Read Chapter 21: The Crack

The rain had followed him from the estate, a cold Dijon drizzle that slicked the cobblestones and made the old quarter gleam like wet slate. Marcel Fournier's office occupied the third floor of a building that smelled of dust and parchment, and the lawyer himself looked like he hadn't left it since the last century—wire-rimmed glasses, a cardigan over a shirt that had seen better decades, fingers stained with ink rather than age.

"Vincent spoke of you often," Fournier said, pouring two glasses of marc from a decanter that appeared older than the Republic. "Though he never believed you'd come back."

" Neither did I." Alex accepted the glass but didn't drink. "I need to know about Georges Aubert."

Fournier's hand paused mid-pour. He set the decanter down carefully, studied Alex over his glasses. "Georges died yesterday. Suicide, they're saying."

"I found him. It wasn't suicide."

The old lawyer's face sagged, some guarded door opening a crack. He settled into his chair with the weight of a man carrying too many secrets. "I wondered how long before you'd find your way to Aubert's name. Vincent kept him close, you know. Closer than he kept anyone after your mother died."

"Aubert was his partner. The shell company, the barrels, the—"

"Georges was more than a partner." Fournier's voice dropped, and he glanced at the door before continuing. "He was the only man Vincent trusted with the truth. The whole truth, not the version he fed the banks or the gendarmerie. If Georges was killed, it's because he knew something that could still hurt them. Something Vincent left unfinished."

Alex leaned forward. "What unfinished thing?"

"I don't know the specifics. Vincent was paranoid in his final months—and rightly, it turns out." Fournier pulled a slim key from his vest pocket, slid it across the desk. "Safe-deposit box at Crédit Lyonnais on Rue de la Liberté. Your father opened it three weeks before he died. I don't know what's inside. I was told to give you this key if you ever asked about Aubert."

Alex closed his fingers around the key, its brass still warm from the lawyer's pocket. "Why didn't you give this to me at the reading of the will?"

"Because Vincent was explicit: the key goes only to the son who asks the right question. You just did."

Rain drummed against the window. Alex was about to press for more when his phone vibrated—Léa's name lighting the screen. He answered, and her voice came through tight, clipped, the way it got when she was forcing calm over panic.

"Alex. I just got a message. On my phone. A photo."

"Of what?"

"Of me. At the café in Beaune this morning. Taken from across the street." A pause, and he heard her breath catch. "And beneath it, text. 'The daughter of the drowned man should learn to swim.'"

The marc glass shattered in Fournier's hand. The old lawyer stared at his bleeding palm as if he didn't feel it, his eyes fixed on Alex with sudden, terrible recognition.

"Of course," Fournier whispered. "D'Aubigny. Léa D'Aubigny." His voice cracked on the name. "She's Jean-Marc's daughter."

Alex's blood went cold. "You knew her father."

"Jean-Marc D'Aubigny was Vincent's oldest friend. They grew up together in the village. When Vincent started taking risks—real risks, the kind that got men killed—Jean-Marc was the one who tried to pull him back. He drowned in the Saône two years ago. The official report said accident. Wine in his blood, night swimming, current too strong." Fournier shook his head slowly. "Vincent never believed it. He told me once that Jean-Marc had learned something about the Bouchards' operation, something that made him a liability. He tried to warn him. He was too late."

Alex's grip tightened on the phone. Léa was still on the line, and he could hear her breathing, quick and shallow.

"They know who she is," he said. "They've known all along."

"Then she's not safe anywhere in Burgundy." Fournier rose, crossing to a filing cabinet, his bleeding hand leaving smudges on the metal. "I have a contact in Paris. Gendarmerie, retired, clean hands. He has a safe house in the 11th that doesn't exist in any database. If she can get there, she'll be beyond even Bouchard reach."

"Is that true, or are you just trying to get rid of her?"

Fournier turned, and for the first time Alex saw something hard beneath the old lawyer's gentle facade. "I've kept Vincent Moreau's secrets for twenty years. I've buried three men who trusted me with theirs. I don't make promises I can't keep, boy. Your father's enemies don't leave witnesses, and Léa has become one. Get her on a train. Now."

Alex put the phone back to his ear. "Léa, listen. I need you to do exactly what I say."

"I'm not running." Her voice was steel now, fear burned away into defiance. "They killed my father. You told me that. And now you're telling me the man who raised me, who I thought was my father, who covered for the people who did it—"

"Who was killed because he tried to protect you." Alex cut her off. "Because he tried to keep you out of this. And if you stay, his death means nothing. They'll take you, Léa. Not kill you—they'll use you to make me give them the ledger, the estate, everything. And then they'll kill us both anyway."

Silence stretched over the line. He could picture her in whatever corner she'd found, phone pressed to her ear, jaw set, refusing to give ground. She'd been a liability until Aubert's death, he understood that now—an unknown, a potential asset to be neutralized. But the Bouchards had known exactly who she was the entire time. Every moment she'd spent at the estate, every photograph she'd taken, every file she'd copied for him—they'd been watching her as much as they'd been watching him.

"One condition," she said finally. "You find the informant. You find who's feeding them everything, and you make them answer for my father. For Aubert. For Vincent."

"I will."

"And Alex?" Her voice softened, just briefly. "Don't be a hero. Come back."

The line went dead.

Fournier pressed a slip of paper into his hand with an address in the 11th. Alex pocketed it alongside the vault key, already moving toward the door.

"Don't go back to the estate alone," Fournier called after him. "That's what they want. A lone wolf with no allies and no evidence—that's a carcass waiting for wolves."

"Then I'll have to be the hunter instead of the hunted." Alex paused at the threshold. "The new cellar master. Bastien. What do you know about him?"

Fournier frowned. "Bastien Roche. Vincent hired him six months before he died. Quiet, skilled, keeps to himself. The kind of man who doesn't ask questions." He hesitated. "Why?"

"Because whoever's feeding the Bouchards information knew exactly where the magnum was hidden. And Bastien is one of the few people who knew about the press house." Alex stepped into the hallway. "If they've already taken one cellar master, they won't hesitate to take another. Or turn him."

"You're walking into a trap."

"Then at least I'll know what kind of trap it is." Alex started down the stairs, then stopped, looking back. "Call your Paris contact. Tell him to expect Léa. And tell him that if anything happens to her, I'll hold him personally responsible."

Fournier nodded slowly. "I'll make the call. But Alex—" The old lawyer's face was grey now, tired in a way that had nothing to do with age. "Your father made a deal with the Bouchards twenty years ago. Vincent wasn't a victim in all this. He was complicit, in ways you haven't even begun to understand. Whatever you find in that safe-deposit box, whatever Bastien may or may not be—you need to be prepared for the possibility that your father wasn't the man you've built him up to be."

Alex's jaw tightened. "I know what kind of man my father was."

"Do you?" Fournier's voice was barely a whisper. "Then why did you come here asking questions instead of trusting what you already knew?"

No answer came. Alex turned and walked out into the rain, the safe-deposit key burning in his pocket and Léa's last words still echoing in his skull. The wolves were closing in. And somewhere in the dark, Vincent Moreau's secrets waited to be uncovered—or to bury him alongside his father.