His To Claim (The Sanctuary #2)

Chapter 1

ELLA

Paris didn’t feel romantic.

Not when I’d come to close out my sister’s life instead of living my own.

It felt alert.

I noticed it the moment I stepped out of the car—how the city seemed awake in a way New York never quite was.

It wasn’t louder or faster. Just sharper, like it was paying attention back.

The air was cool and damp, the kind that settled into your lungs and stayed there, and the street smelled like rain and metal and something faintly sweet I couldn’t place.

Rose, my beloved big sister, had died here.

That fact followed me out of the car and onto the sidewalk, heavy and immediate, like a hand at my back.

A car accident, sudden enough to make every conversation we’d ever postponed feel obscene in hindsight.

Sudden enough that I still half-expected my phone to buzz with her name lighting up the screen, demanding to know why I hadn’t texted back yet.

The city didn’t care.

Cars slid past without slowing. People moved around me with practiced ease, brushing shoulders, talking over one another, living. Paris hadn’t paused for Rose, and it wasn’t about to pause for me.

I stood there longer than I needed to, my suitcase at my side, coat unbuttoned, blonde hair already frizzing in the damp air. I let myself feel it—the wrongness of standing upright in a place where she had died. The wrongness of being alive at all when she wasn’t.

Then the driver unloaded my bag, muttered something in French I barely registered, and disappeared into traffic without ceremony.

That, somehow, steadied me.

No condolences. No careful looks. No one lowering their voice.

Paris didn’t ask for my grief. It didn’t offer comfort. It simply kept going, daring me to do the same.

Rose would have liked that.

We had always been close—close in the way sisters are when they grow up sharing space and secrets.

In New York, we talked constantly. Not the polite check-ins people mistake for intimacy, but real conversations—late-night calls, half-formed thoughts, the unfiltered truth.

I knew when something was off with her long before anyone else did.

I was the first to notice when her work trips to France began to stretch.

A few extra days at first. Then a week. Then a month.

Then explanations that grew vague around the edges.

She sounded distracted when we spoke, like part of her attention was always somewhere else—somewhere across an ocean I couldn’t see.

Randy hadn’t seemed to notice.

He was a nice guy. Steady, reliable, proud of his wife in the way that didn’t require too many questions. He trusted Rose completely. Trusted the marriage. Trusted the version of her he saw every day.

I loved him for that. And I hated myself a little for knowing better.

Something else had Rose’s attention. I could hear it in the pauses, in the way her voice softened when she talked about Paris, in how quickly she changed the subject when I pressed. I told myself I was imagining it. That it wasn’t my place. That she’d tell me when she was ready.

She never did.

Now, standing here with my suitcase in my hand, I wished I had asked harder. Confronted her. Forced the truth into the open before it could calcify into silence. Whatever Rose had been chasing—or whatever had found her here—I would never hear it from her lips.

Showing up in Paris to find out for myself was the only option left.

I dragged my suitcase inside the building and climbed the stairs, the narrow stairwell echoing faintly with each step.

My hand skimmed the banister, my mind cataloging details because that was how I stayed upright when everything else tilted—the chipped paint, the uneven steps, the smell of old stone and cleaning solution.

The apartment key was heavier than it should have been.

I unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The place was small, but it sure didn’t look temporary.

A real table sat near the window, its surface scarred just enough to prove it had been used. Bookshelves lined one wall, half-full, as if Rose expected to come back and finish the rest later. The sofa was positioned to face the window, not the television.

This wasn’t a crash pad.

This was a life.

My sister’s life, or at least, the part of it no one in New York had known about.

I set my suitcase down and stood there, suddenly unsure what to touch first. In my head, I could still see us as girls—sharing a bedroom in a cramped Manhattan apartment, fighting over clothes, whispering in the dark long after we were supposed to be asleep.

She’d always been louder, bolder, quicker to act.

I’d been the one who thought things through, who planned, who stayed.

Somehow, she’d ended up here.

And I hadn’t.

I crossed to the window and pushed it open.

Paris unfolded below me in fragments—iron railings, shuttered windows, a café just down the block where chairs were being pulled closer together as the afternoon wore on.

Laughter drifted up, easy and unselfconscious.

Somewhere, a door slammed. Somewhere else, a voice called out sharply, followed by a reply just as quick.

I exhaled slowly.

I’d never been to Paris before, which felt ridiculous given how much of my childhood had been shaped by its ghost. My father was French.

Born here. Raised here. Paris had lived in our apartment in New York in small, stubborn ways—phrases he refused to translate, recipes he cooked from memory, an accent that crept into his voice when he was tired or irritated.

My sister loved those pieces. She collected them, romanticized them. Talked about Paris like it was inevitable.

I’d treated it like a story.

Now, I was standing inside it, jet-lagged and hollowed out, because my sister had come here alone and never made it home.

I closed the window and turned back into the apartment, the sounds of the street dulling behind the glass.

I moved more slowly now, like the space might resist if I rushed it. I traced the edge of the table with my fingertips, the back of the sofa, the spines of the books on the shelf. Everything here felt lived in. This wasn’t a place Rose passed through between flights.

This was a place she’d chosen.

The bedroom door stood open.

I hesitated before stepping inside, that old, instinctive pause before crossing into something private.

The room smelled faintly of soap and something warmer underneath it—comforting, familiar.

The bed was made, but not perfectly. A book lay facedown on the nightstand, its spine cracked in a way that suggested it had been read more than once.

And then I noticed the jacket.

A man’s coat hung over the back of the chair, dark and heavy, the sleeves worn soft at the cuffs. Like it belonged there.

I stared at it longer than I meant to.

In the closet, Rose’s clothes hung neatly, divided by season and purpose the way she’d always done it. And beside them—unmistakable now—were men’s shoes. Two pairs. One polished, one scuffed. Both undeniably not hers.

I exhaled slowly and sat on the edge of the bed.

So, it was true.

Rose had shared this space with someone.

Instead of dread, I felt something unexpected unfurl in my chest.

Relief.

The dangerous kind—the kind that made me wonder what else I’d been wrong about.

Not because she’d lied to her husband. Not because she’d broken the rules of a life everyone thought they understood. But because she hadn’t settled.

She hadn’t stopped at safe.

The thought stirred something restless inside me.

Back in New York, Rose had chosen Randy. Dependable, steady Randy, who remembered anniversaries and brought flowers home on Fridays because that was what husbands were supposed to do. Randy, who had loved her without ever demanding too much of her.

Randy, who had never made her voice sharpen or soften the way it did when she talked about Paris.

I had chosen Hank.

Even thinking his name felt flat.

Hank had been nice in all the ways people meant when they said it like a compliment. Thoughtful. Predictable. Proud of me in a distant, approving way. He fit neatly into my life, like a piece designed to match instead of challenge.

My parents had loved him.

“He’s solid,” my mother had said. “You need someone solid.”

Hank was solid. Dependable. Safe. He kissed me the same way every time—gentle, brief, like checking something off a list.

He had also never lit me up.

We’d lasted longer than we should have because nothing was technically wrong. Because our life looked good on paper. Because breaking something that wasn’t broken felt indulgent.

Until Rose died.

Until suddenly the idea of staying in something that merely worked felt obscene.

Standing in my sister’s Paris apartment, staring at a man’s jacket she’d allowed into her private life, I felt a strange surge of pride for her. Rose had wanted more. Had reached for it. Had taken a risk I’d been too careful to consider for myself.

And she’d found it.

The idea didn’t make me jealous.

It made me hopeful.

I stood and moved through the apartment again, noticing things with new eyes.

A second toothbrush in the bathroom. A mug on the counter that didn’t match the rest—bigger, heavier, clearly chosen by someone with different hands than Rose’s.

A faint trace of cologne that lingered near the door, subtle and restrained.

This wasn’t chaos.

This was compatibility.

I thought of Randy, back in New York, moving through the motions of grief with quiet dignity. Handling calls. Making arrangements. Being the man everyone expected him to be.

And Hank—my steady Hank—had shown up after the funeral with groceries and concern and an unspoken expectation that we would slide back into our old shape. That time would smooth the edges of my restlessness.

Neither of them had noticed what Rose and I both had, eventually.

Safe wasn’t enough.

I sank onto the sofa and stared at the ceiling, my thoughts circling in new patterns now.

Rose and I had grown up in the same rooms, shared the same parents, learned the same lessons about responsibility and caution.

We’d both married men our families approved of.

Men who fit neatly into the lives we were supposed to want.

Rose had broken out of that.

Maybe I could, too.

The idea felt dangerous in a quiet, electric way.

I glanced at the jacket again—not with suspicion, but with curiosity. Whoever this man was, he wasn’t my story. He was simply proof. Evidence that Rose had found something that made her step outside the life she’d been handed.

And that mattered.

I stood and went back to the desk, opening a folder of papers. I didn’t search for names. I wasn’t ready to know who he was. That could wait. For now, it was enough to know that Rose had been alive here in ways I hadn’t seen before.

After a cursory glance at the contents, I closed the folder and set it aside.

Outside, the city was shifting toward evening, the light thinning, the sounds rising. Paris didn’t soften as the day ended—it sharpened, like it expected something of you.

I smiled faintly.

Rose had always been braver than me. Quicker to leap. Less concerned with whether the ground beneath her feet was solid.

But she’d left me this.

Not answers. Not closure.

Possibility.

I crossed the room and stood by the window once more, watching the street come alive below. People gathering. Chairs scraping. Voices lifting.

“Okay,” I said quietly, to Rose or myself—I wasn’t sure which. “I see it.”

The city felt inviting.

I didn’t look away.

Tomorrow, I would start asking questions.