The surveillance photograph of her mother sat inside a locked drawer in Valentina's rooms, but she carried its weight everywhere she went for the next three days.
Damien's people traced the image to a street in Marseille within forty-eight hours — a routine coffee errand, the kind of small ordinary detail that made the whole thing feel more real and more impossible at once. Her mother, alive, buying coffee on a street corner like the last seven years hadn't happened at all.
"We can't move on this carelessly," Damien said, spreading a city map across the study table. "If your uncle has kept her hidden this long, he's not keeping her in some unguarded apartment. There will be people watching her. People watching for exactly this kind of interest."
"Then we watch first."
"We watch first,"
