MARION

The sky over Monte Carlo was just beginning to blush, that quiet hour between dawn and daylight when the world still belonged to the few awake to see it. From the terrace of my suite at the Hôtel de Paris, the harbor shimmered below, yachts glinting like scattered pearls in the soft gold of morning.

I had barely slept. Meetings with investors had stretched deep into the night, contracts signed, and whiskey poured, but now, with the city stirring awake, my thoughts were somewhere else ...