Ethan:
Morning at the Lysandre estate always smells like something delicate trying not to burn.
Lavender from the courtyard. Black coffee too rich for its own good. The faint tang of cold marble, silence, and the ghosts of a hundred conversations that never finished.
The chaos from yesterday was gone. Buried.
Lucinda hadn’t resurfaced.
Vincent hadn’t summoned us.
No alarms. No guns. Just sun bleeding through the sheer curtains and the sound of her footsteps in silk across the floor.
I didn’t bring up what happened in the library.
Not because I was hiding.
But because it didn’t matter.
Celeste knew.
And we both understood that if something didn’t kill us outright, it just folded into the myth of us.
I was already at the long dining table, coffee in hand, skimming the international news. Shirt half-buttoned. No tie. One leg propped, casual — but calculated. Always.
She walked in like she’d owned the morning before it ever began.
Celeste:
He didn’t say it.
Didn’t need to.
The silence between us was thick with history, not guilt. He wasn’t hiding from me — he was just choosing what didn’t need to be relived.
And me?
I was letting him.
Because Ethan wasn’t a man who buried things.
He carried them.
In his eyes. In his pulse. In the way his hand twitched slightly when his fingers brushed the newspaper. He didn’t mention Lucinda. Or his past. Or the look he gave her when he told her loyalty meant choosing the fire.
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I didn’t ask.
I just took my seat across from him, draped in silk the color of morning storms, hair pinned back in that lazy, dangerous way that meant I could pull a knife from it in three seconds if I needed to.
Breakfast was served.
Berries. Brioche. Honey-glazed bacon that curled on the plate like art.
The chef didn’t ask how we wanted it.
He just knew.
We were halfway through our first cup when I said it.
Soft. Like a grenade with the pin still in.
“Prague.”
Ethan:
I looked up.
Met her eyes.
And smiled.
“God,” I muttered. “That honeymoon.”
She laughed. Loud. Unfiltered. Real.
We’d been twenty. Newly married. Too high on power and the idea of each other to see straight. Vincent had sent us to Prague under the guise of "romantic cover" for a meeting with one of the black-market arms dealers who owed him a favor.
What he didn’t tell us was that the dealer’s ex-wife had hired a Czech kill squad to interrupt the deal.
Celeste:
We were halfway through a candlelit dinner at a restaurant built inside an old bomb shelter when the first window shattered.
I didn’t scream.
I ducked and flipped the table.
Ethan had already drawn the pistol from under his coat. Tossed me a knife with the same calm as passing me the salt.
I remember the red lighting. The chandelier swinging. The hostess vomiting behind the bar.
I remember Ethan shooting out the overhead lights before dragging me behind the piano.
We kissed between reloads.
Ethan:
She wore black lace and blood.
I remember thinking she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen — standing over a corpse, hair loose, heels cracked from running across cobblestone, lipstick smudged from kissing me before slitting a throat.
There were six attackers.
We killed four.
Scared off two.
And then we danced in the empty dining room to music coming from the waiter’s radio, surrounded by glass and gunpowder.
Celeste:
We made love that night in a hotel bathtub half-filled with ice and bruises.
He bandaged my arm. I kissed his busted lip. The water turned pink and neither of us blinked.
It wasn’t romantic.
It was us.
“Do you remember,” I said between bites of honey-drenched toast, “when you tried to order room service after the shootout?”
Ethan grinned.
“They had really good crème br?lée.”
I snorted. “You had a cracked rib.”
“And you had a bullet graze your thigh. But sure, let’s argue about dessert priorities.”
He passed me the butter.
His fingers brushed mine.
And for a second, I felt it again — Prague. The fire. The adrenaline. The way we came alive under pressure, like diamonds clawed from dirt.
Ethan:
“We were different then,” I said softly.
Celeste nodded, then shook her head.
“No,” she said. “We were the same. Just… shinier. Louder. Like we thought the whole world owed us a stage.”
I reached across the table and took her hand.
No performance.
Just skin. Warm. Real.
“I’d marry you again,” I said.
“Even with the gunfire?”
“Because of it.”
She laughed again — that rich, wicked laugh that made people nervous and made me feel invincible.
We raised our coffee cups.
Not wine this time.
Not champagne.
Just black coffee and survival.
“To another day alive,” I said.
Celeste raised her brow, then tapped her cup to mine.
“To the next city we set on fire.”
And then?
She leaned over the table and kissed me.
Soft. Deep. Like it was Prague again.
Like we were twenty and indestructible.
And maybe we still were.
Because as long as we had each other…
The war never ended.
It just dressed better.
