Read Chapter 16: The Investor's Game

The café Lucas had chosen was the kind of place that made Camille feel instantly out of place—all white marble and sparse orchids, waiters who glided rather than walked. She had worn her sharpest blazer, the dark navy one she saved for board meetings, and still she felt underdressed.

Lucas was already seated at a corner table, his suit immaculate, his smile calibrated to disarm. He didn't stand when she approached.

"Camille," he said, as if they were old friends. "I'm glad you came alone."

She sat across from him, keeping her hands flat on the table. "You knew I would."

"I know a lot of things." He gestured to the waiter, who materialized with two espressos. "I know you've been to the warehouse in the 18th. I know your lawyer friend Véronique is very good at her job. I know you and Antoine have been sleeping with one eye open."

Camille didn't touch the coffee. "Then you also know I have evidence linking your Luxembourg shell company to the sabotage."

Lucas laughed softly, stirring his espresso with deliberate slowness. "What you have is a fabricated background check that someone—probably me—planted to make you think exactly that."

The words landed like a slap. She kept her face still.

"You're not the villain here, Camille." He set the spoon down. "I'm not trying to destroy AlgoSens. I'm trying to get what I'm owed."

"Which is?"

Lucas leaned back, studying her with the patience of a man who had already rehearsed this conversation a hundred times. "Seven years ago, I held a patent—a method for adaptive neural pruning. Small thing, really. But Maxime used it without a license when he built the original Sentio architecture. He never told anyone. Not his partners, not his investors. Especially not his mentor."

Camille's throat tightened. *Françoise.*

"I discovered the overlap two years ago," Lucas continued. "I approached Maxime privately. Offered him a fair deal—compensation, or a licensing agreement. He refused. Said the algorithm had evolved far beyond my patent, that my claim was legally worthless." Lucas shrugged. "He was probably right. But I'm not a litigator. I'm an investor."

"You're a blackmailer."

"I'm a businessman." Lucas's voice carried no heat. "Maxime went dark before we could reach a resolution. And now his code is sitting on encrypted drives in your office, and the company is bleeding talent, and the health ministry deadline is—what—ninety-six hours away?"

Camille said nothing.

"Here's my offer." Lucas placed a single sheet of paper on the table between them. "I back AlgoSens. Full funding, no board seats, no strings. The moment you deliver Maxime's original code to me—"

"Absolutely not."

"—you walk away with your career intact, Antoine keeps his job, and the ministry deal closes."

Camille looked at the paper but didn't touch it. "You want the algorithm. The core asset. The thing that makes AlgoSens worth anything."

"I want what I'm owed," Lucas repeated. "You have seventy-two hours. Deliver Maxime's code, and I'll wire the first tranche before lunch the same day. Refuse, and I'll make sure the board understands exactly how deep the sabotage goes—and who enabled it."

"Enabling it? I've been fighting to—"

"You've been defending Antoine." Lucas's eyes glittered. "That's not the same thing. The board wants results, not loyalty. And right now, you have no results. You have a dead founder, a raided office, and a mentor who wrote you a letter inside a scarf she gave you years ago."

Camille felt the blood drain from her face.

"Françoise and I have spoken," Lucas said, almost gently. "She's an old woman, Camille. She wants to protect her legacy. That doesn't make her your enemy. But it doesn't make her your ally either."

He stood, buttoning his jacket. "Seventy-two hours. You know where to find me."

He left the paper on the table. Camille sat motionless as the waiter drifted over to collect the empty espresso cups, and only then did she notice her hands were shaking.

---

She found Antoine in the server room, hunched over a terminal with cables snaking around his feet like dark vines. He looked up when she entered, reading her face in a single glance.

"It's worse than we thought," she said.

She told him everything. When she finished, Antoine was quiet for a long moment, staring at the blinking lights on the server rack.

"He didn't deny the shell company," Antoine said slowly. "He just said we'd *think* it was fabricated. That's not the same as saying it isn't real."

"Which means he's toying with us. Either way."

"Or he wants us to waste time verifying." Antoine stood, rolling his shoulders. "He's betting we can't deliver the code in seventy-two hours. We can't—Maxime's dead, and the drives are encrypted with a key we don't have."

Camille pulled the red scarf from her bag, running the fabric through her fingers. "But Lucie might have backup. Maxime was paranoid. He wouldn't have left his life's work in a single place."

"The bartender said Lucie vanished with him. If she's hiding, we have no way to—"

"We found the warehouse through a decrypted fragment. We can find her the same way." Camille pulled out her phone. "I know someone who worked with Lucie at Maxime's first startup. A data engineer named Sofia. She's in Lyon now, but she might know where Lucie went."

It took three calls and forty minutes of bargaining before Sofia relented. Lucie had moved to the suburbs outside Paris, a quiet town called Maisons-Laffitte, to stay with her sister after Maxime disappeared. Sofia gave them an address and made Camille promise to tell Lucie she was sorry.

The drive took an hour. Antoine's old Peugeot groaned on the highway, and Camille kept the scarf folded in her lap like a talisman. The neighborhood was leafy and calm, all brick houses and clipped hedges, an unlikely place for a woman on the run.

They parked across the street from a modest two-story house. Camille saw movement behind the curtain on the second floor.

"Wait," Antoine said, touching her arm. "Let me talk first. She might bolt if—"

But the front door opened before he could finish. A woman stepped out onto the porch, dragging a rolling suitcase behind her. She was tall, with chestnut hair pulled into a hasty knot, wearing a traveling coat and the kind of harried expression that said she was already late.

Lucie Moreau. Alive. And leaving.

Camille was out of the car before she could think. "Lucie!"

The woman froze, hand on the handle of a taxi that had just pulled into the driveway. Her eyes widened with recognition—not of Camille, but of something else. Fear.

"Please," Camille said, approaching with her hands raised, the scarf spilling from her grip. "I'm not here to hurt you. I work for Maxime. At AlgoSens. I need to talk to you."

Lucie's gaze dropped to the red scarf in Camille's hand. Something flickered across her face—confusion, then recognition, then something darker.

"You have Françoise's scarf." Lucie's voice was barely above a whisper. "Why?"

Camille stopped three feet away, lowering her hands. "She gave it to me. Years ago. I thought—"

"Thought it was a gift." Lucie's laugh was hollow. She glanced at the taxi, then back at Camille. "She's watching you. Through that scarf. Always was."

The words hung in the cold air. Antoine had reached them now, standing just behind Camille, his presence steady and silent.

"What do you mean?" Camille asked.

Lucie looked at the scarf again, then back at Camille's face, and something in her expression softened. "You really don't know, do you? You really think she ever cared about you."

The taxi driver honked. Lucie ignored him.

"My flight leaves in four hours," she said. "I was supposed to be gone before anyone found me. But"—she hesitated, then reached into her coat—"you came all this way. And you brought that scarf."

She pulled out a USB stick, worn and scratched, and held it between two fingers.

"Maxime gave this to me the night he left. Backups of everything. The real code, the early builds, the emails that explain why he ran." Lucie's eyes met Camille's. "I was going to take it to Canada and never look back. But you're here, and you're wearing his mentor's scarf, and I don't know if that makes you safe or the most dangerous person I've met all year."

She pressed the USB stick into Camille's palm.

"I'll tell you everything. But not here." She nodded toward the taxi. "There's a café two blocks away. I have forty minutes before I need to leave for the airport."

Camille closed her fingers around the warm metal.

"Thank you," she said.

Lucie's smile was thin and fleeting. "Don't thank me yet. You haven't heard what Maxime found out about Françoise." She glanced at the scarf still dangling from Camille's hand. "And you haven't figured out why she gave you that scarf in the first place."