Read Chapter 26: Faultlines

The silence in the Fiat stretched like a fault line between them. Victor drove with both hands on the wheel, knuckles pale, the mountain road unspooling in the headlights. Camille pressed her forehead to the cold glass and watched the chapel shrink behind them.

“You knew,” she said. Not a question.

Victor’s jaw tightened. “I knew Pierre existed. I didn’t know he’d made the ring for Lidia.”

“You knew he was a forger. You knew the kind of people you were circling. And you still gave me that ring like it was—” She stopped, throat closing.

“Like it was real,” Victor finished quietly.

She laughed, a raw, humorless sound. “Nothing about you is real, is it? The charm, the teasing, the way you look at me like I’m the only woman in the room. It’s all craft. All technique. You learned it the same way you learned to read a mark’s tells.”

He didn’t deny it. That was the worst part.

“Let me out.”

“We’re two kilometers from the car park. And there’s no signal here.”

“I don’t care.”

Victor pulled over anyway, gravel crunching under the tires. The engine idled. Camille stared at the dashboard, at the faint glow of the tracking chip reader he’d tried to hide in the glovebox earlier.

“Why did you plant the blue ring in the vault?” she asked.

“I told you. To fracture Lidia’s organization. Make them suspect each other.”

“You told me that after I caught you. What would you have said if I hadn’t found it?”

Victor turned to her. In the dim light, his eyes looked almost black. “I would have told you the truth eventually.”

“Eventually,” she repeated. “That word’s doing a lot of heavy lifting.”

A long pause. Then Victor said, “When I was seventeen, Lidia’s father took me in. Taught me the trade. Not just the con—the art of it. The patience. He used to say, ‘A good lie is a truth that hasn’t finished marinating.’” He smiled grimly. “I believed him for a long time. Then he died, and Lidia took over, and I realized the marinating was just rot dressed up in silk.”

“You loved her.”

“I trusted her. It’s not the same thing. She used that trust to build a decade of operations on my back, and when I tried to walk away, she made sure I couldn’t. Not without leaving a trail of broken people behind.”

“So you decided to burn it down instead.”

“I decided to finish what he started. Cleanly. Without her.”

Camille shook her head slowly. “You’re still doing it. Still playing the long game. And I’m just a pawn you picked up because I fit the role.”

Victor’s hand moved toward hers, then stopped. He let it fall back to the wheel. “You’re not a pawn, Camille. You’re the reason I want to stop.”

“Then stop. Tell me everything. Now.”

He looked at her for a long moment, then nodded. “Everything. But not in a car on a mountain road. We have less than twenty-four hours to the gala, and I need to show you something first.”

Camille wanted to argue. But the exhaustion in his voice, the raw edges where she’d never seen them before—she recognized that sound. It was the sound of a man dismantling his own armor.

She opened the door. “Fine. Drive.”

---

The auction house was closed to the public, but Camille still had her security badge. She hadn’t surrendered it. A small act of defiance, or denial, depending on the hour.

The front lobby was dark, marble reflecting the faint city glow through the windows. Victor waited in the car around the corner, two blocks away, as she’d insisted. She needed to do this alone.

She swiped her badge at the side entrance. The lock clicked green. Inside, the air was cold and still, the way buildings feel when they’re holding their breath.

Camille moved through the exhibition hall, past velvet ropes and glass cases, her heels muffled by runners laid for tomorrow night’s gala. The police had sealed the main vault, but there were auxiliary storage rooms—less secure, less documented. If there was a record of the necklace’s movement before the theft, it would be in the director’s private office, tucked behind the conservation lab.

She stopped at the door to Marcel Fournier’s office. It was unlocked, which was wrong. Marcel locked everything. He had a ritual about it, a compulsion she’d teased him for at office parties.

Camille hesitated, then pushed the door open.

The office was immaculate, as always. A mahogany desk, a wall of photographs showing Marcel shaking hands with collectors, a single orchid on the windowsill. But the desk drawer was slightly ajar. And on the blotter lay a red silk thread.

Not just any red silk thread. The same shade of Mongolian khullu as the one she’d found in the vault.

Camille reached for it, but stopped. She pulled out her phone instead, snapped a photo. Then she opened the drawer with the edge of her sleeve.

Inside: a ledger. Handwritten. Dates, names, amounts. Some she recognized—Lidia’s shell companies, a collector in Geneva, a gallery owner in Dubai. Others she didn’t. The entries went back two years.

She turned the pages slowly, heart kicking against her ribs. There it was, three lines down: the night of the theft. *S. Kovač — delivery confirmed. Escort: E. Marchand.*

Eloise Marchand. Lidia’s assistant. The same name Pierre had given them.

But it was the column beside it that made Camille’s blood run cold.

*Insurance valuation: €14M. Claim filed: €13.8M.*

The claim had been filed the same night. Before the theft was even reported to police.

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

Camille spun. Marcel Fournier stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the dim hall light. He was wearing a suit, perfectly pressed, as if he’d been expecting her. In his hand, he held a small black object. A stun gun.

“Marcel.” She kept her voice steady. “I found the thread. The same one Lidia wears. It was in your desk.”

“It was in Lidia’s shawl,” Marcel corrected, stepping into the room. He closed the door behind him with a soft click. “I took it after she visited me the night before the theft. I needed a marker. Something to point the investigation somewhere safe.”

“Somewhere safe.” Camille’s mind raced. “You faked the theft.”

“I engineered it,” Marcel said, as if correcting a minor grammar error. “Lidia provided the logistics—the forger, the courier, the timing. I provided the access. The paperwork. The insurance claim.”

“Why?”

Marcel’s face flickered. For a moment, the mask slipped, and Camille saw something raw underneath. Grief, maybe. Or guilt.

“The auction house has been bleeding money for three years,” he said. “You saw the numbers. The Fontaine collection alone nearly bankrupted us. The board was going to vote me out—after twenty years, Camille. Twenty years building this place into the premier venue on the Riviera. And they were going to replace me with a corporate appointee from Paris who’d never touched a ruby in his life.”

“So you stole from your own vault to pad the insurance payout.”

“I stole from nobody. The necklace is a duplicate—always was, since Lidia switched it two years ago when she used the original as collateral for a loan she never intended to repay. The only thing I did was formalize its disappearance. The claim pays off the auction house’s debts. The necklace returns to Lidia. Everyone wins.”

“Everyone except the police,” Camille said. “Except the insurers. Except me.”

Marcel smiled, and it was the same warm, avuncular smile he wore at holiday parties. It didn’t reach his eyes. “You were never supposed to be part of this, Camille. You were supposed to walk away when the theft was reported. Take your leave. Let the system do its work.”

“But I didn’t walk away. I kept digging.”

“And digging,” Marcel agreed. He took a step closer. “Which is why I’m afraid I can’t let you leave.”

The stun gun came up, and Camille saw the arc of blue light between the contacts. She had maybe a second, if that.

She grabbed the orchid pot from the windowsill and hurled it. Marcel flinched, batting at the ceramic shards, and Camille lunged sideways—not for the door, but for the panic button under his desk.

Her palm hit the plate. Nothing. She pressed again.

“Disabled,” Marcel said, straightening. His suit was flecked with dirt, his composure cracking at the edges. “The director’s office has its own security override. I had it installed last month. For emergencies.”

He advanced. Camille backed toward the wall, fingers brushing a shelf of reference books. Heavy leather volumes. She grabbed one—*The History of the Cartier Heist*—and swung.

Marcel caught her wrist. He was stronger than he looked, and the stun gun came up again, this time pressing against her side.

“I’m sorry, Camille.” And he sounded almost sincere. “You were always my favorite.”

The world went white. Then black.

---

Camille blinked awake on a cold concrete floor. Her head throbbed. The air smelled of metal and old packing materials.

She was in the vault. Not the main one—the auxiliary storage room, the one with the reinforced inner door that had no emergency release from the inside. The one she’d insisted on installing herself, after the burglary in 2019.

Marcel stood outside the glass partition, adjusting his cuffs. Behind him, she could see the main hall being prepared for the gala. Ladders, florists, a man polishing a glass case.

“Two choices,” Marcel said, his voice muffled by the partition. “You stay here until the gala concludes. Theft is discovered, claims are paid, and I release you in the morning with a story about a misunderstanding. You keep your job, your reputation, and your freedom.”

“And the second choice?”

“You make a scene now. Someone calls the police. You’re already a person of interest—they’ll find you locked in a vault you had access to, with a ledger you removed from my desk.” He gestured to the folder she’d dropped in the office. “You’ll be arrested within the hour. And the necklace will still be gone.”

Camille pushed herself to sitting. Her ribs ached where the stun gun had touched her. “You think Lidia will let you walk away clean? She doesn’t share well.”

Marcel’s smile thinned. “Lidia and I have an understanding. She gets the pendant. I get the payout. Neither of us mentions the other’s name.”

“Except the police already know about her. Victor’s been giving them information for months. The second they find the ring—the blue one—they’ll trace it back to her workshop, and then to you.”

Marcel’s pause was barely perceptible. But Camille saw it.

“Victor,” he repeated. “Your charming little con man. You think he’s working for the police?”

“I think he’s working for himself. But that doesn’t mean he won’t burn you to the ground to get what he wants.”

Marcel studied her for a long moment. Then he said, “I’ll be back at midnight to check on you. Use the time to think about which choice you want."

He stepped away. The lights dimmed, leaving only the blue emergency glow.

Camille sat very still in the vault, listening to the building hum around her. Her phone was gone—Marcel had taken it. Her badge was on his desk. She was sealed inside a room she’d designed herself, and the only person in Monaco who knew where she was had no reason to trust her, and every reason to wonder if she’d gone to the police.

She pressed her palm to the cool glass of the partition and thought about Victor’s face in the car, the way he’d said *You’re the reason I want to stop.*

She didn’t know if it was a lie.

She just knew she had to find out.