31

Sierra’s POV

A change in Louis was a subtle shift in the atmosphere of our home. It was a silence that was too deep, a look in his eyes that drifted to a middle distance, even when he was playing with Katie on the rug. He was present, but partitioned. A part of him was locked away in a room I couldn’t enter.

He kissed me with the same passion, held me with the same possessiveness, but his mind was elsewhere. I’d catch him staring at his phone, not reading, just staring, as if waiting for a verdict to come through.

“Is everything okay with the new hotel acquisition?” I asked two days after his mysterious visitor, trying to sound casual as I sorted through fabric swatches for the gala’s decor.

“Hmm? Yes. Fine. Just fine.” He didn’t look up from his tablet.

Fine. The word was a wall. I knew better than to push. When Louis Trevane built walls, they were made of steel and consequences.

That night, after he’d fallen into a fitful sleep, I lay awake, the silence pressing in. My phone was on the nightstand. I picked it up, scrolling mindlessly through news feeds, a habit born of sleeplessness and a low-grade anxiety that had become my baseline.

My thumb paused. A small headline in the World section of a financial paper:

**Swiss Socialite’s Tragic Accident. Lena Moreau, 45, sister of disgraced French model Celeste Moreau, died early today in a single-vehicle collision on a mountain pass outside Geneva. Police cite icy conditions. Ms. Moreau, known for her philanthropic work with orphaned children, leaves behind no immediate family.**

My breath hitched. Moreau. Celeste’s sister. Louis’s past, crashing into the present in a burst of metal and ice on a Swiss mountain.

*Icy conditions.*

*A single vehicle.*

*No immediate family.*

The phrases were clean, clinical. They painted a picture of a sad, random event.

But the timing. Days after a nervous, greasy man had come to our house and mentioned Monaco. Days after Louis had retreated behind his steel walls.

A cold, sick feeling pooled in my stomach. It was a feeling deeper than fear. It was a knowing.

I looked at Louis sleeping beside me. In the faint light from the window, the hard lines of his face were softened. This was the man who sang silly songs with our daughter, who remembered I liked my coffee with a specific, obscure honey, who held me as if I were the only solid thing in his universe.

And he was also the man who had, without a flicker of hesitation, made a monster his employee.

I slid out of bed, my heart hammering. I walked on silent feet to his study. The room held the faint scent of his cologne and old paper. The computer was off. The drawers were locked. But his legal pad was there, the one he used for quick, brutal notes.

I flipped through it. Past notes about the foundation, Katie’s school schedules, security protocols. Then, near the end, a fresh page.

At the top, a name: *Lena Moreau.*

Below it, a single, stark line: ***Problem. Eliminate. Clean.***

And below that, three letters: ***A.F.***

The initials swam before my eyes. *Alistair Ford.* Elias Crowe.

The room tilted. I gripped the edge of the desk. The clean, clinical words from the news article echoed in my head. *Icy conditions. Single vehicle.*

*Eliminate. Clean.*

He hadn’t just hired Crowe for protection. He had deployed him. As a weapon. He had looked at a threat from his past and had it… erased.

The moral conflict I’d felt over the deal curdled into something black and horrifying inside me. We hadn’t just bought a guard dog. We’d bought a wolf and sent it to slaughter.

I heard a floorboard creak in the hall. I shoved the pad back, my movements frantic and silent, and slipped out of the study, back into the dark hallway.

Louis stood there, a silhouette against the moonlight from our bedroom door. He was awake.

“Sierra?” His voice was sleep-roughened, but alert. “What are you doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” I whispered, the lie brittle. “I was getting water.”

He stepped closer, peering at my face. He could see too much. He always could. “You’re shaking.”

“It’s cold.”

He reached out and took my hands. They were like ice. He didn’t call me on the lie. Instead, he pulled me into his arms, against the solid warmth of his chest. He wore only his pajama bottoms. His skin was hot. “Come back to bed. I’ll keep you warm.”

In bed, he wrapped himself around me, his front to my back, his arm a heavy band across my waist. His lips found the sensitive spot behind my ear. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he murmured, his voice a vibration against my skin.

I couldn’t. The words were a dammed flood of accusation and terror in my throat. If I said them, I made the nightmare real. I forced myself to relax against him. “Just a bad dream.”

He held me tighter. His hand slid under my sleep shirt, spreading over my stomach, possessive and comforting. “I’m here. Nothing will hurt you.”

But what if *you* are what hurts me? The thought was a silent scream.

His touch, however, was a drug. As his fingers traced slow circles on my skin, the fear began to twist and melt into something else—a dark, desperate need for connection. He was my sanctuary and my peril. I turned in his arms, facing him, and kissed him.

It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a clash, a confession, a battle. I poured all my confusion, my horror, my unyielding love into it. He met me with a fierce, hungry intensity, as if he too was exorcising demons.

His hands were everywhere, mapping my body as if to memorize it, claim it, anchor himself to it. There was a roughness to his touch tonight, a barely leashed wildness that mirrored the storm inside me. My own hands raked down his back, pulling him closer, needing to erase the distance, the secrets, the ghost of a woman on a Swiss mountain pass.

When he entered me, it was with a deep, claiming thrust that drove the air from my lungs. We moved together in the dark, a frantic, silent symphony of need and absolution. It was less about pleasure and more about possession, about affirming that we were here, alive, together, even if the ground beneath us was stained with blood we had ordered.

After, spent and trembling, I lay with my head on his chest, listening to the frantic gallop of his heart slowly subside. His fingers trailed lazily through my hair.

“I love you, Sierra,” he whispered into the dark. “More than anything. Never doubt that.”

It was the truth. I knew it was. And that was the most terrifying part.

The man who loved me more than anything was also a man who could have another human being killed to protect our peace.

Where did that leave me? Complicit. Loved. Safe.

And haunted.

“I love you too,” I whispered back, the words a vow and a prison sentence.

As I drifted into an uneasy sleep, the headline played behind my eyes. *Philanthropic work with orphaned children.*

We had just killed a woman who helped orphans to protect our own child.

The math of our love was written in blood, and I was no longer sure I knew how to read it.