Read Chapter 30: The Collector's Soirée

The lanyard was heavier than it looked. Camille looped it over her neck as she stepped from the hired Mercedes onto the cobbled forecourt of the Villa Aurora, feeling the laminated card press against her collarbone like a lie she was still learning to wear.

The villa rose above the harbor in tiers of white stone and glass, its terraces strung with lanterns that threw soft gold across the Mediterranean. Music drifted down—a string quartet, something by Satie—layered over the murmur of the very rich pretending not to notice one another.

Guards flanked the entrance, dark suits, earpieces. One stepped forward with a scanner.

Camille's palm was slick. She pressed the lanyard flat against her sternum, gave the guard her name with the easy confidence of someone accustomed to being expected.

The scanner beeped. The guard nodded.

She was inside.

The foyer was a cathedral of marble and mirrors, and the crowd parted around her in waves of silk and sapphires. She'd worn black—simple, severe, the kind of dress that made people look at her face instead of her neckline. The LED in her ear canal buzzed once, twice.

"Cami." Victor's voice, thin but steady, threaded through the open channel. "You're in. I'm reading your signal. Keep moving toward the back—the collector will hold court in the eastern salon."

She touched her earlobe, a gesture that looked like adjusting her earring. "Copy."

It felt strange to hear him like this, disembodied, a ghost in her ear. She'd left him propped against the headboard of the safehouse bed, his shoulder wrapped, his face gray with blood loss and stubbornness. He'd insisted on the open channel even as she'd insisted he rest.

*You'll be my eyes*, she'd said. *That's all I need.*

She hadn't said what else she needed. She hadn't let herself think it.

The villa unfolded around her in a series of rooms, each more opulent than the last, and Camille drifted through them with her champagne glass held like a shield, scanning faces, cataloging exits. The guests were a taxonomy of old money and new, oil magnates and tech billionaires, women draped in stones that could have funded small nations.

None of them wore what she was looking for.

The real pendant was a phoenix of sapphires and rose-cut diamonds, designed to catch light like a struck match. She would have recognized it from across a burning room.

It wasn't here. Not in the foyer. Not in the salon. Not on any throat or wrist she passed.

"Marcel's intel said the buyer wanted a private viewing," she murmured, angling her head toward her shoulder. "Maybe the piece stays in a vault room until the deal closes."

"Or maybe the deal is the show," Victor said. "Keep looking. The eastern salon. There's a door past the piano—staff only. If they're moving the piece, it'll come through there."

Camille moved.

The eastern salon was smaller, more intimate—damask walls, a frescoed ceiling, furniture that looked too fragile to sit on. The crowd here was thinner, older, richer. And there, near the windows that overlooked the harbor, laughing at something a silver-haired man had said—

Lidia.

Camille stopped breathing.

Lidia wore emerald silk that matched her eyes, her dark hair swept up to expose a throat draped in diamonds that weren't the pendant but were certainly worth a small principality. She held a glass of champagne like she'd been born with it in her hand, and her smile was the same smile Camille had trusted for three years.

The same smile that had sold her out to thieves in a vault.

"Camille?" Victor's voice sharpened. "You've gone quiet."

"Lidia's here." The words came out flat, even. "Front of the room. By the windows."

A pause. She could hear him thinking, the faint rustle of him shifting against the headboard.

"Okay. That's—that's okay. She expected to be here. She brokered this deal. We knew she'd be in the room."

"We didn't know she'd be *in the room*." Camille forced herself to breathe, forced her gaze away from Lidia's laughing face. "She's not wearing it. And I don't see it displayed anywhere."

"Then it's not a viewing party. It's a negotiation."

A waiter passed with a tray of oysters. Camille waved him off, watching Lidia over the rim of her champagne glass. The silver-haired man beside her was talking intently, gesturing toward the terrace, his voice a low murmur she couldn't catch.

"The buyer," she said. "I think the silver-haired man is the buyer. Lidia's pitching him something."

"Can you get closer?"

She moved, weaving through the crowd with the practiced ease of a woman who had spent years navigating party rooms full of people who wanted her to prove she deserved their business. She angled toward the windows, toward the fragment of conversation—

"—ensure the provenance is airtight," Lidia was saying. "The documentation is flawless. The chain of custody, verified. You needn't worry about any—complications."

The silver-haired man said something Camille couldn't hear. Lidia laughed again, a sound like breaking glass.

"Of course. That's the beauty of this piece. It's not been seen in public in decades. When it changes hands tonight, only the two of us—and the necessary parties—will know it ever did."

*Tonight.*

Camille's blood went cold.

"Vic," she breathed. "The swap is happening *tonight*. Here. She's not showing the pendant because it's not meant to be seen. They're going to move it directly from the vault to the buyer's hands, no display, no records. It'll be over before anyone knows it happened."

"Then we need to know where the vault is." His voice was tight, the strain of his injury bleeding through. "The staff door you passed—does it look secure?"

Camille glanced at it, a discreet panel of walnut between two bookcases. A guard stood in front of it, immobile, his face professionally blank.

"Guarded," she said.

"Then we need a distraction. Or we need to get you into his orbit, make him want to show you the piece."

She thought of the ledger, the weight of it in the small of her back, tucked beneath her dress. Her only leverage. Her only card to play.

"If I tell him I hold proof of the piece's true provenance?" she murmured. "That I can make his acquisition clean—or make it impossible?"

"He'll either invite you into the vault or have you shot."

"That's oddly comforting."

She felt, rather than saw, Victor's faint smile through the channel. "Stay alive, Cami."

"Working on it."

She was still watching Lidia when it happened. The silver-haired man—the buyer—turned to accept a fresh glass from a waiter, and in that moment of inattention, Lidia's gaze swept the room.

And found Camille.

The smile didn't falter. It widened. And Camille understood, with a drop of ice in her stomach, that she had not been unexpected at all. That Lidia had known she would come. Had *wanted* her to come.

Lidia raised her champagne glass in a small, elegant salute.

And then she turned back to the buyer, dismissing Camille entirely.

"She knows I'm here," Camille whispered. "She knew before I walked in. She's not surprised."

Silence on the channel. Then, Victor said, "Get out. Now. It's a trap."

"I can't." Camille's eyes stayed locked on Lidia's back, on the curve of her spine in that emerald dress, on the diamonds glittering at her throat. "If I run, I lose the only chance we have to find the pendant. She's counting on me to panic."

"Cami—"

"She's counting on me to be the same woman she fooled before." Camille set her champagne glass down on a nearby table, untouched. "She's wrong."

She took a step forward, toward the windows, toward Lidia and the buyer and the truth that hung between them like a noose.

"Whatever happens next," she said quietly, "tell me you have my back."

"Always," Victor said. "I've got you."

And Camille walked forward, into the heart of the trap, to spring it herself.