Chapter 342: Something Old, Something Fake

Rémy kept his free hand folded on the table. Behind the sunglasses, his eyes kept drifting to the croissant.

Jade came down the jet stairs one step at a time, holding the rail. She stopped at the bottom.

Rémy turned his head toward her and smiled.

"Ah. La petite voleuse."

Jade’s knuckles went white on the rail.

Damien answered him in French, low and even, a handful of words. Rémy’s smile slipped. He faced the table again.

"What did he call her?" Aria asked.

"The little thief."

"And what did you say?"

"That she’s with me."

Jade heard it. She let go of the rail and walked straight past Rémy to the car waiting at the hangar door.

Damien turned to the nearest of his men. "Water. Nothing else."

"Yes, sir."

"Madame Sinclair," Rémy said as Aria passed. "A man thinks better on a full stomach."

"Then you’ve got all day to think," Aria said.

***

The villa sat on the cliffs above the Corniche, white stone and blue shutters, with a terrace that hung out over the sea. It belonged to a shipping family who owed Damien a favor. By ten, the housekeeper had been sent to her sister’s, and the dining room had become something else.

Kai’s map filled a television at the end of the table. Laptops lined both sides of it. Damien’s men came and went through the terrace doors in pairs, salt-stiff from the boats or grey with dust from the docks, and reported in French.

One word kept coming back. Aria asked.

"Radoub," Damien said. "Dry docks. The old ship-repair yards. Half of them are empty."

By noon he had the harbor master’s duty roster, the evening tide tables, and the name of every crane operator working the north basin. Two of his boats idled past the breakwater with fishing rods over the side.

Kai called at half past twelve.

"Nine sites she could use on an hour’s notice and still leave by water," he said. "Seven of them are dry docks. You have eyes on all nine?"

"Yes."

"Of course you do," Kai said, and hung up.

Jade had fallen asleep on the sofa with her shoes on and her phone face-down on her chest.

Aria watched her husband work. He had been up since before five. Somewhere between the hangar and the villa he had shaved and rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and he moved from laptop to phone to map as if the day had been built around him.

At one, she carried two coffees out to the terrace, where he had gone to take a call away from the noise.

He sat in a wrought-iron chair facing the water with the phone at his ear. She set his cup on the low wall. He kept talking, reached out, and drew her in by the open front of her coat.

He finished the call in French, set the phone on the wall, and stood.

He kissed her. He tasted of coffee and the wind off the sea. His hand slid inside her coat and settled over her ribs, his thumb resting just under the curve of her breast, and stayed there while the kiss went slow and deep and her fingers curled into his collar.

When she drew back, her face was hot.

"There are a dozen men in that dining room," she said.

He kissed the corner of her jaw, then the soft place under it.

"Damien."

"Five minutes."

She let him have five minutes. He rested his forehead against her temple and closed his eyes, and she felt his breathing slow. Below them the sea moved against the rocks. Out past the harbor, a white fortress sat on its island like something left over from a story.

Her hand lay on his chest. The sun found the ruby on her finger and threw a small red spot onto his shirt, right over his heart.

She studied it.

"Everyone keeps calling it the Key," she said.

He opened his eyes.

"Séverine wouldn’t tell me what it is. Valérie wanted me to describe it, and when I wouldn’t, she asked if it was heavy." Aria turned her hand in the light. "If she knows what it looks like, why ask?"

"To hear what you’d say."

"Or because she’s never seen it either." She slid her other hand into her coat pocket and closed it around the rusted key. "This is the only thing I have that leads anywhere. She’s not getting it."

"No."

"So I give her something else."

She turned the ring on her finger.

"It was my grandmother’s," she said. "It came down through my mother. It’s old, and it’s real, and it looks like something a family would kill over." She closed her hand. "She only has to believe it for five minutes."

Damien looked at her closed hand. A muscle moved in his jaw.

"I hate this," he said. "I don’t want her touching anything of yours."

"I know."

He wrapped his hand around her fist, ring and all.

"Do it," he said. "I’ll get it back."

He picked up his phone and made a call in French. At three, a man in a linen suit came up the steps from the road and set a ring box on the dining table. It was worn red leather, the gilt along its edges rubbed almost to nothing, and it smelled faintly of someone’s attic. Aria worked the ring over her knuckle. It came off hard. Underneath it was a band of paler skin. She set the ruby on the faded satin inside and pressed the lid shut.

Her phone buzzed before she could put the box away.

[Elias: Going in now. Six hours, maybe more.]

Aria held the phone against her chest. Damien’s arm came around her waist and pulled her back against him, and she looked at the sea for a while.

By a quarter to six, the sun had dropped low and copper over the islands. Everyone was in the dining room. Jade was awake, perched on the arm of the sofa. The red box sat on the table in front of Aria.

At 6:00 p.m., her phone lit up.

Everyone in the room turned toward it.

[Unknown: Dry dock 4, north basin. Seven o’clock. My son, the Key, and your husband. Nobody else.]

Damien read it over her shoulder and said a few words into his phone. On the screen at the end of the table, one of Kai’s nine dots already had a circle drawn around it.

The phone buzzed again.

A photograph loaded slowly, one band at a time.

The terrace. The low wall. Aria in Damien’s arms, his hand inside her coat, her face tipped up to his. The picture was grainy, taken through a long lens from a boat out past the rocks.

Under it, one more line.

[Unknown: Bring your coats. It’s cold by the water.]

Aria lifted her eyes to the terrace doors. Out past the breakwater, a small white boat swung its bow toward the open sea.