Chapter Thirteen
THE DAY EVERYTHINGended started like any other day in the life they’d built together.
Zacharie made her breakfast—an herb omelet with gruyère, her favorite, alongside fresh fruit and coffee that she’d once told him was better than anything she’d ever had in a café. He woke her with a kiss, lingering just long enough to feel her smile against his lips before forcing himself to pull away.
The urge to join her in the shower was almost unbearable, like always. But he managed to resist, barely.
After breakfast, they lingered over coffee at the kitchen island, the morning light streaming through the windows and catching the gold in her hair. She was telling him about a new storyline she’d been sketching—something about Luc Infernalis going undercover at a vineyard in Bordeaux—and her hands moved animatedly as she spoke, her eyes bright with creative excitement.
Their fingers kept finding each other across the marble countertop.
Just touching.
Just being present.Together.
It was everything Zacharie had never allowed himself to want, but as much as he wanted to enjoy it...
Something just felt off.
He didn’t know if it had to do with him or Mira or something else.
But he was unable to get rid of it, this feeling that something was not right. It almost made him ask Mira if they could postpone her return to university. But because he wanted to give her a normal life, and he wanted to believe that hecouldgive her one—
Paranoid.
That was what he told himself as he got behind the wheel.
You’re just being paranoid.
Mira started talking to him about the latest edits her agent had asked for as he drove. He did his best to concentrate, but his attention was fragmenting.
Something was just...off.
He couldn’t pinpoint it. The road ahead was clear, the traffic light, the morning unremarkable in every visible way. But his instincts—honed by decades of missions where a misread shadow meant death—were screaming.
“Zacharie?” Mira was gazing at him in concern. “Is everything okay?”
He couldn’t answer, with his gaze sweeping the road and the sidewalks. Trying to find something—anything—that would explain what was it about this day that was...off.
“Zacharie? You’re starting to make me nervous.”
The uncertainty in her tone made him reach for her hand...just as a figure stepped into the road, and Zachary finally found what he was looking for.
Braxton Moates.
He emerged from between two parked cars, directly in their path, and looking like he hadn’t been sleeping for weeks. Zacharie registered everything in the span of a single heartbeat: the wild eyes, the unshaven face, the gun already rising. The first shot cracked against the windshield.
Mira screamed.
The glass held—bulletproof, reinforced, worth every cent he’d spent on it—and Zacharie made a decision that required no thought at all.
He floored the accelerator.
Braxton’s eyes went wide with shock, his mouth forming a word that never made it past his lips, and then—
Thud.
The impact shuddered through the car, rubber grinding over flesh, bones cracking under wheels. Mira cried out again, her hands flying to her mouth, and Zacharie was already fighting the steering wheel as the vehicle fishtailed violently.
