Covenant (Paris Mob Book 1)

by Michelle St. James

A ring.

  She dropped it into the palm of her other hand. It was old, although she couldn’t place its exact age on sight. She set the tweezers down and rubbed the ring between her fingers, slowly revealing its gold finish and an elaborate pattern that looked to be late Renaissance in style. A giant ruby — authentic from the looks of it — sat at its center, dull with dust and grime.

  She removed a polishing cloth from the stack on one of the shelves, then took the ring to the desk against the wall. She tried not to think of her father as she sat in the chair in front of the computer, of all the hours he’d logged at the desk, researching the provenance of pieces, calling his contacts at museums around the world to get more information. She focused on the ring instead, carefully rubbing it clean with the polishing cloth used specifically for gold.

  Its shine was revealed with each layer of grime she removed. When she was done, she knew instinctively that it was solid gold, and that the ruby at its center — now winking in the light from the desk lamp — was the real deal. She was careful not to remove too much of the patina, even though it meant leaving the layer of brown dust that had settled into the cracks of the filigree in the band.

  She studied the details under a loupe, noting the slightly rough edges indicating the piece had been fashioned by hand, the thick scrolls that ran from one side of the stone to the other. Something caught her eye, and she turned the ring toward the light, slowly making out the script etched on the inside of the band.

  Ducunt volentem fata.

  The words pulled at the corners of her memory. She couldn’t place them, although they were obviously Latin, and she turned to the computer and entered them into the search engine.

  The fates lead the willing.

  A phrase she’d learned at the private school in Bel Air that had been insisted upon — and paid for — by her father.

  She sat back in her chair, turning the ring over between her fingers, wondering if her father had known the ring was hidden inside the desk. Had he planned to remove it? Or had it remained a secret even from him? She knew from his scrupulously maintained records that the desk had come in with a shipment of pieces from his picker in Vienna, but the invoice hadn’t detailed anything specific about its provenance. It was a beautiful piece, and a valuable one, but trying to track it based on those merits alone would be next to impossible.

  She set the ring on the desk and turned back to the computer.

  RENAISSANCE RUBY RING DUCUNT VOLENTEM FATA

  She typed the words into the search box of the browser, then half-heartedly scrolled through the images on the screen. It was a long shot, but not as long as she’d thought. Halfway down the second page, she caught sight of the ring.

  Clicking on it, she magnified the image, comparing it to the ring she’d pulled from the back of the desk. It was the same one. It had to be.

  She clicked through and found herself on a page detailing items sold at a private auction in Berlin nearly twenty years earlier. There were no pictures — just a long list of art, antiquities, and jewelry that had been sold. She skimmed the list, her eyes coming to rest on an entry near the bottom of the page.

  FILIGREE RING - RENAISSANCE - GOLD - FILIGREE - INSCRIPTION READING DUCUNT VOLENTEM FATA

  No buyer's name. She wasn’t surprised. High end auctions were often private, bids offered and accepted by phone or through surrogates who attended the auctions on behalf of clients. Few collectors were eager to advertise that they’d acquired an expensive piece of art or furniture.

  Fortunately for her, she didn’t have to rely on public manifests. She reached for her cell phone and began scrolling through her contacts in Germany.

  4

  Christophe surveyed the sidewalk from the backseat as Julien pulled up to the curb. A group of leather-clad men stood outside the bar where he was supposed to meet Bruno. They glanced at the sleek black Porsche, eyeing it with interest before turning back to their conversation. A group of teenagers passed by on the other side of the glass, their combat boots heavy on the cracked concrete of the sidewalk.

  Bruno knew he hated the neighborhood, but it was where they always met. A test of sorts. One of his younger brother’s many attempts at putting him off balance. Christophe suspected it was a primal sort of posturing related to the fact that Christophe was older, taller, slightly bigger. Bruno had been pushing his buttons since they were boys running around the fields and beaches of Corsica. Now the buttons were bigger and more dangerous — but that didn’t seem to scare Bruno. In fact, his baby brother seemed to relish pushing them, seeing how far he could go before Christophe felt compelled to put him in his place.

  Julien cut the engine, and opened his door. “I’ll come with you.”

  “No,” Christophe said. “It’s not necessary.”

  Julien hesitated. “But…”

  “It will be fine.” Christophe felt for the weapon strapped to his side as he reached for the door. It wasn’t his only defense. He and Bruno had been trained in the art of fencing when they were young, graduating to Krav Maga when they were teenagers. But while Christophe was more than proficient in both, he preferred the sleek Beretta. It was substantial and clean, removing obstacles with a minimum of mess and even less fuss.

  Exactly the way he liked it.

  Plus it was beautiful, like almost everything made in Italy.

  “Are you sure?” Julien asked.

  Christophe closed the door without answering. Julien was more than his second-in-command. He was Christophe’s closest confidant, as much a brother as Bruno. Still, Christophe made it a point to keep him at arm’s length. It wasn’t Julien’s place to push.

  Especially when it came to Bruno.

  He knew how his friend felt about his brother, and it made their interaction even more tense to have Julien looming over them, glowering at Bruno and the sidekicks he used to insulate himself from Christophe.

  He buttoned the jacket of his Armani suit as he approached the bar, making a point to meet the eyes of the hoodlums congregated at the door. They muttered insults under their breath, but Christophe kept walking. He was a busy man. He prided himself on picking his battles. The group was inching toward the Porsche when he stepped into the bar. He had to suppress a smile at the thought of them trying to overtake Julien. There were only four of them.

  He stood inside the door and scanned the dimly lit room until his gaze landed on the hunched figure at the table in the back, two men flanking the high-backed booth. His brother’s face was in shadow as he approached, but the two men snapped to attention when they saw Christophe coming. He stepped around the tall one named Felix and slid into the booth across from his brother.

  “Hello.”

  “Bonjour,” Bruno said. “Voulez une bière?”

  Christophe glanced at his brother’s beer. “No, thank you.”

  Bruno glared at him. His brown eyes were a reflection of Christophe’s, but Bruno’s were red-rimmed, and dark smudges shaded the translucent skin underneath. A white T-shirt was visible beneath his leather jacket. Their coloring was the same, but where Christophe had their father’s prominent bone structure, Bruno’s face had their mother’s roundness. Bruno’s hard eyes were a strange counterpoint to the soft features that had given their mother the appearance of a guileless ingenue well into her thirties.

  “Why must you always speak English?” he demanded.

  There were things Christophe was willing to concede to Bruno: his pride, quite often. His rudeness, just as frequently.

  His mother’s language wasn’t one of them.

  “What did you want to see me about?” Christophe asked.

  Bruno leaned back in the booth, his mouth set in a hard line, and Christophe caught sight of the knife strapped to his brother’s side. “That’s all? No questions about Papa? About the chateau?”

  Christophe turned his palms toward the ceiling. “What shall I ask? If his latest gold digger has departed? If he’s learned his lesson? If he’s taken a job?”

&nbs
p; Fire leapt from Bruno’s eyes. “A job would be beneath him.”

  And beneath you.

  Christophe didn’t speak the words. There were those who would say he was taking the easy way out, but there was nothing easy about the life he’d chosen. Nothing easy about running the multiple income streams that provided money not just for him but for the nearly one hundred people who worked under his command. He wasn't interested in the moral argument; his operation was a business like any other.

  Bruno didn't want to be part of it. Not officially anyway. Christophe had tried bringing him in early on, before his brother made it clear he wouldn’t work under Christophe’s authority. Which didn’t stop him from trying to earn a buck just outside it, of course.

  Bruno and his father were one and the same, content to let Christophe pay the bills, keep the large, rambling chateau on Corsica in good repair. Christophe maintained an employee whose sole job it was to oversee the maintenance of the property. Checks were written for renovations and repair, for food and utilities, to pay the small staff he still retained to keep the place from sliding into its former state of disrepair.

  But the art and antiques he acquired — or re-aquired in many cases — were kept at the house in Paris. He didn’t trust his father with them. Never again. He’d been rebuilding the legacy of their name brick-by-brick in the eight years since he’d started working under Nicolas Perrot in the Paris mob, escalating his efforts when Nicolas had been taken into custody after the fall of the Syndicate. Christophe was determined that his family’s legacy would remain under his control. He had little interest in his father’s womanizing. He sought only to insulate the estate from further loss.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  Bruno’s voice brought him back to the present moment. “Of course. But I don’t want to talk about father,” Christophe said. “How are you, Bruno?”

  It had been three months since he’d seen his brother. The last time they’d met, Christophe had been sitting outside a police department in the 13th Arrondissement, waiting for Bruno to appear with Julien after being bailed out of jail. The charge had been minor — they usually were.

  Bruno surveyed him with suspicious eyes, then reached for the flat, slim pack of Sobranie cigarettes on the table. “I just got back from London.”

  “Again?” It was the third time Bruno had mentioned being in London in so many months. He would have to ask Farrell Black if his brother had been getting into trouble there. He’d done a favor recently for the head of London’s mob organization, and while the fall of the Syndicate had isolated their business interests, it would be a mistake for Bruno to interfere in Farrell’s business.

  “Business.” Bruno took a drag on the cigarette, studied Christophe through the smoke.

  Christophe nodded. “Is there anything you need?”

  Bruno’s gaze hardened. “I don’t need your help. I can take care of myself.”

  Christophe tamped down the urge to dispute the claim. “Of course. What is this about then?”

  “There’s a shipment coming in through Belgium next Wednesday,” Bruno said, leaning forward as he took a drag on the cigarette. “Nothing overly valuable. TVs, computers…” He waved a hand dismissively through the smoke in the air. “That kind of thing.”

  Christophe was aware of the impending shipment. Bruno was right; it was minor in the grand scheme of his operation. But Christophe made a point to know every aspect of his business at any given time, and he had a near encyclopedic knowledge of incoming and outgoing shipments, debts that were owed to the organization, employees on the verge of dismissal — or death. He had people in management positions, of course. But it wasn’t their job to make decisions that would affect the course of the Paris organization. It was his. And he couldn’t do it if he didn’t know what was going on every week, every day, every hour.

  “What about it?” Christophe asked.

  “I have a buyer,” Bruno said. “All lined up and ready to go. You let me take control of the shipment, I turn it over in under twenty-four hours, we split the money.”

  “I’ve already made arrangements for that shipment,” Christophe said. The buyer was an exporter in Rouen who would quickly load the inventory on a cargo ship bound for Ireland.

  Bruno removed a pen from the pocket of his jacket, held the cigarette in his mouth as he scrawled something on a napkin. He slid it across the table to Christophe.

  “I think you’ll find my buyer will offer you a much bigger profit margin.”

  Christophe glanced at the number written on the napkin, then turned it over. The figure was a little over half the amount he had lined up with his current buyer. Split with Bruno, his profit margin would be a quarter of what it would be if he moved the inventory as planned. They would have earned more if Bruno had agreed to work with him officially, but that was his brother — always trying to find a way around things to avoid the hard work of going through them.

  He glanced at Bruno, saw the shine in his eyes, the way he licked his lips, a nervous habit since childhood. Christophe smiled.

  “It’s a good price,” he said. “Can I count on you to insure there won’t be any… complications?”

  Two summers earlier, Bruno had taken control of a shipment that had subsequently been raided by the judicial police in Grenoble. Christophe had had to call in favors, disperse large sums of cash to make the problem disappear.

  “Of course,” Bruno said, as if the incident in Grenoble had never happened.

  Christophe nodded. “I’ll send word to my men that you’ll meet them in Lille at midnight tomorrow.”

  Lille was just over the border from Belgium. It was how all their shipments from the other country arrived.

  Bruno’s relief was apparent. He had never been good at hiding his emotions. “You won’t regret it. I’ll get you your share as soon as my buyer pays.”

  Christophe nodded. He would never see his share of the profit.

  “I should be going,” he said moving to slide out of the booth.

  “Stay,” Bruno said. He tamped out the cigarette, leaving the gold wrapped filter in the ashtray. “We can have dinner. They have good burgers here.”

  Christophe resisted the temptation. This was par for the course with Bruno: the antipathy upon meeting, the angry request for something, the almost manic turnaround when he got his way. It wasn’t born out of a genuine desire to bridge the gap between them. There was a long list of situations in which Christophe had given in, wanting to believe there was a way to make all that had happened between them water under the bridge. It always ended badly.

  “Thank you, but no. I have business to attend to.”

  Bruno’s groupies moved aside as they slid out of the booth. Christophe hesitated, then leaned in to kiss his brother’s cheeks, letting his hand linger on the soft hair at the back of his head. Family was family. No matter what they did, how they disappointed you, your heart remembered them as they once had been.

  “Au revoir," Bruno said.

  “Goodbye, brother,” Christophe said.

  He didn’t look back as he headed for the door.

  5

  Charlotte watched as the men loaded the desk, wrapped in blankets, into the moving van they kept for such occasions. Once she’d removed the ring from the case piece, the drawer had slid easily into place. It was perfect, ready for another four hundred years.

  “Do you have the address?” she asked Abel, one of the part time drivers and furniture movers her father kept at the ready.

  “We’ve got it,” he said.

  “Good. Wait outside until I get there.” Joelle had told her that Christophe Marchand was picky and difficult to please. She didn’t want Abel and his partner unpacking the piece until she was there to answer any questions that might arise.

  He nodded and stepped into the truck. It started with a cough and rumbled down the narrow cobblestone street. She turned the ring over in her pocket as she watched the truck turn the corner. She didn’t know why
she was carrying it around, but she’d been unable to let it go after conducting her research on it the night before. It felt like a talisman of sorts, which didn’t make sense given the facts she’d unearthed about its previous owner.

  “Ready to meet the beast?” Joelle stepped up next to her.

  Charlotte laughed. “He can’t be that bad.”

  “He is,” Joelle said. “The worst.”

  Charlotte tried to imagine the man that inspired such blatant annoyance in Joelle. Was he obnoxious and sloppy? An aging aristocrat who smelled bad and had even worse manners?

  “I’ll deliver the desk and then it will be over,” Charlotte said.

  “So you’ve decided then?” Joelle asked.

  Charlotte turned to look at her. “Not definitively. But I just don’t know how I can keep it.”

  “I understand.”

  Charlotte knew that Joelle did understand, but she still felt bad. If she sold the shop, Joelle would likely be out of a job, either because the new owner would want to hire their own staff or because they would take the building and turn it into yet another coffee shop (the last thing Paris needed).

  “Let me give it some more thought,” Charlotte said, walking with Joelle into the store to get her bag before she headed to the metro. She was delaying the inevitable; she couldn’t leave her job in Los Angeles and move to Paris, and managing the shop from across the Atlantic, even with Joelle’s help, would be next to impossible. If she was smart, she would rip off the Band-Aid and be done with it.

  “Why don’t you take my scooter?” Joelle asked. “It will be easier than the metro.”

  Charlotte laughed. “Easier for whom?”

  Joelle looked perfectly natural jetting around Paris on the little purple scooter. Charlotte was fairly certain she’d break her neck. Other than her summers in Paris, she was Los Angeles born and bred, educated at Columbia in New York City where navigating the subways had quickly become second nature. She hadn’t even been near a bicycle since she was ten years old.