Estienne's POV
I wake to cold sheets and the muffled sound of a voice from the bathroom, and for three disoriented heartbeats, I reach for a warmth that is no longer there. My palm finds only the impression her body left behind, the cotton still holding the faint shape of her.
I lie still, staring at the ceiling, replaying the hours that came before.
The rain. The chase through slick streets with security guards at our heels. The way she kissed me in that alley like she was trying to disappear into me.
I have never met anyone like Valérie Martin.
She appeared on a dark road like a figure from a fever dream, barefoot and desperate in a ruined evening gown, and nothing about her has made sense since.
She deflects questions with questions. She carries skills that contradict the simple story she tells.
She watches the world with eyes that have seen too much and trusted too little, and every time I get close to the truth behind them, she retreats behind walls I cannot climb.
The voice from the bathroom continues, too low for me to distinguish words, but the tone carries urgency.
She is on a phone call, I realize.
I sit up slowly, the sheets pooling at my waist, and my gaze lands on the chair by the window where she dropped her bag in the heat of our collision last night.
The bag is half-open now, its contents visible in the gray morning light.
I should not look.
I know I should not look.
But the nagging sensation that has been building since that first car ride sharpens into something I can no longer ignore.
The flicker of recognition that crossed her face when I said my family name, gone so fast I almost convinced myself I imagined it.
The way she deflects personal questions with questions of her own, a technique too polished for someone with nothing to hide.
I cross to the chair before I can talk myself out of it, my bare feet silent against the carpet, my pulse beginning to hammer with dread.
The bag contains ordinary things—a toiletry kit, a photograph of an elderly man I do not recognize. And there, wedged beneath sunglasses, the edge of a burgundy booklet.
A passport.
I pick it up and open it, and the world tilts beneath my feet.
The photograph is unmistakably her—those dark eyes, that determined set of her jaw, the face I kissed until we were both breathless in that alley.
But the name printed beneath it is not Valérie Martin.
It is Renée Pasquier.
My mind races through everything she has told me, every lie I swallowed because I wanted so badly to believe her.
And then further back—to a summer when I was thirteen and bleeding on a dark-haired girl's white sneakers, a girl I was forced to abandon when my parents packed our lives into suitcases and dragged me to America without allowing me even a moment to explain why I would never meet her at our stone wall again.
Then I think of the company that nearly destroyed us. And I realize I have been sleeping with the enemy.
The bathroom door opens.
She steps out, face flushed from whatever conversation she was having, and freezes when she sees what I am holding.
The color drains from her cheeks in a rush that confirms everything I need to know.
"Estienne," she starts, and her voice carries the desperate edge of someone watching their lies collapse around them.
"Renée Pasquier." I say her real name, and it tastes like betrayal on my tongue—sharp and bitter and wrong in ways I am only beginning to understand. "You're Renée Pasquier. Frank Chevotet's wife. The heir to the company that tried to bankrupt us."
She takes a step toward me, her hands rising in supplication. "Please, let me explain what happened, because it is not what you think and I never meant to—"
"Not what I think?" The laugh that escapes me sounds nothing like my own voice. "You showed up on that road playing the victim, and I fell for it completely. I even brought you into my home."
"Everything I told you about my situation was true." Her voice shakes, but she holds my gaze with a stubbornness that would be admirable if it did not make me want to put my fist through the wall. "Frank is exactly the monster I described, and I really did escape from him that night because I could not survive another day in that house."
"And you thought the best place to hide was my grandfather's estate?" I advance on her, the passport clenched in my fist, my chest tight with a fury I am struggling to contain. "The estate your company spent years trying to destroy?"
"I did not know it was your estate when I got in your car." She retreats until her back hits the wall, and the memory of pressing her against that same wall last night makes bile rise in my throat. "I had no idea who you were until you told me your name, and by then it was too late to explain without making everything worse."
"Too late?" The word explodes out of me. "You had days, Renée. You had every opportunity to tell me the truth, and instead you kept lying while I—" I stop myself before the confession escapes, before I admit that I was falling in love with a woman who does not exist.
"I was afraid." Her voice cracks, and I hate how much that sound still affects me. "I was afraid that if you knew who I really was, you would throw me out, and I had nowhere else to go because Frank's people are searching everywhere for me."
"What happened at that diner?" I demand, the pieces clicking into place with sickening clarity. "Who were you running from when you burst into that bathroom and begged me to climb out a window? Frank's people, weren't they? Hunting his runaway wife."
"Yes." She does not deny it. "And if they had found me, I would be back in that house by now, facing consequences I do not want to describe to you."
I stare at her, this woman I thought I knew, this stranger wearing the face of someone I trusted.
The intimacy we shared last night feels tainted now, every touch recontextualized by the revelation that she has been playing a part since the moment she got in my car.
"Who was the strategist?" The question emerges dredged up from the same place where I have been storing my grandfather's pain for two years. "The woman who came to our estate and gathered intelligence to destroy us—who was she?"
Renée's face goes pale. Her mouth opens, but no sound emerges.
I watch her struggle with the weight of my question, watch the way her expression fractures into guilt and grief and something I cannot quite name.
"You are Frank's wife," I press, my voice dropping to something cold. "You must know who that woman was."
Renée's face goes pale. Her mouth opens, but no sound emerges.
I watch her wrestle with my question, watch the war playing out behind her eyes—loyalty versus truth.
"Renée," I say, and her name cuts like glass. "Who was she?"
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