Celeste:

  The river welcomed us like an open mouth — cold, brutal, teeth-first.

  We hit hard. Steel groaned, glass exploded, and the black coupe sank like a secret. I was the first to surface, laughing — not because it was funny, but because we survived.

  Again.

  Ethan dragged the duffel to the shore, soaked and heavy with something more valuable than money. His shirt clung to him like sin, the pistol still somehow in hand. He looked like a revenant pulled from the deep, eyes glittering with that steady, quiet rage I adored.

  We didn’t speak until we reached the car I had stashed in an alley two blocks from the river — a matte-gray sedan, no plates, no questions. We left the stench of smoke and sirens behind.

  We drove in silence.

  Not because we had nothing to say.

  But because we were too alive to ruin it with words.

  Ethan:

  Celeste’s family estate was twenty minutes outside the city — old-world architecture wrapped in modern corruption. Iron gates. White stone. Cameras that didn’t just record, they remembered.

  The guards saw us through the rain-drenched windshield and stepped back like the Red Sea parting. They knew the look on our faces. The kind of blood-wet, half-wild look that said don’t ask.

  The front doors opened before we reached them.

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  And there stood her father.

  Vincent Lysandre.

  A man who spoke in inheritances and smiled like a razor. Dressed in black silk and cold judgment, holding a glass of something older than the bones in his enemies’ graves.

  Celeste:

  “Darling,” he drawled, eyeing the cuts on Ethan’s hands, the mud on my heels. “You look like hell.”

  I walked right past him.

  “I brought you something,” I said, tossing the duffel onto the polished marble floor. Water splashed from the corner, but the folder inside was bone dry. Wrapped in plastic. Just like Ethan said.

  Vincent raised a brow. “That’s the Delacroix archive.”

  “And now it’s a Lysandre weapon,” I said sweetly. “You’re welcome.”

  He nodded slowly, then looked at Ethan. “And what do you want, son-in-law? A thank-you?”

  Ethan didn’t blink.

  “I want to go upstairs,” he said, voice like steel wrapped in velvet. “And fuck your daughter with the window open.”

  Vincent chuckled. Not because it was funny. But because he respected audacity.

  “Be quick about it,” he said, sipping his drink. “We have work to do in the morning.”

  Ethan:

  We took the stairs without looking back. The guards didn’t move. The house knew not to interfere.

  Her bedroom — our bedroom — was just as we left it: elegant, cold, dark wood and silver accents, a wall of windows looking over the estate’s private forest. The bed was huge, empty, perfectly made.

  Celeste tore off her soaked dress in one motion, leaving a trail of dripping lace. I dropped the pistol on the dresser, peeled my shirt off, and kicked the door shut.

  We didn’t speak.

  We didn’t need to.

  Not when her teeth were already sinking into my shoulder, not when I was pushing her against the glass, not when the rain outside turned the whole room into a cathedral of shadows.

  Celeste:

  Later, tangled in sheets and bruises, I traced the new scar on his ribs.

  “Do you ever regret this?” I asked softly.

  He didn’t answer right away.

  Instead, he reached for the file — now open on the bed beside us. Photos. Blackmail. Names. Power, printed and bound.

  Then he looked at me.

  “No.”

  I smiled, slow and satisfied.

  “Good.”

  Because now?

  Now we had everything.

  And the city didn’t even know it belonged to us yet.