Chapter 11: The Balance

Some stories peak at the kiss. Mine didn’t.

Elise stayed. Not as a shadow. Not as an ornament. But as a mirror.

She wasn’t impressed by access or connections. She didn’t ask where the jet came from or why the car was waiting. She knew the answers. She just cared whether I still did.

We weren’t loud. We didn’t need to be. When I walked into a room, she didn’t follow, she arrived. On her own terms. And people noticed. The kind of attention that couldn’t be bought, only understood.

I still worked beside Rivière, through the dinners, the gatherings, the whispered deals that passed beneath chandeliers older than the countries hosting them. Elise was with me now. Not clinging. Not questioning. Anchoring. I moved in the currents he charted, sat in rooms where silence held more weight than introductions, where names were currency and most were too expensive to speak aloud.

When a man from Istanbul asked where she was from, she said, "Nowhere that would help you." And smiled.

We moved through the world like we’d rehearsed it. Like it had been waiting for us to walk in sync.

There was a rhythm to this new life. A tempo I was learning to conduct.

I had to maintain the gravity. The silence. The mystery. But now I did it while holding onto something real.

Sometimes that meant saying no. Sometimes it meant pulling back. Sometimes it meant excusing myself from a table that had taken months to earn a seat at, just to take a walk with her instead.

We’d sit by the lake again in Geneva. Or in Florence, in a courtyard that belonged to no one but remembered everyone.

Elise never asked for more. But she noticed everything.

One night, after a long evening with Rivière and a prince with no country but too much land, she took my wrist in her hand, ran her finger along the edge of the RM, and said:

"You wear it differently now."

"How?"

"Like it’s yours. Not because it is, but because you finally are."

There were days I still drifted. Times I still heard the mask calling.

But Elise didn’t keep me from falling. She reminded me how to stand back up.

And as strange as it sounds, in this world of weightless wealth and whispered power, it was that quiet grace that made me more dangerous than ever.

I still carried the second watch. I still hadn’t found the third.

But I no longer felt like I was chasing something.

Because now, for the first time, the life I had built didn’t feel borrowed.

It felt… chosen.

And yet some nights, when the city was too quiet and even Elise had fallen asleep beside me, I would take both watches from the safe and place them side by side on the table.

Two pieces of a story that wasn’t finished.

I’d stare at the empty space between them and wonder: Was the third out there waiting for me?

Or was it already watching, waiting for me to become the kind of man who could wear it?