Gray light seeps through the thin curtains, casting the hotel room in shades of ash and pearl.
Estienne sleeps deeply beside me, one arm flung across the pillow where my head had been, his breath slow and even, his face soft with a peace I have never known.
I watch him for longer than I should, memorizing the way his dark hair falls across his forehead, the slight part of his lips, the steady rise and fall of his chest.
Last night feels like a dream I borrowed from someone else's life.
Borrowed. That's a generous word for what I did.
I ease out of bed silently.
I have spent years learning not to wake the man beside me. The difference is that this time, I am not afraid of what happens if he stirs.
My bag sits where I dropped it last night, abandoned in the heat of our collision.
I retrieve the phone—that clunky, cheap thing I bought while Estienne was busy stealing fruit—and slip into the bathroom, closing the door behind me with a soft click.
The lock turns under my fingers, and only then do I allow myself to breathe.
The bathroom is small and utilitarian, white tile and fluorescent light that makes my reflection look haunted.
I lower myself onto the closed toilet lid and stare at the phone in my hands, my fingers trembling as I insert the SIM card and power on the device.
The glass shower door still holds droplets from last night, and the memory of his hands on my skin, the steam curling around us, makes my chest ache with longing.
The screen glows to life with agonizing slowness, each loading bar a countdown to a conversation I have been dreading since the moment I climbed out of that window.
I select the basic settings without reading them, dismiss the prompts, ignore the tutorials. My thumb hovers over the keypad, and I dial the only number I know by heart.
Christopher Peletier, my grandfather's lawyer. The man who drew up the contracts that bound my life to Frank Chevotet, and the man who has spent the years since trying to find a way to undo them.
The phone rings once. Twice.
"Hello?" His voice is cautious, the way people answer calls from unknown numbers.
"Christopher." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "It's Renée."
The silence on the line lasts exactly two heartbeats, and then his composure shatters.
"Renée." His voice breaks with relief. "Thank God you're alive. I've been trying to find a way to reach you since the party, but no one knew where you went, and Frank has been telling everyone you had a breakdown, that you're receiving treatment somewhere private, and I knew—I knew that couldn't be right, but I had no way to—"
"Christopher." I cut him off gently, conscious of Estienne sleeping in the next room, conscious of the thin walls and the silence of early morning. "I'm safe for now. But I need your help."
He takes a shaky breath, composing himself with the professionalism that has served my family for decades. "Tell me what you need."
"I need to know my options." I press my free hand against my knee to stop the trembling. "For divorce."
The silence that follows tells me everything before he speaks a single word.
"Renée." His voice carries the weight of a man delivering news he has been dreading. "There are no good options. You have to understand—the marital contract ties Frank's ownership of Domaine Pasquier directly to your marriage. Without you as his wife, he has no legal claim to the company. He will never agree to a divorce because without you, he has nothing."
And without him, I have everything. Funny how that works
"Then I'll divorce him without his agreement." The words taste like desperation. "Surely there are grounds—cruelty, abuse, something that would let me—"
"The contract is ironclad." Christopher's voice is heavy with regret. "Your father made certain of that. Even if you could prove the abuse, the divorce proceedings would take years. And during those years, he would maintain control of the company."
My grip tightens on the phone until my knuckles ache. "Then I need to take the company back another way. It's mine by birthright, Christopher. There has to be something—some clause, some loophole."
The sigh that escapes him sounds like surrender. "If there were a legal path, I would have found it years ago, Renée. I watched your father destroy everything Léonard stood for when he tied it to that monster. If I could have saved you from Frank, I would have done it without hesitation."
The bathroom light flickers overhead, casting strange shadows across the tile.
I stare at my reflection in the mirror above the sink—the woman who orchestrated the near-destruction of Domaine Côté, the woman who spent eight years building an empire for a man who repaid her with bruises and humiliation.
The woman who fell in love last night with the one person who would hate her most if he knew the truth.
"You said there are no good options." I keep my voice low, but something in my tone has hardened into the same steel I used when I was dismantling competitors. "That implies there are other kinds of options."
"Renée, I don't think—"
"Christopher." I cut him off with a firmness that surprises us both. "I have spent eight years being the ghost behind Frank's success. I am not asking you to protect me from difficult truths. I am asking you to tell me what you know."
The silence stretches between us, filled with the weight of everything he is not saying.
"There are paths," he admits finally, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "But they carry risks I would never recommend to a client."
"Whatever risks you're afraid of," I press, and the words come out flat, honest, stripped of any pretense. "they can't be worse than spending the rest of my life as Frank's possession."
Christopher is quiet for a long moment, and I can hear him thinking—weighing his duty as a lawyer against his loyalty to my grandfather.
"There are things I know," he says slowly, "that I have never put in writing. Information about Frank's business dealings that would interest certain… regulatory authorities."
My heart beats faster. "What kind of information?"
"The kind that could ruin him." Christopher's voice carries a darkness I have never heard from him before. "But also the kind that could ruin you, if anyone ever discovered how it was obtained."
I think of Estienne sleeping in the next room, of the way his hands cradled my face, of the future I want but do not deserve.
How pathetically romantic of me.
"Tell me more," I say.
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