Read Chapter 33: The Fake Reveal

The night air had turned salt-thick by the time Victor’s tires squealed to a stop outside the auction house’s service entrance. Camille was out of the car before it fully halted, her heels clicking against wet cobblestone as she pushed through the unmarked steel door Henri had left ajar for them.

Inside, the building felt hollowed out—every display case emptied, every velvet bust swaddled in dark cloth. The sting had swept through like a tide, leaving only the bones of the operation behind.

“Evidence lockup,” Victor said, jogging up beside her, his voice tight in the open channel. “Henri said they logged everything in the basement vault before transport.”

Camille didn’t answer. She was already descending the spiral stairs, her mind racing through the auction house’s floor plan, through every security protocol she had ever memorized. The fake pendant—the one that had been on display all evening—would have been seized alongside the authentic pieces. She needed to see it. Touch it. Pull it apart.

The basement was cold, fluorescent, humming with the quiet machinery of a building in shutdown. A young Interpol clerk looked up from a folding table stacked with evidence bags.

“Laurent and Marchand?” he asked, checking a clipboard. “Agent Henri said you’d be coming. The seized jewelry is in the far locker—rack C, third shelf.”

Camille moved past him without acknowledgment. The locker door grated open, and there it was, sealed in a clear evidence pouch: the *Lumière de Minuit*. The fake. The trap.

She tore the pouch open.

“Careful,” Victor said, reaching for her wrist.

She shook him off. “This isn’t the piece I inspected this morning.”

Victor’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

Camille held the pendant up to the fluorescent light, turning it slowly. The chain was right. The claw settings were right. But the gem—the central sapphire, a flawless cornflower blue—had a microscopic inclusion at the lower girdle that she had documented in her pre-auction report. She had photographed it, measured it, cursed it.

It was gone.

“This is a different fake,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Someone swapped the fake.”

The room seemed to contract around them. Victor stepped closer, his shoulder brushing hers as he examined the stone.

“You’re sure?”

“I catalogued a tiny rutile needle here,” she said, gesture to the stone’s lower edge. “It was a flaw I used to verify provenance. This stone is clean. Too clean. It’s a copy of the copy.”

The implications hit her like cold water. The pendant at the auction house had been a decoy within a decoy. Lidia had known about the Interpol sting—or at least suspected it—and had orchestrated a second swap before the evening’s events. Which meant that somewhere between the auction house, the soirée, and the evidence locker, someone had pulled the fake and replaced it with an even more convincing imitation.

But that wasn’t what stopped her breath.

The fake in her hands had a setting that was slightly too deep. A jeweler’s eye might catch it. A thief’s hand might use it.

Camille produced a loupe from her pocket—a habit she’d never broken—and pressed it to her eye. She angled the pendant beneath the light, focusing on the bezel’s inner rim. There, scored into the metal in a micro-engraving nearly invisible to the naked eye, was a string of coordinates.

“Victor,” she said, her voice barely above a breath. “Get me a map.”

He pulled out his phone, unlocked it, and handed it to her. She typed the coordinates into the search field, watching the red pin drop onto the screen.

It landed on a private airstrip, seven kilometers east of Monaco, tucked into the hills above Cap-d'Ail.

“Falk’s plane,” Victor said, reading over her shoulder. His jaw tightened. “The hangar’s been leased under a shell company for three years. We flagged it when we first started tracking him, but we never got physical access.”

Camille pulled the loupe away, turning the pendant over in her hands. The message was clean, deliberate. Whoever had engraved it had known exactly who would find it.

“This wasn’t meant for Interpol,” she said slowly. “It was meant for a jeweler. Someone who would notice the swap, who would check the setting, who would know to look for a hidden message.”

“Lidia,” Victor said.

“Or Lidia left it for us,” Camille countered. “She knew we were at the soirée. She knew Henri was going to make his move. She might have anticipated that I would be the one to inspect the evidence afterward.”

Victor’s expression flickered—something between doubt and calculation. “Lidia doesn’t work for free. If she left this, she wants something in return.”

“Then we give it to her,” Camille said, pocketing the pendant. “After we retrieve the real necklace and hand Falk to Interpol, Lidia’s cooperation can be part of the negotiation. But if the coordinates are real, we don’t have time to debate it.”

She turned toward the stairs, but Victor caught her sleeve.

“Camille. If this is a trap—if Falk planted that message to lure us to the airstrip—we’re walking into a bullet.”

“Then we don’t walk,” she said, meeting his eyes. “We fly.”

They made the call to Henri from the car, engine idling at the curb while Victor spoke in clipped, urgent sentences into his phone. Camille watched the street, the sodium lights casting long shadows across the empty boulevard. The gala was hours away. The real necklace was still out there, and now they had a location.

Henri’s voice crackled over the speaker. “We can’t mobilize a full team to the airstrip without tipping off Falk’s air traffic contacts. You’ll have to go in ahead. We’ll stage a perimeter team five minutes out. If you can delay him—buy us time to get in position—we can end this tonight.”

“Delay him how?” Camille asked.

There was a pause on the line. “You’re the jeweler. The pendant you’re holding—the fake with the message—is worth enough to tempt a man like Falk. Offer it to him as a decoy. Make him think you’re selling out your own investigation.”

Camille’s stomach turned. “He’ll want proof of authenticity.”

“Then give him proof,” Henri said. “Show him the stone. Tell him you lifted it from the auction house before the sting. He knows you had access.”

Victor killed the call before Henri could say more. He turned to Camille, his face half-shadowed.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said quietly.

“I know.”

“If Falk checks the stone, if he has a jeweler on his payroll who inspects it even for a second, he’ll know it’s a fake. And then we’re both dead.”

Camille looked down at the pendant in her hands—the clean stone, the hidden coordinates, the ghost of a message that had pulled them this far. She thought of the real *Lumière de Minuit*, somewhere on Falk’s plane, waiting to vanish into a private collector’s vault. She thought of her father’s workshop, of the hours she’d spent learning the difference between a true stone and a lie.

“Then I’ll make sure he doesn’t inspect it,” she said, sliding the pendant into her coat. “Drive.”