Read Chapter 6: The Debt Collector

The stairwell door slammed behind them, the echo of Ferrand’s boots still hammering up from below. Camille’s lungs burned as she took the last flight two steps at a time, Victor’s hand clamped around her wrist, pulling her through the rooftop access door into the gray pre-dawn air.

The industrial quarter stretched below them in a grid of dark rooftops and dead streetlights. The container port glowed on the horizon, a haze of sodium light. Somewhere out there, a sealed box held the real Cœur de Neptune, waiting for 0600.

“Car’s on Rue Michau,” Victor said, breathless, already moving along the parapet toward a fire escape ladder on the far side. “Two blocks east.”

Camille yanked her wrist free. “You have a plan for the fact that Ferrand is probably calling Thomas Falk right now? Or did that detail slip your mind too?”

Victor paused, one hand on the rusted rail. His jaw tightened. “Falk doesn’t take calls at five in the morning. He’s a creature of habit—wakes at eight, espresso, then destroys his enemies after breakfast. We have three hours.”

“Comforting.” She followed him down the ladder, her heels catching on the rungs. The metal clanged, loud as a gunshot in the quiet. Below, a dog barked somewhere in the warren of warehouses. “How much do you owe him?”

Victor dropped the last few feet and turned, wiping dust from his palms. “Two point three million.”

Camille stopped halfway down the ladder. “Two *point three*.”

“It was for securities. Art-backed loans. The market shifted, my partners fled, and I was left holding the paper. Falk bought the debt from the original lender at a discount, and now he holds me like a promissory note.” Victor’s voice was flat, unemotional, as if reciting a balance sheet. “He’s been patient. Patient men are the most dangerous. But patience has an expiration date, and Ferrand just told him I’m still in Monaco.”

She finished her descent, landing with a soft thud. The alley smelled of diesel and salt. “So you’re not just a thief trying to clear his name. You’re a dead man walking, and you’ve dragged me into your wake.”

“That’s one way to see it.”

“It’s the only way to see it.” She stepped closer, close enough to see the faint scar along his jawbone, the one he’d had before she met him—a souvenir from a deal gone wrong in Palermo. “You used me. You knew Ferrand would be there, and you needed a witness with credibility so he wouldn’t just kill you on sight.”

Victor’s eyes met hers. For a moment, the mask slipped—not into guilt, but into something rawer. Exhaustion. Desperation. “Yes.”

The admission landed like a blow. Camille had expected him to deny it, to spin another layer of charm. But he stood there, unshaven and soaked with sweat, and just took it.

“The only way I clear Falk’s debt is with cash,” Victor said. “The only cash I can access quickly is the finder’s fee from the auction house for recovering the necklace. Ten percent of fair market value—that’s five point four million. Enough to pay Falk, cover my debts, and leave me clean. But I can’t collect if I’m dead, and I can’t find the necklace from a shallow grave in the hills. You’re not my shield, Camille. You’re my *deadline*.”

She stared at him. “I’m your what?”

“If I’m working with a legitimate jeweler—someone the auction house trusts, someone with a reputation—then there’s a paper trail. A reason I’m still alive. Falk won’t kill me while I’m useful to a client who can pay. He’s a businessman first. He knows I’m worth more moving than dead.” Victor spread his hands. “You’re not a shield. You’re collateral. He won’t risk harming someone connected to the Grimaldi circle. Too much heat.”

“So I’m insurance.” Camille laughed, a short bitter sound. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It should make you feel safe. Whoever’s after me won’t risk touching you. You’re the one person in Monaco who can get us into the auction house’s records, the provenance files, the security footage without raising questions. Falk doesn’t have that access. Neither does Ferrand. You’re not just useful to me—you’re essential to the recovery. And Falk knows a recovered necklace means I can pay him.”

Camille turned away, walking toward the mouth of the alley. Her mind churned. Everything he said made a certain crooked, ruthless sense. Victor had always been a master of turning weakness into structure, making his own survival the load-bearing wall of any deal.

“And if we fail?” she asked, without looking back. “If the container ships out and the necklace disappears into a private collection in Dubai or São Paulo?”

A pause. Then Victor’s footsteps on the pavement. “Then Falk comes for me, and I’ll give him what he wants.”

“Which is?”

“A name. The one who took your necklace. He gets the thief, and he gets the seven hundred thousand he originally lent me—paid in blood or gold, he doesn’t care which.” Victor stopped beside her at the alley’s mouth. “I told him I could find Bellamy. That’s the assurance that’s kept me breathing this long.”

Camille’s head snapped toward him. “You told Falk Bellamy is alive?”

“I told him what I suspected. That the apprentice who faked his death in Sardinia was still working, still producing masterpieces for a shadow network.” Victor’s expression grew cold. “If I don’t prove it, Falk will assume I lied to buy time. And you know what he does to liars.”

The words settled like cold stones in her stomach. She knew of Thomas Falk by reputation—an art dealer who worked the gray spaces between auction houses and private collections, who acquired pieces through means that never quite crossed into legally actionable. He was dangerous in the way deep water was dangerous. Calm surface, crushing pressure below.

“So this isn’t about helping me,” Camille said slowly. “It’s about you delivering Bellamy to Falk as payment.”

“It’s about both.” Victor stepped closer. “Camille, I know what I did to you. Five years ago, when I took that commission and vanished, I left you to take the fall. I was young and stupid and desperate, and I told myself you’d survive it—and you did. You restored your reputation, built your workshop, became the most trusted appraiser on the Riviera. I, on the other hand, have been running ever since. I’m tired of running.”

His voice cracked on the last word, just slightly. Camille hated that she noticed.

“I don’t expect forgiveness,” Victor continued. “I expect a deal. Help me find Bellamy and recover the necklace. I’ll clear my debt, you clear yours. We both walk away whole. But if we don’t work together, right now, in the next twenty-eight hours, then Falk will find me, Bellamy will vanish into the network he’s built, and the real Cœur de Neptune will be broken down and sold as individual stones to buyers who’ll never know what they held.”

Camille thought of the necklace—her father’s final work, the one masterpiece he’d poured every skill into before his hands began to shake. The Cœur de Neptune wasn’t just an artifact. It was a conversation with a ghost.

“Twenty-eight hours,” she said.

“Two-oh-six p.m. tomorrow. Falk’s deadline. Then the container’s gone, and my options run out.”

A car engine turned over nearby. Victor’s driver—a wiry Corsican in a plain dark suit—pulled up to the curb, headlights cutting through the pre-dawn gloom.

Camille looked at the car, then at Victor. “Bellamy’s workshop was cleaned out of the molds that matter. But he had a second site. Somewhere he worked alone, after hours, when he didn’t want the foreman to know.”

Victor raised an eyebrow. “You know where?”

“I know what he left behind.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone, opening a photo she’d taken before they fled—a close-up of the hairline crack in the master mold, visible in the frame’s capture. She zoomed in and handed it to him. “That crack is a tool signature. Every craftsman leaves one. Bellamy’s father taught him to disguise it, but under stress, he reverts to old habits. If we can find the forger’s other workbench, I can match it against the records of his past forgeries. Find the pattern. Find the man.”

Victor studied the photo. For the first time since they’d met again, something shifted in his expression—not hope, exactly, but a flicker of professional respect.

“Then let’s move,” he said. “Falk eats breakfast at eight.”