Chapter 41 Paris, Early

Chapter 41 Paris, Early
They landed into grey morning light, the kind that made Paris look like a city still deciding whether to wake up.

Gia had not slept. She had spent six hours over the Atlantic with the portfolio case between her feet and her hand resting on top of it, the way a person rests a hand on something living, checking it is still breathing.

Marco had not slept either. He had spent the flight watching the cabin the way he used to watch corridors, cataloguing exits without seeming to move his eyes.

They cleared customs separately, ten minutes apart, the way Marco had insisted before they boarded. Two travelers who did not appear to know each other. It felt absurd walking through an airport pretending not to see the man she loved. It also felt, after everything, like the only sane way to move through a city where someone might already be watching for exactly this arrival.

Reyes was waiting outside, in a car that was not a taxi and not obviously anything else. She had left her second-in-command running the domestic search for Hale and taken the first flight out. The portfolio needed a federal hand on it in person, and she was not willing to trust that hand to anyone else.

“You made it,” she said, when Gia slid into the back seat.

“Barely.”

“Barely is the only way anyone makes it through this part,” Reyes said, and pulled into traffic before Marco had even closed his door.

Céleste’s apartment was above a shuttered bakery in the eleventh arrondissement, up four flights of narrow stairs that smelled like old flour and older wood.

She opened the door before they knocked. She had clearly been listening for footsteps on the stairs for longer than was comfortable for anyone.

“You look like you haven’t slept,” she said to Gia.

“I haven’t.”

“Good,” Céleste said. “Neither have I. At least we match.”

Inside, the apartment was small and precise, the way a person’s space becomes precise when they have spent months bracing for something they cannot name. A single chair faced the door. A go-bag sat by the window, zipped, ready.

Reyes set a folder on the small kitchen table.

“I need your statement,” she said. “Everything. The account, the submissions, what Ivy asked you to do and when. I need it on record before Paris, in case something happens at the show that prevents us doing this after.”

Céleste sat down across from her.

“What could happen at the show,” she said.

Nobody answered right away.

“He’s missing,” Gia said finally. “Hale walked out of his office yesterday and hasn’t been seen since. We don’t know if that means he’s running or if it means he’s already here.”

Céleste’s hands went still on the table.

“Here,” she repeated. “In Paris.”

“We don’t know,” Marco said. “But the show is public. Announced. Ticketed. If he wanted one place to find every person connected to this case standing in the same room at the same time, he would not have to work very hard to choose it.”

The kitchen went quiet the way small rooms go quiet when everyone in them is doing the same math.

Céleste gave her statement for two hours. Reyes recorded it, took notes, asked the same question three different ways at three different points, the practiced pattern of someone building something that had to survive a defense attorney tearing at every seam.

Gia listened to all of it. She had heard most of it once already, over a phone call weeks ago, but hearing it again, formally, on record, with Ivy’s name spoken aloud sentence after sentence into a recorder that would carry it into a federal courtroom, felt different. Heavier. Real in a way it had not quite been before.

When it was finished, Reyes closed the folder and looked at both of them.

“This is good,” she said. “This is very good. Combined with the construction notes, combined with Renata’s identification, this is enough to move on Hale the moment we can locate him.” She paused. “The only piece I don’t have yet is the portfolio itself. Physical custody, chain of evidence, in federal hands before the show.”

“Tonight,” Gia said. “After the final fitting. I’ll bring it to wherever you say.”

“Somewhere public,” Marco said. “Same principle as the florist. The safest exchange is the one that looks like nothing.”

Reyes thought for a moment.

“There’s a café near the venue,” she said. “Open until midnight. I’ll be at a table by the window at eleven. You walk in, order a coffee, leave the case under the table when you go to the bathroom. I pick it up. We never speak to each other.”

“That simple,” Gia said.

“That simple works,” Reyes said, “because nobody expects simple.”

They left Céleste’s apartment as the afternoon light started going gold over the rooftops, the kind of light that made even a city holding this much danger look, for a few minutes, like it was only ever beautiful.

Gia’s phone buzzed as they reached the car.

A text from the fashion house’s assistant. Efficient, as always.

Final fitting moved up two hours. Creative director wants you there by six. She said it’s important.

Gia frowned and looked at Marco.

“That’s not like her,” she said. “She never moves things up without a reason.”

She called the assistant back instead of texting. It rang twice before picking up, and the voice on the other end was not the assistant’s precise, unhurried voice at all.

It was rushed. Frightened, in the careful way people try not to sound frightened on the phone.

“Ms. Lombardi,” the assistant said. “I need you to come now. Not at six. Now. Someone came to the venue this morning asking questions about you, about the collection, about a woman named Elena Russo. He had credentials. He said he was with an American federal agency.”

Gia’s stomach dropped through the floor of the car.

“What did he look like,” she said.

The assistant described him in four sentences.

Marco, listening beside her, went completely still. She had seen that stillness only twice before — once at a photograph in a small house in Baja California, once at a name on a laptop screen in the studio. Both times, recognition had cost him something before he let it show.

“That’s not Hale,” he said quietly, when she’d hung up.

Gia looked at him.

“I know,” she said. “It’s the man from the security footage. The one Renata identified.”

The one who had killed Ivy.

He was already at the venue.