A master Hermès artisan is found dead in his Paris atelier — hands arranged around a Birkin that exists on no manifest, no waitlist, no record. CIPHER calls it what French authorities won't: a hit.CIPHER is a four-person rapid-response intelligence unit operating beneath the NSA, Interpol, and MI6. They don't officially exist. Neither do the cases they take. Operatives Sloane Voss and Ezra Calloway go in under cover — a luxury goods investigator and her tech consultant — and surface the edge of something vast: a network called LUXE that has turned the world's most coveted handbags into an intelligence operation moving freely across international borders, because no customs agent on Earth looks twice at a woman carrying a $40,000 bag.Nano-surveillance fibers woven into lambskin. Quantum-encrypted dead drops hidden in hardware. AI-generated forgeries that defeat even Hermès' own systems. LUXE has been operating undetected for nineteen years. And someone inside CIPHER has been keeping it that way.As the investigation pulls Sloane and Ezra deeper into LUXE's world — through private auctions, holographic runway dead drops, and boardrooms that move billions through authenticated couture — the professional distance between them stops being distance. And when a classified file surfaces both their names under a column labeled Legacy Assets — Unactivated, the mission stops being just a mission.The bags hold secrets. So does everyone chasing them.Book One of The Couture Code trilogy.
