The grayness of morning did nothing to erase the weight of the night before. Isabelle had barely slept after finding the petal on her nightstand, her mind replaying her sister's voice over and over, tangled in the scent of rosewater that had no business lingering in her apartment.
Now the streets of Paris stretched out before her, damp and dull beneath a low ceiling of clouds, but the world felt sharper, somehow — like the moment just before a blade meets skin.
She pulled her coat tighter as she crossed Rue des Martyrs toward the modest café where Jean-Baptiste Dubois was waiting. A quiet man, mid-thirties, heavy around the eyes in a way grief made permanent. His brother, Mathieu, had gone missing two months ago — one more name on her growing wall of ghosts. But the files didn't do justice to the haunted look that greeted her when she slid into the seat across from him.
The server delivered two black coffees and disappeared, leaving the air heavy between them. Jean-Baptiste toyed with the sugar packet but didn't open it, his hands restless and awkward.
"I wasn't sure you'd actually come," he said finally.
"I don't ignore patterns," Isabelle replied softly. "Your brother's name came up more than once."
Jean-Baptiste gave a dry, humorless laugh, rubbing a hand over his stubble-rough face. "He was stubborn. Always digging. Couldn't let things go."
Isabelle folded her hands around her coffee cup, letting the heat ease into her fingers.
"Mathieu had been looking into the disappearances, hadn't he? Before he vanished."
Jean-Baptiste nodded slowly, reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out a small, worn leather notebook. He slid it across the table to her. The pages were bloated from old rain, the ink smudged in places, but the names were still legible. Isabelle recognized a few of them instantly — missing persons, dates, addresses, some underlined, others marked with stars.
"He kept this hidden," Jean-Baptiste murmured. "I only found it after the police gave me back his things. He thought someone was following him."
Isabelle flipped carefully through the pages, noting the steady evolution from curious scribbles to careful, coded observations. On one page, Mathieu had written in block letters:
'MASQUERADE CLUB. LE MASQUE D'IVOIRE. They always end there.'
Her breath stilled.
"You've heard of it, haven't you?" Jean-Baptiste asked. His voice held no judgment, only exhaustion.
"I've heard whispers," Isabelle replied carefully. "But whispers won't hold up in court."
"They won't even get you to the front door," he said. "Mathieu figured that out too late."
A pause stretched between them, long and strained. The sounds of the café — cutlery, quiet conversations, the hiss of an espresso machine — seemed so ordinary, so jarringly out of place against the implications settling in her mind.
She flipped to the last written page. A half-finished note in his jagged, hurried scrawl:
'They smile like ivory masks. Dead eyes behind the charm. He promised me a name...'
The ink trailed off.
"Do you know who 'he' is?" Isabelle asked.
Jean-Baptiste shook his head, staring out the window at the rain-washed streets.
"He didn't say. I only know he'd arranged to meet someone two nights before he vanished." His fingers drummed a restless beat on the table. "The night he disappeared, I found his phone under his bed, but the SIM was missing."
Isabelle closed the notebook, her mind working faster now. "Where are his other things?"
"At my place," Jean-Baptiste answered. "I couldn't bring myself to throw them away."
She finished her coffee in two long, bitter swallows.
"Show me."
—
The apartment was small, spare, and smelled faintly of books and old cologne. Jean-Baptiste led her into the second bedroom — or what had once been one — now a makeshift storage space. A stack of Mathieu's belongings sat neatly arranged on a folding table: keys, wallet, sketches, USB drives, and an old metal cigar box.
Jean-Baptiste opened the box, revealing a scatter of loose photos, matchbooks, a few coins, and at the very bottom — something that didn't belong.
A card.
Off-white, thick, pressed with an embossed texture that felt oddly expensive. It wasn't paper. It was ivory, or at least the perfect imitation of it. There were no words, only a symbol pressed in gold leaf: an abstract mask, the curve of a grin stretched too wide to be human.
Isabelle turned it over. On the back, an address. An abandoned part of the old meatpacking district. And below the address, a single line, printed in the same delicate gold font:
"Admission granted upon perfect silence."
The weight of the card sat heavy in her palm.
Jean-Baptiste hovered close, lowering his voice. "I didn't notice it until now. It was stuck between two old receipts."
Isabelle stared at the card, the shape of the mask, the curve of the gold smile.
The same shape she'd seen, once, in one of Vivienne's old sketchbooks. A design she had drawn but never explained.
And suddenly, the air in the room felt thinner.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket, jolting her back. She fished it out, the screen flashing with a blocked number. A moment of hesitation — then she answered.
A soft voice spoke on the other end. Not a man's. Not a woman's. Hollow, measured, mechanical.
"I see you've found the first smile. Be careful, Isabelle. Not all masks are meant to be removed."
The call ended.
In the silence that followed, her fingers curled tightly around the ivory card, her pulse heavy in her throat.
To be continued...