The boulangerie on Rue de Bretagne closed at seven, which gave Ivy Forsythe exactly eleven minutes and no margin for distraction.

She moved through the Marais at the easy, unhurried pace of someone who had lived in this neighborhood for years - which she hadn't; three weeks was the full extent of it - but she had learned a long time ago that the best disguise was simply belonging. Not a costume, not a cover story. Just the quiet certainty of a person who had every right to be exactly where she was. She wore dark jeans and a sand-colored linen jacket, her black hair loose around her shoulders, and she carried the canvas shopping bag with the worn leather handles that she'd had since she was nineteen, the handles darkened and softened by years of use. She looked, to the casual observer, like a woman on her way home.

In a technical sense, she was on her way home.

The evening had gone warm for early October, and the sky above the narrow street had turned the dense, saturated amber that Paris produced at this particular hour and no other city in the world quite managed - light settling into the old stone of the buildings the way warmth settled into bones, slow and permanent. She'd grown up being brought to Europe every summer: her mother's preferred cure for everything from boredom to heartbreak had been a change of continent. Vivian Harrington Forsythe believed in beautiful places with the conviction that other people reserved for medicine, and Ivy had absorbed this belief without meaning to. Paris had always done something to her that she couldn't name and had stopped trying to. It was the one city in the world where she could almost - almost - be still.

She bought the last two baguettes. The old man behind the counter made his usual observation that she bought too much bread for one person, and she gave him her usual answer - large appetite - and he shook his head and told her bonne soirée with the resigned paternal warmth he offered every regular customer, and she tucked the baguettes under her arm and went back into the street.

She had been in Paris for three weeks, which was three weeks longer than she'd intended. The Monet had taken longer than expected - the provenance trail was particularly convoluted, running through four decades and three forged certificates of authenticity - and she'd made herself stay until she was certain. That was the rule she'd made for herself a long time ago and the one she never compromised: you did not act until you were certain. Not certain that the owner had been wronged - that was usually clear enough within a week - but certain of the whole chain, every link, so that when she returned the piece there was nothing ambiguous about where it belonged.

Her father had taught her that. Sebastian Forsythe of Sterling Industries, who was, in his professional life, the most scrupulously law-abiding man she'd ever encountered and who had, in her childhood, taken her to every major museum in Europe and explained to her in detail how many of the pieces on those walls had arrived there through methods that had nothing to do with legitimate commerce. He'd never told her to do anything about it. He'd simply explained, with the patient thoroughness he applied to everything, how the world worked. The conclusions were her own.

Her mother had taught her fencing.

Ivy had put the two educations together around the age of nineteen and had been refining the combination ever since.

The apartment was on the third floor of a building three streets over, accessible through a courtyard that most passersby walked past without registering and then up a back staircase that the building's primary residents had apparently forgotten existed since approximately 1970. Ivy had found the place six years ago through a chain of contacts she kept deliberately obscure: she paid through a lawyer, who paid through a management company, who reported to a landlord who had never met her and had no particular reason to try. She maintained no photographs inside. Nothing with her real name on it. A particular Marseilles soap in the bathroom. A good bottle of Bordeaux on the kitchen counter. A dog-eared copy of The Count of Monte Cristo on the bedside table - she reread it every few years and found it newly satisfying each time. She identified with the Count, she had decided years ago: not with his revenge but with his patience, the long meticulous work of setting things right.

Small comforts, carefully chosen. Nothing that couldn't be walked away from.

She'd gotten good at that. Walking away.

She unlocked the courtyard gate, crossed the damp cobblestones, went up the back stairs, and was thinking about whether the baguette would be better tonight with the good Brie she'd bought two days ago or with butter and fleur de sel, when she slid her key into the apartment door and felt it: the faint, unmistakable resistance of a lock that had been opened recently and relocked carefully from the inside.

Not by her.

She stood on the landing for a moment. One breath. Two. Not long - just long enough for the particular quality of alertness she'd developed over the course of her career to do its quiet work: methodical, thorough, with nothing in it that resembled panic. No light visible under the door. No sound from inside. No smell except her own soap and the faint ghost of the Bordeaux and the night air coming up the stairwell.

Whoever was inside was not searching the place. They were waiting.

She turned the key and stepped in.

The apartment was dark except for the floor-to-ceiling windows at the far end of the main room - uncovered, as she always left them - full of the last ember-colored evening light. Against them, perfectly backlit: a man.