Read Chapter 29: A Warning Shot

The port at night was a maze of containers and shadows, the harbor lights casting long yellow stripes across wet concrete. Camille moved through it on instinct, her heels long abandoned somewhere near the auction house, her bare feet slapping against the cold ground as she wove between stacked cargo boxes.

She'd left Victor two blocks away. Two blocks, and she hadn't closed the distance. She could feel the minutes burning away from her, the stolen ledger pressed against her ribs beneath her jacket, Marcel's warning about the police circling her name.

A sound cut through the salt air. A crack, sharp and wrong. Then another.

She froze against a shipping container, her breath catching when she realized the sounds had come from the direction of the marina. From where Victor was waiting.

Camille ran before she could think. Around a corner, past a stack of rusted anchors, and there—thirty meters ahead, near the slip where the smaller boats bobbed against their moorings—she saw him.

Victor was doubled over near a chain-link fence, one hand pressed against his shoulder, dark blood seeping between his fingers. His other hand gripped the fence wires as if he'd fall without it. Above him, a figure in a dark coat was already retreating toward the shore road, unhurried, professional.

Camille reached Victor just as his knees buckled. She caught him, feeling the warmth of blood soak into her blouse where her arm wrapped around his chest.

"Shot me," he said, his voice thin with shock, as if he were reporting a malfunction rather than a bullet wound. "Professional."

"Did you recognize him?"

Victor shook his head, then winced at the motion. "Surprised he didn't finish the job. That's what bothers me."

Camille hauled him upright, his weight dragging against her shoulder. The wound was in his upper arm, not his chest—a graze, maybe, or a deliberately controlled shot. The kind of message a professional sends when he wants the target to think about what nearly happened.

"We used a safehouse two summers ago," Victor managed, his breath ragged. "Môle des Pêcheurs. Little fishing shack, west side. Do you remember it?"

She remembered it. A cramped cabin where they'd hidden from Lidia's men after a botched job almost destroyed their partnership the first time. The irony sat bitter in her throat.

Half dragging Victor through the dark streets of Monaco's working harbor, Camille pushed through the pain in her calves and the exhaustion clawing at her mind. She thought of the police, actively searching for both of them by name. She thought of the blue ring she'd found in the vault, a chip embedded in its center—a chip Victor had planted on the real thief's accomplice months ago, without telling her. She thought about the man who'd shot him, deliberately letting him live.

Nothing about this night added up cleanly.

The fishing shack was exactly as abandoned as they'd left it—dust layers on every surface, a cot in the corner, a rusted first aid kit hanging on the wall. Camille lowered Victor onto the cot and tore open the kit, wincing at its condition but finding alcohol, clean gauze, and a needle if she needed to stitch.

"The bullet went through," she said, examining the wound. "Clean shot. You'll be fine if I can stop the bleeding."

Victor let out a dry laugh. "Falk's people don't miss. He wanted me alive. He wanted me to know he knows where I am."

Camille pressed gauze against the wound, her hands steady despite the tremor running through her arm. "Tell me the truth. Everything. No more protecting me from it."

Victor looked at her for a long moment, the overhead bulb catching the shadows under his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and raw, without the easy confidence she'd known him to wear like armor.

"I was planted."

The words hung in the air between them like gun smoke.

"Planted by whom?" she asked, not needing to release the pressure on his wound.

"Monaco's financial crime unit." He swallowed. "Three years ago. They identified Falk as the linchpin in a network of stolen high-value objects—art, jewelry, antiquities. Everything funneled through his private collectors circuit, all transactions off the books, all legitimate on paper. They needed someone inside. Someone who could get close to him."

"You were a cop."

"A informant." He held her gaze. "Contract arrangement. They had leverage on me from the old days, and they gave me a choice: flip permanently or go to prison for the Marseille job."

The Marseille job. Camille remembered it with the remembered sickness of betrayal—a safe he'd planned with her, then executed without warning her the police were coming down on their heads. She'd spent two years believing he'd sold her out to save himself.

"You used me to feed them information," she said. The words came out steady, but they cost her something to speak.

"No." Victor's jaw tightened. "I used my own network. My own partners were kept separate. But you—you were never meant to be in the frame. The auction house theft was meant to give me an opening with Falk, a way to prove I could still move high-end goods. Then Lidia got involved, and you got involved, and suddenly the whole operation needed to bend around a second target: you."

"The police. They have my name."

"They've had my name for months. They added yours when you became part of the case." He winced as Camille threaded the needle. "That's how I knew when you went into the auction house. I was supposed to have your back. I didn't."

Camille tested the first stitch, then continued. "The blue ring. The tracking chip."

"Insurance." His voice grew strained. "I planted it on Kovač's accomplice during a delivery in Nice three months ago. Meant to use it to track the pendant if Falk moved it without my involvement. But it got tangled up in the auction house vault when the accomplice brought it back through."

She finished the last stitch and bound the wound tightly. Blood soaked through the second layer of gauze before finally slowing. Victor's breathing had evened out enough that she could let go of her own worry.

"You're still hiding something," she said. "The shot. He didn't finish you. That means Falk wants you alive enough to talk. To bring you in for questioning. Which means Falk doesn't know yet that you're working against him—he only knows you've been circling the pendant."

"Or," Victor said, "that was the warning. The bullet was meant to tell me I'm on the wrong side of a chessboard I don't fully understand."

Camille studied him in the dim light. The man who'd betrayed her once, who'd been working for years to bring down a system that swallowed jewels like water and polished money until it gleamed clean. She'd spent so long believing the worst of him that accepting the whole truth felt like a betrayal of her own story.

But she'd also seen him risk his cover to help her escape. She'd seen him choose honesty when deception would have been easier. And right now, he was bleeding on a cot in a dusty fishing shack while a man who'd nearly killed him walked free.

"You said the police have my name because of the case," she said slowly. "But there's another reason they have it, isn't there? They flagged you as a known associate of mine. Which means Lidia knew how to find you. Which means Lidia knew about you before everyone else did."

Victor's face went still. "You're thinking Lidia fed the police my identity."

"Or Falk did. One of them wanted you compromised. Tonight's shot—that wasn't about the pendant. That was about burning your cover."

He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was rough. "If Falk knows I'm with the police, then this is over. There's no way into his network. The collector's identity will stay secret and the pendant will disappear into a vault that no one will ever open to find it."

"Eloise Marchand gave me a gala lanyard with my name on it," Camille said. "She expects me at the collector's soirée. She didn't give one to you."

Victor's eyes met hers. "You can't go in alone."

"I won't be alone." She finished the bandage and pressed her palm against his chest, feeling his heartbeat beneath her hand, strong and steady despite the night's events. "I'll have you on open channel. And I'll have the ledger."

"Camille—"

"This isn't a question." She cut him off. "I've spent four years running from what you are. I've spent the last three days learning what you've actually been doing. When the shot landed tonight, I ran toward it, not away. That's the answer you needed, and now I need you to be the voice in my ear when I walk into that room and face the man who bought everything from Falk."

Victor held her gaze for a long moment. Then, slowly, pain moving through his features, he nodded. "Then we do this together. You're going to walk in there, find the necklace, and find out who the collector is. And I'm going to stay alive long enough to meet you at the other side."

Camille looked down at the ledger still tucked inside her jacket. It was the evidence that would convict Marcel and Lidia and perhaps Falk too. But tonight, it was the only asset she had that Falk wouldn't expect her to carry.

She was going to need every advantage she could find.