Read Chapter 3: The Invitation

The call came at seven minutes past midnight, buzzing through the silent apartment like an ill-tempered wasp. Camille had been staring at the ceiling, the tarnished business card balanced on her sternum, rising and falling with each breath. Victor Devereux’s name. A Monaco number. And beneath it, in handwriting she remembered too well, *Look closer, Camille.*

She answered on the fourth ring.

“You’re awake,” Victor said. No greeting. No apology for the hour. His voice had the same velvet sheen it always carried, polished by a decade of half-truths and full deceptions. “Good. I was worried you’d have that card framed by now, or burned.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to show you something. And I want you to see it before the sun does, because after sunrise, it stops being useful.”

Camille sat up, pressing the phone harder against her ear. The card slipped onto her duvet, the tarnished edge catching the streetlight through the window. “You have the necklace.”

“I have information. Better than the necklace, at this hour.” A pause, the faint clink of glass on glass. “You spent the evening chasing shadows through vault manifests and shipping records. I spent it with a man who knows the name of the forger. The real name, not the shell company. He’s willing to talk, but he wants to do it face to face, and he wants you there.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re the one who spotted the fake,” Victor said. “He respects that. Also, he doesn’t trust me alone in a room with money, which is frankly insulting.”

Camille swung her legs off the bed, padding barefoot to the window that overlooked the harbor. The yachts bobbed in the dark water, their mast lights like a constellation fallen to earth. Somewhere out there, in one of the white towers along the quay, Victor Devereux was sitting in a suite he couldn’t afford, spinning a story designed to make her bite.

The rational part of her mind, the part that had built a reputation on precision and proof, screamed caution. Victor had ruined her. He had walked into her father’s workshop with a smile and walked out with the one piece that mattered most, leaving her to take the fall. She had spent five years rebuilding, and he had not aged a day, not gained an ounce of shame.

But the clasp on the counterfeit necklace was machined to tolerances that required a Swiss CNC rig. The trident hallmark was blunted at the exact angle of a worn die, and that die, she was certain, had once struck pieces for her father. Someone inside her family’s orbit had reached into the past and pulled out a ghost. Victor was right about one thing: the forger had inside knowledge.

Professional pride said she should go alone, gather the intel, cut Victor out of the fee entirely.

Desperation said she couldn’t afford the time to do it alone.

“Where?” she said.

“The Blue Note. It’s a club on the lower deck of the Monte Carlo Casino’s private annex. You know it?”

“I know it’s a front for high-stakes backgammon.”

“Among other things. Come through the service entrance on the east side. Ask for Jean-Luc; he’ll bring you up. Fifteen minutes, Camille. After that, the man loses his nerve, and I lose my cut.”

“You have a finder’s fee in mind?”

“Ten percent of insured value. I told you on the terrace, and I don’t haggle twice.”

He hung up before she could argue.

---

The east service entrance of the casino annex was a steel door painted to look like rusted copper, tucked between a delivery bay and a dumpster that smelled of old champagne and citrus. Camille arrived in a black trench coat over the same charcoal dress she’d worn to the auction, hair pinned, no jewelry. She knocked twice, and a slot slid open at eye level.

“Jean-Luc,” she said.

The slot closed. The door opened. A man with a shaved head and a neck like a fire hydrant gestured her inside, then led her through a narrow corridor lined with electrical panels and stacked crates of wine. The air shifted from industrial to opulent as they passed through a velvet curtain into a space that felt like a jewelry box turned inside out—dark lacquer walls, brass fixtures, low amber light pooling on green felt tables.

Jean-Luc stopped outside a door at the end of a corridor. He knocked once, then stepped aside.

Camille pushed the door open.

Victor sat at a round table in the center of the room, back to the wall, a glass of cognac in front of him. He looked the same as he had on the terrace—sharp cheekbones, dark hair silvered at the temples, the tailored suit of a man who understood that appearance was the first and most effective lie. Across from him, in a chair angled toward the door, sat a woman.

She was fortyish, with cropped platinum hair and small, quick eyes that measured Camille the way a jeweler measures a stone—for flaws, for weight, for value. Her hands were folded on the table, and when she saw Camille, she unfolded them to reveal a cigarette case made of gunmetal.

“Camille Laurent,” the woman said. Her accent was French but flattened by years abroad—Geneva, maybe, or Luxembourg. “Victor said you’d come alone. He didn’t say you’d come angry.”

“I’m not angry,” Camille said, taking the seat Victor offered. “I’m skeptical. There’s a difference.”

The woman smiled. “My name is Odile Marchand. I work in logistics—customs, brokerage, the careful movement of objects across borders. Eight days ago, I signed a manifest for a crate that left a private workshop in Marseille. The crate was marked as an industrial printer. The contents were not.”

Camille leaned forward. “What was in it?”

Odile tapped her cigarette case against the table. “A plaster mold. Reversed, negative, wrapped in acid-free tissue. And a set of jeweler’s tools—old ones, custom handles, the kind a master has made to fit their hand.” She paused. “The mold had a marking on its base. A trident. Blunted, worn with age. I photograph everything that passes through my warehouse, Ms. Laurent. I was curious, so I kept a copy.”

She slid a photograph across the table. Camille picked it up.

The image was grainy, taken from above and slightly to the side, but the detail was unmistakable. The mold’s base bore the same trident hallmark she’d examined under her loupe that afternoon—the blunted tines, the worn edge where the die had been struck thousands of times. The tools beside it were arranged in a leather roll, and the largest of them, a burnishing tool, had a handle wrapped in faded blue tape.

Camille’s breath caught. She knew that tape. It had been on her father’s bench for as long as she could remember, a strip of electrical tape wrapped around the handle to mark it as his. He had never let anyone use that tool. He had said it was his luck, his signature, the thing that had never failed him.

“I took that photo on the condition that I never reveal the client’s name,” Odile said. “But I also took it knowing that whoever commissioned that mold was going to use it to make a forgery. You found it, which tells me I was right. The question is whether you want the name.”

“You said you had a condition,” Camille said.

“The condition is that you don’t go to the police with my name. I’m not the thief. I’m a broker. I keep records, and I sell them to people who need them.” She looked at Victor. “Victor vouched for your discretion. Although given your history, I’m not sure that’s much of a recommendation.”

Victor raised his glass. “I’m a changed man, Odile. Mostly.”

Camille set the photograph down. Her hand was steady, but inside, something had shifted—a cold stone dropping through her gut. The tools in that image could have come from any bench, but the blue tape was specific. Her father had died three years ago. His workshop had been auctioned off to settle debts, the tools sold in lots to collectors and secondhand dealers. She had not been able to bear attending the sale, and she had never asked where the lots went.

“Who commissioned the mold?” she asked.

Odile stubbed out a cigarette she hadn’t lit. “I don’t have the name. The invoice was routed through a shell company registered in Delaware, which is not my specialty. But the shell is owned by a trust, and the trust’s beneficiary is a person of interest to you.” She paused. “His name is Claude Reynard.”

Camille’s spine went rigid. “Claude Reynard is dead.”

“Officially,” Odile said. “He died in a boating accident off Corsica four years ago. But beneficiaries have a habit of resurfacing when the money is right. The trust was funded six weeks after his death, which is either very optimistic estate planning or evidence that death was more of a suggestion.”

Victor set his glass down. “Reynard was your father’s partner, wasn’t he? The one who handled the business side, the accounts, the insurance on the collection.”

Camille nodded, barely. Claude Reynard had been her father’s most trusted associate, a silver-haired man with a quiet laugh who had taught Camille to play chess and had emptied their family accounts within a month of her father’s first stroke. When he died, the remaining assets had vanished into probate and legal fees. She had assumed he took the secrets to his grave.

“The necklace is in London,” Victor said. “Meanwhile, the money trail points at a dead man who knows more about your father’s work than anyone alive.” He spread his hands. “This is what I’m selling, Camille. Ten percent of insured value, forty-eight hours to deliver the real piece back. I have a team ready to move tonight if you give me the word.”

Camille looked at the photograph again. The blue tape. Her father’s hand. She had spent years trying to forget that bench, the smell of solvent and metal filings, the way he’d hummed off-key when a piece was going well. Now a dead man was using his tools to fake his work, and Victor Devereux—the same man who had almost destroyed her—was the only one standing between her and the truth.

She slid the photograph into her coat pocket. She stood.

“I’ll verify what you’ve given me,” she said. “If it checks out, you get your fee.” She looked at Victor. “But if this is another lie, Victor, I don’t just walk away. I make sure you never work in this town again.”

Victor smiled, slow and warm, the smile of a man who has already counted the winnings. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

Camille turned and left the room. Behind her, the door clicked shut, and she heard Odile’s low laugh, and then Victor’s voice, too quiet to make out words.

She was halfway down the corridor when she realized her hand was still in her pocket, fingers pressed against the photograph. And beneath the photograph, still there, was the tarnished business card.

*Look closer, Camille.*

She pulled it out. On the back, in the same handwriting, was a new line she hadn’t noticed before—or perhaps Victor had added it when she wasn’t looking. The ink was fresh.

*Ask about the London vault.*

Camille stopped. The London vault. Victor had mentioned it on the terrace, claimed the real necklace was sitting in a bank in London. But the address he’d refused to give. Now, here, scrawled on the back of a card in the same hand that had sold her father’s secrets, was an invitation she could not ignore.

She pocketed the card and walked out into the Monaco night, the photograph burning against her heart, the city glittering around her like a stage set designed to make her forget that every light was a lie.