The city was alive with restless energy, its streets glistening under the drizzle of midnight rain. Neon signs flickered above narrow alleys, casting fractured colors across puddles that mirrored a world both dazzling and cruel. Louvre moved quietly through the crowd, his satchel heavy with exhaustion and light with coins. Each step carried the weight of survival, yet his eyes still lifted toward the skyline, where towers of glass and steel rose like monuments to a life he could never touch.
In those towers lived Venice. Her world was gilded, wrapped in silk and expectation. She was the daughter of wealth, a figure admired and envied, yet unseen in her truest self. Behind the polished smiles and carefully chosen gowns, she felt the invisible chains of privilege—every decision dictated, every dream measured against her family's ambition. She longed for something beyond the golden cage, something real, something hers.
Neither Louvre nor Venice knew the other's name. They were strangers divided by fortune, separated by walls of class and circumstance. Yet fate, subtle and insistent, had already begun its quiet work. The rain that fell on Louvre's worn jacket was the same rain that tapped against Venice's window. The city that kept them apart was also the city that would bring them together.
And under that restless sky, two lives—one carved from scarcity, the other from abundance—were about to collide. Their story would not begin with grandeur, but with a single moment of chance, a spark in the darkness that neither could ignore.