The Maison AVA, the beautiful, sunlit, Parisian fortress, was being executed.
It was a quiet, brutal, and efficient death.
The grand, white-walled atelier, which for five years had been a cocoon of creativity and survival, was now a hollow, echoing shell. The bolts of silk and wool were gone, packed. The state-of-the-art sewing machines were silent, shrouded in plastic. The dress forms, her silent, headless assistants, were wrapped in muslin, standing in a mournful row by the door, ready to be crated like precious, delicate corpses.
Her life was being dismantled, packed into wooden boxes stamped with the simple, black, three-letter logo: AVA.
Destination: New York.
Aurora, the "Madame" of the house, stood in the center of the chaos, a still, cold point in her own storm. She wore her u
