Read Chapter 33: The Missing Vintage

The rain came sideways, hammering the slate roof of the cellars like a hundred fists. Camille had been awake for hours, listening to the wind tear through the vines, her body coiled with the instinct of every grower who knew that a Bordeaux storm in late spring could mean either salvation or ruin.

She pulled her oilskin coat tighter and stepped out into the night. The electricity had flickered twice already, and the yard was a river of mud. Jean-Marc had gone home hours ago, and the rest of the harvest crew had scattered after the documentary crew packed up their lights and left. She was alone.

Her boots squelched toward the utility shed first, checking the barrels. Then she stopped. Her heart hammered.

A light. Gone now. But she had seen it—a pinprick of yellow through the pines, where no light should be.

The hidden plot. Her mother's legacy. The cuttings she and Lucas had babied through the winter, the ones that produced the grapes for the wine that had just won gold.

Camille broke into a sprint, mud sucking at her heels, rain stinging her face like needles. She crashed through the treeline, branches whipping across her cheeks, and when she broke into the clearing, she stopped dead.

The world went silent. The rain didn't matter. The wind didn't matter.

Half the vines were gone. Not broken. Not withered. *Gone*. Clean cuts at the base, rootstock left raw and bleeding sap into the storm, the canes themselves vanished into the dark.

She fell to her knees beside the nearest severed trunk. A clean diagonal slice. Professional. Done with a sharpened pruning tool, not a carelessly swung axe. Someone knew what they were doing. Someone knew exactly how much they could take without killing the plant—not that it mattered. Cutting the canes now, before véraison, destroyed the year's crop. The grapes that would have become her first fully legitimate vintage, the one that would dig them out of debt, were now nothing more than compost in some thief's truck.

"No," she whispered. Then louder: "No, no, no, no—"

She scrambled to her feet, her chest tight, her vision swimming. She counted. Row by row, her fingers trembling as she traced the stumps. Fourteen of them. Fourteen plants. Sixty percent of the total yield. Gone.

Something glinted at her feet. A twist of wire, the kind used to tie trellis supports. But this one was copper, not the galvanized steel she used. And it was tied in a neat double loop—a signature knot, the kind a man who had done the same job for forty years used without thinking.

She knew that knot.

Her uncles had planted their own plot years ago, on the southern slope that caught the afternoon sun. Old-school Bordelais to the bone. Never adapted, never changed their methods, used the same copper wire in the same double loop because "the modern stuff breaks, and don't you forget it, girl."

Bernard's voice echoed in her head. *Don't you forget it, girl.*

She didn't.

Camille pulled out her phone. The screen was slick with rain, but she managed to dial Lucas.

"Camille? It's three in the morning—"

"Get to the château. Now. Bring the tracking equipment in the library—the GPS unit, the one Jean-Marc used to map the new parcels."

"Camille, what's wrong?"

"Half the hidden plot is gone. Someone cut the vines. And I know who did it."

The line went silent for a moment. Then Lucas's voice came back, low and hard. "I'm on my way."

---

An hour later, with dawn still an hour off, Lucas knelt in the mud, his high-powered flashlight sweeping over the severed trunks. He picked up one of the copper wires, turning it over in his fingers.

"This is enough to take to the gendarmerie," he said.

"Not without proof they did it themselves." Camille's teeth were chattering. She had refused to go inside, had stayed out in the rain as if proximity to the damage could somehow reverse it. "Bernard would just say someone stole his wire, or that he's been using this brand for years—which is true. He'll lawyer it into oblivion."

Lucas stood up. "Then we don't go to the gendarmerie. We follow the trail."

He pointed toward the southeastern edge of the clearing, where the undergrowth had been trampled. The mud held tracks—not bootprints, but the wide, churned ruts of a small truck. The rain was washing them away, but enough remained.

Lucas pulled out the GPS unit and began walking, his head down, his flashlight tracing the path. Camille followed, her heart a cold hard stone in her chest. Every step felt like surrender. The vines were gone. Her mother's legacy, the wine that had finally given her validation, the future she had been building toward for months—all of it, bleeding sap into the mud.

They emerged onto a farm track that ran behind the château's eastern boundary. The ruts continued, fresh and deep.

"Where does this lead?" Lucas asked.

"I don't know. I've never been down here." Camille frowned. "It's not on any of the maps."

They followed it for twenty minutes, the track curving downhill through a dense copse of pines until it dead-ended at a locked metal gate. Beyond the gate, visible through the rain-streaked bars, was a perfectly manicured vineyard. Rows of Cabernet Franc stretched into the gray gloom, trellised and neat, young leaves just starting to unfurl.

"Whose land is this?" Lucas's voice was tight.

Camille stepped closer to the gate. A sign hung crookedly on the post, listing badly in the wind.

*Château Haut-Bref — Propriété de B. Delacroix*

She laughed. It came out broken, a sound she didn't recognize.

"Haut-Bref," she repeated. "Bernard's second property. He's been trying to sell it for years. He calls it his 'retirement investment.'"

"He took your cuttings to his own vineyard?"

"Not took. Stole. But he can't plant them that fast—they'd need weeks of nursery prep—"

Lucas shook his head. "He doesn't have to plant them yet. He just has to keep them alive until the appeal. If he wins control of the estate, you're gone, and he has his own champion vines ready to go in. He's not stealing your vintage, Camille. He's stealing your future."

The cold in her chest turned to ice. Of course. The hostile takeover she had assumed was dead—the appeal in four weeks, Bernard's silence since the documentary aired, his suspiciously cordial behavior at the truce meeting—all of it made sense now. He wasn't negotiating. He was waiting.

And while she had been busy fending off Vasseur's foreclosure and managing the media storm, Bernard had been dismantling her proof.

"If I can't produce the wine, I can't pay the debt. If I can't pay the debt, the château goes to auction. And if the château goes to auction..." She trailed off.

"Bernard buys it at a discount through a shell company," Lucas finished. "And the whole thing is his anyway."

Camille gripped the gate. The metal was cold and slick, the rain stinging her knuckles. On the other side of the bars, Bernard's vineyard lay quiet and smug under the storm, half a million euros' worth of stolen cuttings tucked away somewhere inside its barns.

"We need to get in there," she said.

"We can't just break in—"

"I don't mean the land." She turned to Lucas, her eyes burning. "I mean the cellar. The ledgers. Bernard has kept a written record of every transaction he's ever made on this estate since my father died. I found a loose page once, years ago—a note about a cash payment he received from a man in Libourne. I didn't understand it then. But now I think I do."

"What man?"

Camille meeting Vasseur's eyes across the documentary footage flashed through her mind. The foreclosed notice. The blackmail attempt. The way Vasseur had watched her mother with something between contempt and hunger.

"Philippe Vasseur," she said. "Bernard's been in bed with him from the start. And if I can prove it, the appeal collapses. The creditors back off. And this land thief gets exactly what he deserves."

Lucas was silent for a long moment. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a skeleton key ring—the kind used by estate managers to open every lock on a property.

"Jean-Marc gave me a spare set when I helped him inventory the cellars last month. He said if anything ever went wrong, I was to get it to you."

Camille's hand closed around the keys. They were warm from Lucas's pocket, absurdly light. Half the estate's future—and now her mother's truth—hung on a few grams of brass.

She turned back to the gate, rain drumming against her back. Bernard was a mile away in his warm château, sitting on her stolen vines, drafting his victory speech.

But he didn't know what she knew. And he didn't know what she was about to find.

"Let's go," she said. "I want to be inside before he wakes up."