Read Chapter 27: Clutched in the Vault

The auxiliary vault smelled of metal and old paper, a tomb of catalogued certainties. Camille’s back pressed against the cold steel door, her pulse a dull roar in her ears as Marcel Fournier leveled the small pearl-handled pistol at her chest. His hand trembled slightly, but his eyes were flat, irredeemable.

“You were supposed to stay in the gallery,” he said, voice thin and reedy. “You were supposed to look at the Chagall and drink champagne and let the insurance adjusters do their work.”

“You locked me in a vault, Marcel.” Camille kept her voice low, steady. She’d been trained by her father to read a stone’s flaws under pressure. A man was no different. “That’s not standard procedure.”

“Standard procedure was a clean theft. A clean payout. Instead, I have a dead auction house, a missing masterpiece, and you—poking around with your little magnifying glass and your receipts.” He gestured with the gun toward the far shelf, where she’d laid out the photocopied ledger pages and her phone, its screen cracked from when she’d fallen. “You found the documentation. The second appraisal. The shell company in the Seychelles.”

“I found the truth.”

“The truth is expensive.” Marcel took a step closer. The vault’s emergency light cast his face in sickly amber, carving deep shadows beneath his eyes. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in weeks. “Do you know what it costs to keep a house like this afloat when the market for Old Masters collapses and your primary collector runs off with a yacht and a mistress? I’ve spent three years shoring up holes with my own money, my own inheritance. And then Lidia walks in with her sad eyes and her dead husband’s debts, and she offers me a way out.”

Camille’s mind raced. “The fake pendant. The one Pierre made in the mountains. You knew.”

“Lidia came to me with a plan. We stage a theft of the Laurent et Fils heirloom—insured for ten million—and split the recovery fee. The pendant never really leaves the country. She has a forger she trusts, a man in the hills who owes her a favor. All we need is a convincing duplicate and a credible thief.” He laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “I didn’t know she’d chosen you as the patsy until the CCTV footage surfaced with you handling the case.”

“She chose me because Victor knew me,” Camille said, the pieces sliding into place with a sickening click. “Because I was the one person who wouldn’t stop looking.”

Marcel’s jaw tightened. “That was the flaw in the design. You were never supposed to find the workshop. You were never supposed to meet the forger. And you were certainly never supposed to dig up the original appraisal from two years ago.”

Camille’s eyes flicked to the ledger on the shelf. “You didn’t just stage a theft. You staged a recovery of a necklace that was already stolen. Lidia swapped the real pendant years ago, used it as collateral for her own debts, and handed you a beautiful paperweight to insure.”

Marcel’s grip on the pistol faltered for half a second. It was enough.

“You’re not the mastermind, Marcel.” Camille took a half-step forward, letting her voice soften. “You’re the mark. The same as me. Lidia used you to clean her collateral, and now she’s gone, and you’re standing in a vault holding a gun on a woman who has nothing to do with any of it.”

“She was supposed to leave the piece in the vault with the fake. I was supposed to find it, return it to the insurers, collect the reward.” His voice cracked. “Instead, she took the real pendant and vanished. And now there’s a Russian courier with a dead man’s passport moving through Monaco with a ten-million-euro necklace in his bag, and I have nothing but a forged blue stone and a trail of paperwork that leads to me.”

Camille’s breath caught. “Kovač. The porter Pierre mentioned.”

Marcel’s eyes widened slightly, as if he hadn’t expected her to know the name. “You know about Kovač?”

“I know the real pendant hasn’t left the country. I know it’s going to be at the gala tomorrow night.” She took another step, slow, deliberate. The muzzle of the pistol now rested at a distance of three feet. Close enough to hurt. Close enough to talk. “And I know that if you shoot me, Marcel, you’ll be alone in this vault with a dead body and a forensic team that will pull apart every transaction you’ve made since the day Lidia walked into your office. The shell companies. The re-appraisals. The forged signatures on the old provenance records. They’ll find it all. They always do.”

Marcel’s hand shook harder. His tongue darted out to wet his lips. “They won’t find anything if I walk out and leave you here. The timer doesn’t reset until midnight. By then, I’ll be on a plane.”

“Where?” Camille tilted her head. “To the Seychelles? To meet Lidia? You think she’ll be waiting for you with open arms and half the payout?”

“She owes me.”

“She double-crossed you, Marcel. She took your collateral, your forgery, your reputation—and she left you holding a gun in a room with a witness.” Camille lowered her own voice to a near-whisper. “I’ve seen her work before. I’ve been her target. She doesn’t come back for loose ends. She cuts them.”

Marcel’s eyes went glassy for a moment, as if he were seeing something beyond the vault’s steel walls. Then his shoulders sagged, the pistol dropping to his side.

“She told me it would be clean,” he said, mostly to himself. “Three days. In and out. No one would get hurt.”

“No one has been hurt yet.” Camille extended her hand slowly, palm open. “But there’s a gala tomorrow night, and Serge Kovač is going to walk in with that pendant in his breast pocket, and someone is going to take it from him. If we work together, you can give me what I need to stop that. If you don’t, I promise you the insurance investigators will be the least of your concerns.”

Marcel stared at her hand. The pistol wavered, then lowered fully into his other palm.

“They have my name on the notification list,” he said quietly. “The police. They’ve already been in contact about you. About Victor.”

Camille’s blood ran cold. “What about Victor?”

“They know he’s in Monaco. They know he’s connected to you.” Marcel’s lips twisted. “They’ve been watching the port for two days. They didn’t tell me why—they said it was routine, a courtesy call to a house of record. But they used your name. And his.”

Camille’s mind raced. The unexplained notification list. The police reaching out to Victor. Not routine—deliberate. Someone was feeding them information, and it wasn’t her.

“How do they know his name?” she asked.

Marcel blinked. “I assumed you told them.”

The room seemed to shrink. Camille looked at the cracked screen of her phone, the photos she’d taken, the ledger pages she’d rescued from Fournier’s office. She had evidence now—proof of the insurance fraud, the shell companies, the forged provenance. But it meant nothing if she couldn’t get it to someone who would act without turning her over to the authorities who’d flagged her as a person of interest.

“I need two things from you, Marcel,” she said, her voice steady even as her heart pounded. “First, we get out of this vault before midnight. Second, you tell me everything you know about Kovač’s schedule tomorrow night—every route, every handler, every moment he’s not under the gala’s security umbrella.”

“And what do I get in return?”

Camille held his gaze. “You get to survive the night with your reputation in tatters but your freedom intact. You get to be the man who cooperated with the investigation rather than the man who locked a jeweler in a vault at gunpoint. And you get to watch Lidia Fournier go down for what she did to both of us.”

Marcel studied her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and reached past her to press his thumb to the biometric lock.

The vault door hissed open.

Camille stepped into the corridor, the cool air of the auction house washing over her. Two blocks away, Victor was waiting. But for how long—and for whom—she no longer knew.