Read Chapter 35: Decompression

The floodlights had died with Falk’s surrender, leaving the airstrip to the pale wash of a Mediterranean dawn. Camille stood at the edge of the tarmac, the real necklace—finally, *actually* real—cold and heavy in her palm. Its chain was still warm from Falk’s pocket. She closed her fist around it and felt the stones bite into her skin like a promise kept.

Victor came up beside her, silent, his hands shoved into the pockets of a jacket that had seen better nights. His tie was gone. His shirt was untucked. He looked less like a con man and more like a man who had simply run out of tricks and decided to tell the truth instead.

“You’re holding it wrong,” he said quietly.

“I’m not holding it at all. I’m crushing it.”

“Same thing.”

She loosened her fingers. Emeralds caught the first true light of morning and threw it back in green shards. Camille had appraised stones worth more than most people earned in a lifetime. She had held auction lots that could fund a small nation. But this necklace was not just value. It was vindication. It was her name, returned to her.

“We need to get it back,” Victor said. “The auction house. One hour, Henri said.”

“Henri said a lot of things.” Camille looked past him to where the Interpol agent was supervising the loading of Falk’s men into a transport van. He stood with his back to them, clipboard in hand, calm as a banker balancing a ledger. “I haven’t decided if I believe any of them.”

Victor followed her gaze. “You believe me.”

“Do I?”

He didn’t answer. That was answer enough.

---

The drive back to Monte Carlo was quiet. Henri had offered a car and a driver—a young agent who kept his eyes on the road and said nothing. Camille sat in the back with the necklace in her lap, wrapped in a nondescript cloth napkin she’d taken from the airstrip’s small lounge. It felt almost disrespectful, carrying something so valuable in something so ordinary. But that was the trick, wasn’t it. The ordinary was the best hiding place.

Victor sat beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of his arm through his sleeve. He hadn’t slept. Neither had she. They were both running on adrenaline and the ragged edge of something she wasn’t ready to name.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“We hand it over. You get your clearance. Your reputation. The auction house will want to announce the recovery within the week. You’ll be a hero.”

“I’ll be the woman who got robbed and then cleaned up her own mess.”

“That’s worse. Better press.”

She almost smiled. Almost. “And you?”

Victor looked out the window at the sea, glittering and indifferent. “Henri’s file is gone. But the warrant isn’t. He said he’d handle it, but I’ve learned not to trust promises made by men with badges who sleep with one eye open.”

“You think he’ll betray you?”

“I think he’ll do whatever serves the operation. Today, that’s me walking free. Tomorrow, it might be something else. That’s not betrayal. That’s policy.”

Camille turned the necklace over in her hands, feeling the weight of the stones, the craftsmanship of the setting. Whoever had made the fakes had been good. Nearly too good. But they hadn’t been *her*. She knew the real thing the way she knew her own heartbeat.

“I had a plan,” she said slowly. “Before all of this. When I thought you’d sold me out to Falk. I was going to find you. I was going to make you pay for what you did.”

Victor didn’t flinch. “And now?”

“Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. I just know I’m not going to do that.”

He turned to look at her, and for a moment, the car, the driver, the road, the sea—all of it fell away. There was only Victor’s face, tired and honest in a way she’d never seen him be. He’d always been performing. Even in their best moments, there had been a layer of theatricality to him, a sense that he was watching himself, adjusting his performance. Now there was nothing left to perform. He was just a man who had made a mess of his life and was trying, in his own crooked way, to put it back together.

“I loved you once,” he said. “That was true. That was always true.”

Camille felt something crack inside her, a fissure she hadn’t known was there. “And now?”

“Now I’m hoping it’s not too late to find out if it can be true again. On new terms. No cons. No games. Just—” He stopped, searching for the word. “Just us.”

She didn’t answer. She wasn’t ready to. But she didn’t pull away, either, and after a moment, Victor’s hand found hers, loosely, a question more than a claim. She let it rest there.

---

The auction house was a fortress of white marble and glass, set back from the Boulevard des Moulins behind gates that had been closed every night since the original theft. Camille had expected to feel triumphant walking through them again. Instead, she felt hollow, as if the morning had burned through her reserves and left only the dry scaffolding of duty.

The director met them in the lobby, a thin, nervous man named Moreau who had spent the past three weeks assuring insurance investigators, clients, and the press that the necklace would be recovered and the house’s reputation restored. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept in a month. Camille didn’t offer comfort.

“Is it—is it intact?” Moreau asked, staring at the cloth bundle in her hands as if it contained a live explosive.

“It’s real,” Camille said. “That’s the important part. I’ll want a full appraisal in the vault. Witnessed. Recorded. And I want the paperwork to reflect that I was the one who returned it.”

Moreau blinked. “Of course. Naturally. We’ll—we’ll make sure everything is in order.”

“I know you will. Because if it isn’t, I’ll have Henri provide Interpol’s full report to the press, and we can all discuss in public exactly how your security failed to notice a hole in your own floor plan.”

Moreau swallowed. He led them to the vault, a circular room of steel and LED light that smelled faintly of ozone and cleaning solvent. Camille placed the necklace on a velvet tray in the center of the appraisal table. She unwrapped it slowly, letting the chain unspool, letting the stones catch the light.

It was beautiful. It had always been beautiful. That was the tragedy of it.

The digital scale hummed. The loupe slid from her pocket. She worked in silence, methodical, cataloguing weight, clarity, color, setting. The flaws she knew by heart. The tiny nick in the fourteenth stone that no one but a master would ever notice. The way the clasp caught, just slightly, from a repair done decades ago in a workshop that no longer existed.

“It’s real,” she said finally. “It’s the original.”

Moreau exhaled. “Thank God.”

“Thank me,” Camille said. “I’m the one who got it back.”

---

Later, after the paperwork was signed and the necklace was locked away, Camille found Victor waiting on the terrace outside the auction house’s private lounge. He was leaning against the balustrade, looking out at the Mediterranean, which had turned from grey to gold as the sun climbed higher.

She came to stand beside him. “You didn’t have to stay.”

“I didn’t want to leave.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

They stood in silence for a long moment. Camille felt the weight of the past weeks pressing down on her—the theft, the chase, the lies, the near-misses, the moments when she’d been sure she would never untangle the truth from the performance. She had done what she set out to do. She had proven her innocence. She had recovered the necklace. She had brought Falk down.

And yet.

“I don’t know what happens now,” she said. “To me. To you. To—” She gestured vaguely between them. “This.”

“One thing at a time,” Victor said. “We’re both still standing. That’s a start.”

“I trusted you once. You broke that trust.”

“I know.”

“And then I trusted you again, because I had no choice. And you kept your word. But that doesn’t mean I trust you now.”

“I know that too.”

She turned to face him fully. “I need you to tell me something. And I need you to mean it. Not because you want something from me. Not because you’re trying to earn back points. Just because it’s true.”

Victor met her eyes. His were the same brown they’d always been, but there was no game in them now. No calculation. Just a man, tired and honest, standing in the light of a morning he hadn’t been sure he’d see.

“Ask me anything.”

Camille took a breath. “Are we partners? Or are we still just two people conning each other into thinking we can be more than what we are?”

Victor didn’t look away. “I don’t know yet. But I’m willing to find out. If you are.”

The sea glittered below them. Somewhere in the city, a church bell rang the hour. Camille thought about all the days she had spent alone in her workshop, trusting no one, relying on no one, building a fortress around her heart so high that even she couldn’t see over the walls.

Victor wasn’t castle material. He was more like a scaffolding—unsteady, temporary, prone to collapse. But scaffolding was useful. It helped you build things you couldn’t build alone.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s find out.”

Victor’s smile was small and cautious, like a man testing ice. But it was real. She was almost sure it was real.

---

By the time they left the auction house, the sun was high and the city was awake. Camille had the feeling of a door closing behind her—not on danger, exactly, but on the version of herself that had walked into this case alone, suspicious, armored against everyone and everything.

She didn’t know what the next chapter held. She didn’t know if Victor would keep his word, or if Henri’s promises would hold, or if Falk’s arrest would stick. She didn’t know if the collector would surface again, or if Lidia’s silence was a debt that would come due.

But the necklace was back. Her name was clean. And she was not alone.

That was enough. For now.