Isabelle's POV
Gravel spat like gunfire under the tires of the black SUV as we fled the iron gates of St. Aurelia. I watched the gothic spires shrink in the side mirror, swallowed by the grey mist. One hour. That was all it took to fall from the epicenter of a social execution to a fugitive in the passenger seat of a boy who had just torched his dynasty.
The car was a tomb of tense silence, smelling of expensive leather and the phantom ozone of the shattered chandelier. Dmitri's hands were locked on the wheel, his knuckles bloodless. He'd discarded his blazer. His black dress shirt was rolled to the elbows, revealing forearms corded with a tension that had nothing to do with the winding coastal road.
"Where are we going?" My voice was too small against the engine's growl.
"Somewhere my father's money hasn't mapped," he said, the words clipped. "He's already frozen every account. By dawn, the school will have a 'wellness check' order with our names on it. We need a dead zone."
He jerked the wheel. The SUV plunged onto a forgotten track, devoured by ivy and brambles. The headlights clawed at the darkness, finally catching a rusted sign dangling from one chain: Valois Estate. No Trespassing.
A fist of memory clenched in my chest. "This is…"
"What's left of it," Dmitri finished, his tone devoid of sentiment. "Seized by creditors. Tied up in Volkov litigation for a decade. A legal purgatory. No surveillance. No patrols. Just ghosts."
We stopped before a skeleton of masonry. The mansion was a scorched carcass against the night sky, its roof a collapsed ribcage, its windows vacant sockets staring blindly at the sea. It wasn't a home. It was an open grave.
Dmitri killed the engine, grabbed a heavy duffel and a flashlight. "Move. We have maybe an hour before they triangulate this car. I'll ditch it later."
We climbed through a shattered terrace door. Inside, the air was a lungful of damp decay and old smoke. Dust, thick as ash, rose with every step in the grand foyer. I could almost see the phantom shapes on the walls where portraits had laughed. This was where my mother had hummed as she danced. This was where my father's voice had filled the mornings with news. Now, only silence answered.
He led me to the library or its corpse. Empty shelves gaped. He went straight to the massive fireplace, its mantel blackened, and ran the flashlight beam over the soot-stained bricks.
"Why here?" I hugged myself, the silver threads of my gown snagging on splintered wood. The finery felt like a cruel joke.
"Because your father was a scholar who understood predators," Dmitri said, his voice hollow in the cavernous room. "He knew the wolves were at the door. He built a bolt-hole."
He pressed a specific stone near the hearth. A deep, mechanical groan answered, a sound of tendons tearing after a decade of stillness. A section of the floor behind the massive, scarred desk slid away, revealing a maw of darkness, a narrow, stone stair descending into the earth.
My suspicion, never fully buried, surged back. "How do you know this? Was this in your father's dossier?"
He turned. The flashlight beam carved his face into a stark relief of shadow and sharp angles. "No. I found it when I was twelve. I came here to escape him. I found your father's journals. I never told Viktor. I never told a soul." He extended his hand. "It was my secret. Now it's yours."
I looked at his offered hand, the hand of the boy who had just chosen ruin over royalty. After a heartbeat that stretched forever, I took it.
The air in the bunker was cool, dry, and sterile. It was a stark, functional space, reinforced steel, filing cabinets, a Spartan cot, a desk. And on that desk, a single, leather-bound ledger.
I moved toward it as if pulled by a wire. My father's handwriting swam before my eyes, his elegant script a direct line to a ghost.
"If Isabelle is reading this, then the worst has happened. The Saints have fallen."
The next hour dissolved. I consumed the pages, each one a piece of my soul I hadn't known was missing. It was more than a diary; it was a testament. And in a hidden pouch in the back, the true weapon: the original, vellum founding covenants of St. Aurelia.
"Dmitri." My voice was a dry rasp. I held up the brittle pages. "Look."
He was at my shoulder in an instant, his presence a solid wall of heat in the cool bunker. "What is it?"
"The school… it was never theirs." My finger traced the florid, ancient signatures. "It was a trust. A Valois trust. My family provided the land, the seed money. The condition was a perpetual meritocracy. There's a reversion clause." I looked up, meeting his storm-grey eyes. "If the board acts for private profit or engages in criminal malfeasance… everything reverts. The land, the buildings, the endowment. All of it. Back to the Valois heir."
Dmitri went very still. Then a slow, dark sound of understanding escaped him. "You don't just have a claim to a vineyard, Isabelle. You own the kingdom. They are all squatters in your house."
The magnitude of it pressed down, terrifying and exhilarating. "This is the secret. This is why Viktor needed me to be silenced. Why Seraphina needed me to be a thief. They're not just covering up a murder. They're hiding a theft so colossal it makes them tenants."
Dmitri's gaze burned into me. The calculating prince was back, but his calculation was now fixed on me as the central variable in a new equation. He reached out, his thumb brushing a smudge of soot or a tear from my cheek. The touch was possessive, reverent.
"You are not a scholarship student," he murmured, his voice a low vibration in the quiet. "You are the foundation they built their lies upon. You are the landlord."
The isolation, the shared danger, the seismic shift in power, it ignited the tension that had simmered since the foundry. Here, in the buried heart of my past, there were no titles, no masks. Just a boy and a girl and a secret that could burn the world.
He leaned in, his breath a warm caress against my lips. "What will you do with your kingdom, Isabelle?"
The answer rose from a place of cold, clear fury. "I will take it back," I breathed. My hands fisted in the fine cotton of his shirt. "And I will start by ensuring a Volkov prince never has to kneel to his king again."
He didn't kiss me. He claimed me. His mouth was desperate, fierce, a rebellion poured into a single, searing point of contact. It tasted of salt and recklessness and a future written in fire. In the ruins of everything, we were building a forge.
A sound froze us.
Not the wind. Not the settling bones of the house.
A deep, metallic clunk echoed from above. The distinctive grind of a heavy vehicle rolling over debris.
Then, the unmistakable, muffled thud of a car door.
We were not alone.