EMMA
The private jet had touched down in the French Alps under a veil of charcoal clouds, but the air at the Chateau de Lune was different. It didn’t just feel cold; it felt electric, humming with the kind of ancient power that made the fine hairs on my arms stand at attention.
I stepped out of the black SUV, my breath hitching in the sub-zero air. Ahead of me stood the "venue"—but that word was an insult to the structure before me.
It was a glass cathedral carved into the side of a jagged obsidian cliff. I had sent the sketches to Gabriel weeks ago during one of our late-night, whiskey-fueled video calls when I was still hiding in London. I had called it my "Pipe Dream"—a design so ambitious, so structurally impossible, that no human firm would ever fund it.
But Gabriel wasn't human.
