The soft glow of her laptop screen illuminated the dimly lit office, casting long shadows across the polished rosewood desk.
It was late—past eleven—and the quiet hum of the Parisian night outside her floor-to-ceiling windows felt distant, almost alien.
Marceline leaned back in her leather chair, her fingers frozen over the trackpad as the email from Étienne glared back at her in sharp, unyielding black and white text.
Subject: Paget, Elliot
“Mr Paget appears to have been conducting an unauthorised review of financial transactions involving several companies associated with the Auclair group shortly before his death.”
She read the line once.
She took a slow, deliberate breath, letting the icy words settle into her chest, and read it a second time.
“There is evidence that Mr Paget copied or removed documents from his workplace.”
Her jaw tightened so hard a faint ache throbbed near her temple.
“I knew it,” she whispered to the empty room, her voice a low, lethal thread.
“I fucking knew it.”
For months, the Auclairs had framed Elliot’s tragic passing as an unfortunate, routine tragedy—a tragic accident, a closed file, a buried secret.
They had expected her to move on, to play nice, to sign retail partnerships and smile across mahogany boardrooms while Claude played his infuriating games of cold indifference.
Her grey eyes scanned down to the final paragraph.
“The official conclusion of accidental death is not necessarily inconsistent with the available evidence.
However, several elements of the original investigation warrant further examination.”
Marceline stopped.
She stared at the screen, her heart beating a slow, heavy rhythm against her ribs.
The cold relief of vindication slowly twisted into a sharp, uncomfortable knot in her stomach.
Étienne was meticulously thorough—he never used cautious, hedge-word phrasing like “not necessarily inconsistent” unless the narrative was far messier than a simple corporate cover-up.
If Elliot had stolen files from the Auclairs, why hadn’t they scrubbed the paper trail completely?
If it was a hit, why leave Étienne enough breadcrumbs to trace the financial audits back to their shell companies?
Something didn’t sit right.
Marceline closed the laptop halfway, the blue light casting a harsh angle across her sharp jawline.
She reached for her phone, hovering her thumb over Étienne’s contact, before glancing toward the window where the Parisian skyline stretched out—and beyond it, the Auclair estate.
She had the weapon she had been waiting for.
But for the very first time, she wasn’t entirely sure whose neck it was actually aimed at.
The late afternoon sun poured through the wrought-iron balcony of the quiet café near the Palais-Royal, bathing the marble table in a warm, honey-colored light.
The ambient hum of Paris wrapped around them—the clink of porcelain espresso cups, the distant murmur of conversation, and the rustle of dry summer leaves drifting across the cobblestones.
Kate took a slow sip of her iced matcha, watching Marceline over the rim of her glass.
For the last forty-five minutes, Marceline had barely touched her tarte au citron.
She spent the entire outing staring absently at the amber liquid melting in her water glass, her fingers mechanically tracing the edge of her silver napkin ring.
Her posture was perfectly poised as always, but her thoughts were clearly miles away, buried under the heavy weight of Étienne’s late-night email.
Unauthorised review of financial transactions…
Copied or removed documents…
The words kept looping in her head like a persistent, low-grade fever.
Kate finally set her glass down with a soft, deliberate click against the saucer, breaking the quiet spell between them.
She leaned forward, resting her chin in her palm, her dark eyes narrowing with razor-sharp focus.
“Alright, Celine,” Kate said softly, her voice cutting through the soft café breeze.
“You’ve spoken exactly twelve words since we sat down, and three of them were ordering sparkling water.
What is going on in that head of yours?”
Marceline blinked, snapping out of her daze.
She forced a smooth, effortless smile to her lips—the practiced mask she wore for boardrooms and galas—and lightly shook her head.
“Nothing,” Marceline replied smoothly, her voice cool and entirely unbothered.
“Just tired from the board meetings this week.”
Kate stared at her for a long, quiet moment, utterly unfooled by the defense mechanism.
She didn’t press further, but the sharp, lingering look in her eyes made it clear that whatever storm Marceline was silently navigating, she wasn’t hiding it as well as she thought.
Kate immediately signaled the waiter with a decisive flick of her wrist, ignoring Marceline’s half-hearted protest.
“Alright, enough with the sparkling water,” Kate declared, setting her phone face-down on the table.
“Just drink alcohol.
You look like you’re about to go to war, and frankly, sober Celine is far too competent at deflecting.”
Marceline hesitated, her hand hovering over the stem of her glass before pulling back slightly.
Kate watched the rare split-second of indecision with absolute, hawkish precision.
She leaned in closer across the marble tabletop, dropping her voice into a conspiratorial whisper that barely carried over the café’s jazz music.
“Is this related to you sleeping with Claude Auclair?”
Marceline choked instantly on her own breath, coughing violently into her napkin as her face flushed a sudden, furious shade of crimson.
She gripped the edge of the table, her dark eyes wide with utter shock.
“What did you just say?” Marceline gasped out, her voice dangerously sharp as she tried to regain her composure.
Kate didn’t flinch.
She simply tilted her head, a slow, triumphant smile spreading across her face as she leaned back in her chair.
“You did not deny it,” Kate noted smoothly, her eyes dancing with wicked satisfaction.
“And when André mentioned it the other day, you didn’t even have a sharp comeback ready.
It is practically written all over your face, Celine—the sudden tension, the violent eye contact, the dramatic boat diving…”
Kate rested her elbows on the table and rested her chin in her hands, her grin widening.
“So tell me,” Kate purred, entirely unbothered by Marceline’s lethal glare.
“How exactly did that happen?”
“I don’t know!” Marceline snapped back in an urgent, hushed whisper, casting a paranoid glance around the sunlit patio to make sure no stray socialite was eavesdropping.
Her grey eyes flashed with raw, humiliated frustration.
“I just screamed at his face…
and then it just happened!”
Kate stared at her, her hand frozen halfway to her glass.
A slow, incredulous beat passed between them before Kate let out a flat, utterly unamused scoff.
“How does that even make any logical sense, Celine?” Kate asked, raising an eyebrow high above her sunglasses.
“‘We had a screaming match in a hallway, and suddenly his shirt was off’?
Is that the corporate strategy now?”
Instead of formulating a razor-sharp comeback, Marceline grabbed her freshly poured glass of Saint-Émilion by the stem, lifted it to her lips, and tipped her head back—draining the entire glass of heavy red wine in a single, desperate, unrefined gulp.
She set the empty crystal back onto the marble table with a sharp clink, wiping a tiny stray drop from the corner of her lip with her thumb.
Kate’s jaw slowly dropped.
She looked at the empty glass, then back at Marceline, her wicked amusement instantly dissolving into genuine, wide-eyed shock.
“Mon dieu,” Kate murmured softly, leaning back into her woven chair.
“You are in so much deeper than I thought.”