The city was still mostly asleep when I found myself on the balcony with a cup of coffee I wasn't really tasting.
The dream had come back. Not the whole thing — just fragments, the way it arrived sometimes when I was too tired to keep it fully out. Jade's voice. The sound of the shot. The particular quality of running without looking back.
I'd been out here for about forty minutes by the time the sounds started from the apartment next door.
Small sounds. The kind that meant someone was starting their morning — a drawer closing, water running, the soft percussion of a person moving through their kitchen. Then the smell arrived, drifting through the gap under her balcony door before the door itself opened.
Eggs. Something herbed. Toast.
Bella appeared in the doorway with the particular expression of someone who had opened their balcony for fresh air and found an unexpected variable already occupying the shared space. She was in the grey shirt, hair loose, a spatula still in her hand.
She looked at me. Then at the coffee. Then back at me.
"You're up early," she said.
"Couldn't sleep enough."
She paused in the doorway. The morning light was the kind that came before the city had fully committed to the day — pale, unhurried, doing its job without announcing it.
"Come in," she said. "I made too much."
I blinked. In all the months of balcony conversations and late evenings and cooking in my kitchen, I had never once been inside hers. The invitation sat in the air between us with a specific, quiet weight.
"You sure?"
She had already turned back inside.
I took that as a yes.
Her apartment was smaller than mine, or maybe just arranged differently — everything placed with the precision of someone who had thought carefully about how much space each thing deserved. Books in a single deliberate row. Equipment I recognised and some I didn't, tucked into shelves with the practised concealment of someone who had long since made that a habit. A small table near the window with two chairs, which she had apparently already set for two without making a decision about it.
I sat.
She set a plate in front of me with the same efficiency she brought to everything — eggs, toast, the herbed thing that turned out to be something with tomatoes that had no business tasting as good as it did at this hour — and sat across from me with her own.
I was reaching for my fork when I felt it. Her hand, briefly, on my forearm — not holding, just registering. She withdrew it almost immediately, but reached instead for the blanket draped over the back of the second chair and dropped it across my shoulders without ceremony.
"Your arms are cold," she said, already cutting into her eggs.
I looked down at my sleeveless arms. I hadn't noticed.
"Thank you," I said.
She nodded once and ate.
We sat like that for a while, the morning moving quietly outside, the city finding its feet below us. She didn't ask questions, which was its own kind of kindness. But somewhere between the first and second cup of tea she made without asking if I wanted one and placed in front of me, she glanced over.
"What is it?" she asked. Not pushy. Just open.
"I couldn't sleep."
"Why."
"Bad dream."
She held the look for a moment — the particular quality of attention she brought to things she was deciding how far to press. Then she went back to her food.
She didn't push further.
And that — the simple, complete absence of pressure, the way she'd covered my arms without making it a thing, the second cup of tea, the extra food — made something in my chest do something complicated.
It felt like Jade. Not Jade specifically — not her face or her voice or the pale blonde hair that caught different light. But the feeling she'd produced. The specific warmth of being in a room with someone who wasn't asking you to be anything other than what you were currently managing to be.
I'd thought that feeling was gone. Gone with Marseille and the bank and the car park where I'd sat and shaken while the city moved overhead.
I looked at Bella across the small table.
She was reading something on her phone now, absently, giving me the quiet I clearly needed without making the quiet feel like absence. The morning light was doing the thing it did with her hair when it was loose. The lopsided necklace from the children's home was on the counter, where she'd put it the night she'd taken it off and apparently left it.
My phone buzzed.
Kenzie.
Something's come up. I need to see you. Can you come now? It's urgent.
I read it twice.
The warmth from the past hour sat in my chest next to the memory of Jade in the alley, hand on her leg, telling me to go. The particular way things ended when you let them get close enough to end.
I thought about Kenzie. About the ferris wheel and the way she'd said Cartez like she was finally seeing something whole. About how good the morning had been before this text arrived and how familiar that felt — something warm and real and worth protecting sitting right next to something that was about to go wrong.
I'd been here before. I knew what came after.
If I kept Kenzie close, it would end the way things ended with Jade. Not the same way — never exactly the same way — but the same shape. Someone I cared about in a doorway telling me to go, and me running, and never quite knowing if they were okay afterward.
I didn't want to end up in another car park three streets away, shaking. I didn't want Kenzie to be the next person I left behind while something I should have prevented happened to her.
"I have to go," I said.
Bella looked up from her phone. Her eyes moved to mine, then briefly to my phone, then back. She didn't ask.
"Thank you," I said. "For breakfast. For—" I gestured vaguely at the blanket still around my shoulders, at the second cup of tea, at the whole quiet uncomplicated hour of it.
She nodded once.
I folded the blanket and left it on the chair, and walked out into the corridor, and stood there for a moment before heading downstairs.
The morning had been good.
That was the part that was going to make what came next harder.
----------------------------------
She was already there when I arrived at the address she'd sent.
Not in the way of someone who had been waiting anxiously — in the way of someone who had arrived early because they were excited and hadn't wanted to waste any of it. She was standing outside a small flower stall at the entrance to the arts quarter market, examining something with the focused attention she brought to things she actually cared about, and when she looked up and saw me coming her face did the unguarded thing it did.
"You came," she said, like it still surprised her sometimes.
"Your text said urgent."
She laughed. "Okay, yes. That was a manipulation tactic." She fell into step beside me, looping her arm through mine with the ease of someone who had decided this was normal and made it so. "I wanted you here early. The market's better before it gets crowded."
It took me a moment to realise what she'd done. The urgency had been manufactured — not out of deception exactly, more out of the particular enthusiasm of someone who didn't trust that the truth, which was simply I want to see you and I want you here early, would be enough on its own.
"The gala," I said. "You promised something normal."
"I promised no parties and no fathers." She steered us toward the first row of stalls. "I delivered. This is the most normal thing I know how to do."
The market was exactly what she'd described at the gala — the kind of place that didn't announce itself, full of things that were either beautiful or entirely impractical, run by people who seemed to have made peace with the fact that commerce wasn't really the point. She moved through it with the ease of someone who came here often, or wished she did — pausing at certain stalls longer than others, picking things up and setting them down, occasionally turning to show me something with the wordless enthusiasm of a person who had forgotten, briefly, to be strategic about anything.
She bought a small ceramic bird at one stall, which she held carefully for the rest of the morning.
At some point she looked at me properly — the quick, honest assessment she sometimes did before she'd decided how to phrase whatever she'd noticed.
"You look tired," she said. "Not today tired. The other kind."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You've been somewhere else since you arrived." She didn't say it with accusation, just with the matter-of-fact observation of someone who paid attention. "Come on."
She'd already spotted the bakery at the end of the market row — the elderly man behind the counter, the smell that preceded it by twenty metres, the small queue of people who clearly knew something the rest of the city didn't. We got pastries without discussing what kind, and she led us to the low wall above the river path where the city opened up on one side and the old residential quarter rose on the other.
We sat.
The morning was doing its best impression of something uncomplicated. Below, the river moved. The market continued its quiet business. The pastry was, objectively, exactly as good as it should have been.
Kenzie sat beside me with the ceramic bird in her lap, not pushing, giving me the morning the way she sometimes gave things — completely, without conditions.
That was what made it harder.
Not the beauty of the morning or the quality of the pastry or even the way she'd planned the whole thing carefully and then pretended it was casual. Just the simple, genuine openness of someone who trusted me with her time and wasn't asking for anything back except to be here.
I looked at the river for a long moment.
"Kenzie."
Something in my voice told her, before I'd said anything else. I watched it move across her face — the brightness dimming slightly, the tilt of her head changing, the particular alertness of someone who has heard their name said in a way that requires them to prepare.
"What," she said. Not a question.
"I need to tell you something."
"Then tell me."
I set my cup down on the wall between us. "Associating yourself with me — with the Cartez name — is a risk you don't need. The people who know that name, what it means, what it's attached to — they'll use it. They'll use you through it. And I don't—" I stopped. Started again. "I don't want that for you."
The silence lasted long enough to become its own thing.
"You're ending this," she said.
"I'm trying to protect—"
"Don't." Her voice had gone flat, the particular flatness that was the precursor to something else entirely. "Don't tell me you're protecting me. I live the life I live. I know what risk looks like. I chose you knowing your name." She turned to face me fully. "You don't get to decide what's too dangerous for me. That's my call."
"I know that."
"Then why?"
"Because the Cartez name follows me whether I use it or not. And everyone who gets close to me either wants something from it or gets pulled into what it costs." I met her eyes. "I left Marseille to get out from under it. I'm not going to drag it into your life."
She looked at me for a long moment.
And then something shifted — the flatness giving way to something rawer and less controlled, the particular expression of someone whose logic centres have been bypassed by something they haven't prepared adequate defences for.
"You're serious," she said.
"Yes."
"You're actually—" She stopped. Her jaw tightened. "I'm living a similar life. Do you understand that? The kind of life where names carry weight and people want things from you because of what you represent? I know exactly what that feels like." Her voice was rising now, not to a shout, to the particular pitch of someone who has been calm for too long and has run out of calm. "And I chose you anyway. Knowing. All of it. I chose you."
"Kenzie—"
"Don't say my name like that." She stood up from the wall, the ceramic bird clutched in one hand, her pastry falling unnoticed. "Don't say it like you're being gentle. You're leaving. Just say you're leaving."
"I'm leaving," I said. "And I'm sorry."
"You're sorry." She laughed, short and without warmth. "You're sorry. That's—" She pressed her hand to her mouth for a moment, collecting something. "Do you know what I thought? When I met you in that pub. Some boy, working a shift, too young and too sharp and looking at me like I was a person instead of a name." She lowered her hand. "I thought — finally. One person who just sees me."
"I do see you."
"Then why does seeing me mean you have to leave me?"
I didn't have an answer that would hold. Everything true I could say would either hurt more or leave something out that she deserved to know, and the thing she most deserved to know — that her father had sat across a mahogany desk and delivered the ending I was currently performing like it had been my own idea — was the thing I was least able to give her.
"It's the right thing," I said, which was both true and insufficient and I knew it.
She looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen from her before. Not the brightness, not the warmth, not the strategic composure of the King's daughter conducting herself in a room full of people who wanted things from her. Something underneath all of those. The specific expression of someone whose chest has been opened by something and who is deciding, in real time, whether to close it or keep it open.
She chose to close it.
The warmth went out of her face like a light being switched off — not slowly, not dramatically, just gone, replaced by a smoothness that I recognised from the gala. The performed version of herself. The one that didn't need anyone.
"Fine," she said.
Just that. Fine.
She picked up her bag from the wall and straightened her jacket and looked at the river for precisely one second, long enough to collect something, not long enough to look like she was struggling.
Then she turned away.
I heard him before I saw him.
Footsteps from the path below — unhurried, deliberate, the particular rhythm of someone who had been waiting at a distance and had now decided the distance was no longer necessary. He came up the steps from the river path with the contained, efficient movement that I'd come to associate with Kenzie's bodyguard — the tall blonde man from the pub, the one she'd introduced me to with a glance that said don't mind him.
He went directly to Kenzie, not to me, which told me he'd seen enough of what had just happened to know where he was needed. He put one hand on her shoulder — not comforting exactly, more like steadying, the way you steady something that's about to fall over — and said something low enough that I didn't catch it.
Kenzie's composure cracked.
Not enormously. Just a fissure — her chin dropping slightly, her shoulders shifting, the particular diminishment of someone who has been holding something together and has found one person in whose presence they don't have to anymore. A sound escaped her that she'd been containing for the past three minutes, small and involuntary and devastating in the specific way that sounds are when they weren't meant to be heard.
He guided her back toward the path.
And then, just before they turned the corner, he looked back at me.
Not long. Not dramatically. Just a single, clean, measuring look — the look of someone who had known this was coming and had positioned himself accordingly and was now confirming that the sequence was proceeding as planned.
There was nothing warm in it.
There was nothing threatening in it either, which was somehow worse.
Just the precise, satisfied attention of a man watching something he'd engineered arrive at its intended destination.
Then they were gone.
I sat on the wall alone for a long time.
The ceramic bird Kenzie had bought was still on the wall beside me where she'd left it. Small. Carefully made. Chosen because she'd liked it, not because it was useful.
I left it there.
And walked home with my hands in my pockets and the particular weight of having done a thing that was both correct and completely wrong sitting somewhere between my chest and my throat, finding no position that was comfortable.