in a box beneath my bed, unable to throw it away and unable to look at it.

Victor’s ring. The one he’d given me before he disappeared. The one I’d traced back to Falk’s commission.

Victor reached for it, but Pierre pulled the box back. “I don’t know what you want with any of this,” he said, “but I’m not a dumb man. I know when I’ve been used as a step in a longer staircase. That ring was never a test. It was a marker. A way of claiming something that belonged to someone else.”

He looked at me, then at Victor, and something ancient and knowing settled in his eyes.

“Your secrets aren’t my business,” he said. “But that ring—I didn’t make it for love. I made it for a woman who wanted to prove she could take something that wasn’t hers and make it look like it always had been.”

Lidia. The ring was Lidia’s proof of concept.

And Victor had given it to me.

I turned to face him, the question burning on my tongue, but before I could speak, the chapel’s old iron bolt rattled in the door—once, twice, three times, a frantic rhythm that split the silence like a blade.

Pierre went white. “You brought company,” he breathed.