Chapter 7 #2
“And what you have is me, and Paris, and that black dress you bought last week that’s probably illegal in three countries. Now I’m giving you a reason to wear that dress tonight.” He shrugs. “I’ll just have to make sure I accessorize with a loaded gun.”
That makes me snort.
He slants a brow. “That’s so attractive.”
“Shut up.”
“Come on, Crazy. If you don’t want to do it for you, do it for me because cabin fever is a communicable disease and you’re giving it to me. Just one night. You can spiral tomorrow.”
I look at him, green eyes pleading. “Okay, fine. But only because you’re pathetic.”
He smirks, flashing those dimples. “You’d fall apart otherwise.”
The black mini-dress clings to me like a second skin—sheer mesh that pretends to be modest while screaming otherwise.
Long tulle sleeves hug my arms, sparkling with delicate vertical lines of tiny crystals that catch the lights like scattered stars.
The neckline plunges in a sharp halter, framing my throat before diving between my breasts in a keyhole cutout edged with dense, glittering beads.
Ian made me buy it last week when he was bored and I was moping, thinking I’m the kind of girl a shopping spree can cheer up. He wasn’t completely wrong, though.
The club throbs with noise and shadow, bodies pressed together in that deliberate crush that happens when a place understands its own reputation and cultivates it. Bass you feel in your sternum. Lights that turn everyone beautiful. The smell of expensive perfume and cheaper ambition.
Ian's hand is at my back as we move through the crowd, steering us toward the bar with the practiced ease of a man who has navigated worse rooms than this.
“Just so you know, if you leave my side, I will shoot the barman on principle,” he says, mouth close to my ear to be heard over the music.
“Why the barman? What did he do?”
We reach the bar and Ian reads his name tag. “Because anyone with the name Thibault should be shot first.”
I let out a laugh, and Ian orders our drinks.
He gets something complicated and I get wine because I'm apparently incapable of leaving the Paris mindset even in a nightclub, and for a while we just stand at the bar and let the music and the crowd wash over us and it's—good, actually.
Better than I expected. The noise does what Ian said it would, fills up all the space where the quiet worry lives, and I feel myself loosen by increments, shoulders dropping, the held breath I've been holding all day finally letting go.
Ian makes me laugh twice in twenty minutes. The second time, I nearly choke on my wine, and he looks vindicated in a way that's deeply irritating.
“See,” he says. “This is better than the balcony.”
“Don't flatter yourself. I'm perfectly capable of moping in public.”
“Sure, but in that dress?” His gaze roves over me. “Yep. Reth's gonna kill me for letting you out of the house in that dress.”
“Lucky for you, he's not here. Come on.” I take his glass and put it on the bar. “You brought me out to dance, so let's dance.”
He lets me pull him onto the floor with the expression of a man who has made peace with his fate, and then the music gets into him the same way it's gotten into me, and within thirty seconds he's stopped performing reluctance and started actually moving, and I laugh again—a real one, because Ian dancing is somehow both exactly what you'd expect and nothing like it at all.
All that coiled, lethal precision redirected into something loose and ridiculous and completely unbothered.
“You're actually good,” I say, surprised.
“I'm excellent at everything.” He spins me once, catches me easily. “Some of us are just built different, Crazy.”
I let the music take the rest of it—the flowers, the door, the long, hollow day—and for a few songs I'm just a woman in a black dress in Paris, dancing with someone who makes her laugh, and it's enough. It's actually enough.
My hips move and the bass vibrates through me, Ian's hand is at my waist, and I close my eyes, allow myself to just exist inside the beat for a little while, not waiting, not counting days, not listening for something that isn't coming.
When I open my eyes, Ian's looking at me.
Not the way he usually looks at me. This is different.
Slower. His eyes on my face like he arrived there without meaning to and then just—stayed, and for one unguarded second there's something in them that makes my breath catch a little.
Warm in a way that isn't about keeping me safe or making me laugh or any of the things Ian usually is.
His mouth pulls up at one corner.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” He turns me once, smooth and easy. “Having fun is a good look on you.”
His words land without the usual ironic cushion. No wink hidden in his tone, no escape hatch built into the sentiment. I don't know what to do with it, so I don't do anything. Just let the beat take us forward and pretend the moment was smaller than it felt.
We dance to two more songs before I gesture toward the bar, parched and sweaty, while Ian looks like a Marine who can combat dehydration at a cellular level.
“Get me a beer,” Ian says close to my ear. “Bathroom break. Do not move from this spot.”
I nod, and he narrows his eyes at me.
“I mean it. Do not. Fucking move.”
“Oh, my God, I’m not eight.”
He lingers just long enough that I roll my eyes, and only then does he shoulder through the crowd toward the back.
I turn to the bar and flag down the bartender, order Ian's beer and top up my wine, and lean back against the bar while I wait, letting the music move through me.
The club has hit that point in the night where everyone's stopped being self-conscious about it, bodies looser, the energy on the floor shifting into something warmer and less deliberate.
I face the bar just as the bartender sets down my drink, and my heart just. Stops. Next to the glass…is a lollipop.
Pink.
Heart-shaped.
I suck in a breath, and my heart restarts at twice the speed. “Who sent this?” But the bartender is already moving, gesturing vaguely down the bar.
“The gentleman—” He turns. Frowns. “He was just here.”
I look down the bar. Nothing. Nobody. And I stand there for one suspended, airless second.
The music pulses. The crowd moves around me like water around a stone.
And then something shifts in the room—a change in the quality of the air, like a pressure system moving in, like the atmosphere itself rearranging around a presence it recognizes.
I know that feeling.
I pick up the lollipop. Hold it in my fingers. And then I move. Through the crowd of dancing bodies, heart beating fast, crushing through perfume and sweat and the blue-pink pulse of club strobes, no logic or plan except that my body had already decided to follow the current.
The club is a living, breathing thing—too big, too loud, too many shadows that swallow people whole.
I push through the crush of bodies on the main floor, the bass hammering against my ribs like a second heartbeat, but I can’t stay down here.
Something pulls me upward, an instinct I don’t question anymore.
I slip past a velvet rope, flash the bored bouncer a smile I don’t feel, and climb the narrow staircase to the upper level.
The mezzanine is darker, more intimate, its velvet lighting casting everything in deep crimson and gold.
A railed gallery circles the dance floor below, giving a perfect view of the writhing crowd, but I don’t look down.
My eyes scan the upper walkway, the private balconies tucked into the corners, the pockets of shadow where normal people don’t linger.
He’s here.
I feel it in the way the air thickens, in the slow crawl of heat up my spine. The same heavy, consuming presence that wrapped around me outside the bakery this morning. The same one that’s lived under my skin for three months.
My pulse kicks harder as I move along the gallery, heels clicking against the polished floor. Every shadowed alcove makes my breath catch. Every tall, still figure turns out to be a stranger.
Until I see him.
A hooded figure at the far end of the mezzanine, hood pulled low, broad shoulders slicing through the crimson light like a blade. He’s walking away from me, unhurried, slipping toward a marked “Rooftop Access – Staff Only” door.
I don’t hesitate.
I push through the last few bodies and follow him up the narrow metal service staircase. The bass from the club fades into a distant throb with every step. Cold night air hits my skin as I reach the top and push open the heavy door.
The rooftop terrace opens up around me—Paris glittering below, the wind whipping my dress against my thighs, the distant glow of the Eiffel Tower watching silently.
But he’s not here. There’s no one out here.
My heart sinks and tears and withers as I step up to the parapet, tears stinging my eyes with Paris spread out before me, and the lollipop slips from my fingers.
I was so sure he was here. I was so sure—
My breath leaves my lungs in a rush. No footsteps. No warning. Just the sudden, suffocating presence of him at my back, so near I can feel the heat rolling off him in waves. I close my eyes, my pulse spiking hard, every piece of my body instantly in agony for him.
“Nazareth,” I breathe, the name cracking on my tongue like a prayer and a plea at once.
“I missed watching you breathe… Sophia Sinclair.”