They felt like truth made visible.
My throat tightened.
At the entrance, simple and engraved, were words that made my stomach flip toward awe.
THE SANCTUARY — EAST WING
MILA ZEE COLLECTION
Permanent Exhibition
Permanent.
The word landed hard.
Mila paused beside me, her gaze moving over her own work with a kind of quiet disbelief, as if she still couldn’t quite accept it was real.
“I didn’t come here thinking I’d stay,” she said, voice low. “I didn’t come here thinking I’d put anything on walls that couldn’t be taken down.”
I stared at a photograph of Connor in a doorway, the city behind him blurred, his face sharp, eyes unreadable. He looked like a man who’d survived things by becoming difficult to destroy.
And yet Mila had captured him like he was … human. Like he belonged to someone.
“You see him,” I whispered before I could stop myself.
Mila’s eyes flicked to me.
It wasn’t a challenge. It was recognition.
“I didn’t plan to,” she said. “He didn’t either.”
We walked slowly, my footsteps quiet against the floor. The photographs did something strange to me, loosening something.
Mila stopped at an image that made my breath catch—a close shot of hands, masculine. The city reflected in a window behind them.
“He built this wing for them,” I said softly, reading the room the way I’d read Kane in the car. “For the men who come here.”
“And for me,” Mila admitted, almost reluctantly. “I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even know it was happening until it was done.”
There was something in her expression then—private and tender—that made me look away out of instinctive respect.
“And now you live here,” I said, more statement than question.
She nodded. “It’s easier than explaining the world outside. Paris is … incredible. But it doesn’t make you feel safe just because it’s beautiful.”
I swallowed, thinking of the way Kane had scanned the restaurant, the street, the car windows.
Thinking of how my sister had kept an apartment like a mask.
“Does it get easier?” I asked, my voice too honest to be casual.
Mila’s gaze softened.
“Yes,” she said. “Not because the city changes. Because you do. Because you find your people.”
I nodded, absorbing that.
A woman who’d made her way here on her own merits—and then got pulled into something bigger.
