The following excerpt comes from the final moments of Chapter One — a return to the Côte d’Azur in 2025, where the novel both opens and circles back. It is a still, intimate scene shaped by everything Steve and Arabella have already lived, and by the unspoken truths that now lie between them.

Outside, our chauffeur — Gilles, a tall man with Alsatian cheekbones and a diplomat’s discretion — opens the Maybach’s door for us.

“Vous avez bien dîné, monsieur?”

“Comme des rois, Gilles.”

“Alors, cap sur la villa.” And we are off, back to Èze.

The drive back to the villa is hushed, the kind of stillness that follows revelation or ritual. Cannes sparkles like an over-decorated cake in the rear-view mirror. The hills around Vallauris blink with hillside villas, their lights flickering behind olive trees and citrus groves. A fox darts across the road and disappears into the maquis. Arabella loosens her hair and sighs lightly. The Maybach cocoons us in scent and silence — bergamot, leather, the faintest trace of truffle oil clinging to my cuff. The sea to our left, black and infinite, rolls gently against the shore, as if to say: sleep now, sins can wait.

When we reach the gates, the lights of the villa come on in a slow ripple — motion-triggered, like some ancient deity stirring.

“Home,” she says, but it sounds like a question.

“For now,” I reply.

The villa doors whisper open, and Gilles disappears like a servant in Racine. Arabella walks ahead, removing her heels with practised grace, then turns at the base of the marble staircase, her silhouette etched in alabaster by the chandelier light above.

“Tu viens ?” she asks, crooking her right index finger at me, her eyes beckoning with that quiet authority she wears like perfume — subtle, inescapable.

She doesn’t need to. I am already walking.

In our room — ours again, maybe — she peels off the silk dress like a second skin. It floats to the floor without ceremony. She moves to her vanity, brushes her hair slowly, then pauses.

“Do I look alright?” she says, not turning.

I step behind her, meet her eyes in the mirror.

“You look… wonderful tonight.”

She gives the ghost of a smile, the kind that used to undo me. Then she reaches for my hand — that simple, old gesture — and leads me to bed like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Not an act of forgiveness. Not a performance. Just two bodies finding the truth between them. Or so it would seem.

Later, with the shutters ajar and the moonlight draped across our sheets, I watch her sleeping. One hand resting on my chest, the other curled as if still holding something fragile. Her breath soft and steady, like surf against a summer shore. But beneath that stillness, something shifts.  Because she doesn’t know that I know — that I’ve read Jade’s letter, that I’ve seen the child, that Jade may have finally given me flesh and bone: a possible son, a new bloodline, arriving just when I’d convinced myself the dynasty had ended with Rupert, a legal fiction.  She doesn’t know that I’ve traced the arc of her deception, that the honeyed lies she whispered in this very bed were stitched together with entitlement and lace. That I now move through the rooms of this villa like a man taking inventory before auction. That in the false bottom of the kitchen drawer is a Matsato chef’s knife, precision-forged carbon steel, shipped from Tokyo. For the kitchen, officially. But the weight of it calms me.

She sleeps, and I stare at the ceiling, measuring breath, time, angles. The reckoning can wait. But not for long.