Chapter 27 #2
The photos didn’t feel like art made for strangers.
They felt like truth made visible.
My throat tightened.
At the entrance, simple and engraved, were words that made my stomach flip toward awe.
THE SANCTUARY — EAST WING
MILA ZEE COLLECTION
Permanent Exhibition
Permanent.
The word landed hard.
Mila paused beside me, her gaze moving over her own work with a kind of quiet disbelief, as if she still couldn’t quite accept it was real.
“I didn’t come here thinking I’d stay,” she said, voice low. “I didn’t come here thinking I’d put anything on walls that couldn’t be taken down.”
I stared at a photograph of Connor in a doorway, the city behind him blurred, his face sharp, eyes unreadable. He looked like a man who’d survived things by becoming difficult to destroy.
And yet Mila had captured him like he was … human. Like he belonged to someone.
“You see him,” I whispered before I could stop myself.
Mila’s eyes flicked to me.
It wasn’t a challenge. It was recognition.
“I didn’t plan to,” she said. “He didn’t either.”
We walked slowly, my footsteps quiet against the floor. The photographs did something strange to me, loosening something.
Mila stopped at an image that made my breath catch—a close shot of hands, masculine. The city reflected in a window behind them.
“He built this wing for them,” I said softly, reading the room the way I’d read Kane in the car. “For the men who come here.”
“And for me,” Mila admitted, almost reluctantly. “I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even know it was happening until it was done.”
There was something in her expression then—private and tender—that made me look away out of instinctive respect.
“And now you live here,” I said, more statement than question.
She nodded. “It’s easier than explaining the world outside. Paris is … incredible. But it doesn’t make you feel safe just because it’s beautiful.”
I swallowed, thinking of the way Kane had scanned the restaurant, the street, the car windows.
Thinking of how my sister had kept an apartment like a mask.
“Does it get easier?” I asked, my voice too honest to be casual.
Mila’s gaze softened.
“Yes,” she said. “Not because the city changes. Because you do. Because you find your people.”
I nodded, absorbing that.
A woman who’d made her way here on her own merits—and then got pulled into something bigger.
“Do you miss home?” I asked.
A pause.
Then, carefully: “Sometimes. It’s not a longing so much as … muscle memory. The way you expect certain things to be simple.”
I exhaled. “Yes.”
She glanced at me. “You sound like you’ve already learned Paris won’t meet you halfway.”
I huffed a quiet laugh. “Paris doesn’t even acknowledge I’m walking.”
That earned a small smile.
We reached the end of the corridor. Mila leaned against the stone wall, arms folded loosely, and she looked less like someone showing me her work and more like someone making space for me to exist.
My eyes drifted back to the photographs—proof that this place didn’t only hold men who were dangerous. It held the people who loved them, too. The ones who learned how to live beside the shadows without letting the shadows swallow them whole.
And somehow, standing in front of Mila’s work, I felt the same thing I’d felt in Rose’s sweater.
Not peace. Not yet.
But steadiness.
A pause.
A place to breathe.
Before I could say anything else, my phone rang.
The sound snapped through the space—too loud, too sharp, too normal.
Mila’s head turned immediately.
I glanced down.
étienne.
Everything inside me went cold.
I answered too fast.
I was supposed to call him.
We were supposed to get together for dinner tonight—awkward and new and fragile, but real. I’d promised I would come back. Promised I wanted to sit at their table. To see Sabine again.
I had even planned what I’d say—how I’d explain that something had come up, that I needed to delay, that I wasn’t disappearing. That I wasn’t abandoning them.
I’d been rehearsing the conversation in my head.
Now, none of that mattered.
Now, his name on my screen felt like a warning siren.
“étienne?”
His voice was panicked.
“Ella,” he said, and my name came out like it hurt. “I went to pick up Sabine.”
My stomach dropped so hard I felt it behind my ribs.
“I’m listening,” I whispered, because something in me already knew.
“They say she isn’t there.”
The hallway narrowed.
The photographs blurred.
My hand tightened around the phone until my fingers ached.
“What do you mean she isn’t there?” I asked, and my voice didn’t sound like mine.
“I am at the school,” he said quickly, breath uneven. “They are telling me she was dismissed. That she left earlier.”
“No.” The word came out flat. Certain. “You didn’t authorize that.”
“I did not.” His voice broke. “They say someone signed her out.”
My knees softened.
Mila stepped closer without touching me, like she didn’t want to startle me but wouldn’t let me fall alone.
“Someone?” I repeated.
“A man,” étienne said. “They believed he was family.”
Family.
The word cracked something open in me.
Sabine’s eyes flashed in my mind. Her little drawing. Her smile. The way she’d wrapped her arms around my legs like she’d decided I was safe.
“She’s five,” I said, and the number sounded obscene. Impossible. “She wouldn’t just go with—”
“He knew her name,” étienne cut in. “They said he spoke to her like he knew her. They thought … they thought it was normal.”
My throat closed.
I could hear noise on his end now—French voices, hurried, overlapping. A door opening. A sharp instruction.
“étienne,” I said, forcing my lungs to work. “Slow down. Are the police there?”
“They are calling,” he said. “They are checking cameras. Ella—”
“I’m coming,” I said instantly.
Mila’s breath caught.
“You cannot—” étienne started, voice raw. “I don’t know—”
“I’m coming,” I repeated, and this time it wasn’t comfort.
It was a decision.
I ended the call before he could argue, because if I heard him fall apart, I would, too.