Chapter 1 : '"Elite"
"It's like everyone's sitting on a pile of secrets, protecting them like their lives depend on it-because once they're out, their lives are practically over."
She held her champagne flute not to drink, but to gesture, seated inside one of the Sainté Group's most exclusive clubs-tucked in the heart of Paris, where the ceilings were mirrored, the air perfumed with power, and entry was granted only to the kind of people who didn't ask the price. The glass caught the club's golden lowlight, glinting like a whispered threat in her perfectly manicured hand.
"You know how they say the deeper the pockets, the darker the secrets?" she went on, eyes flicking toward the upper tier. "Look at them."
Elaina followed her gaze to the mezzanine level, cloistered behind a velvet rope and the illusion of exclusivity.
"Les élites."
They didn't just look rich. They radiated it-like it was a birthright etched into their bones. Lounging like a superior kind, draped in couture and disinterest, each one more devastating than the last. A tableau of privilege.
Elaina caught a familiar crest on a cufflink-Vallois. Oil. Shipping. Scandal. Her father spent a decade chasing a contract they discarded like party favors.
A girl in a slashed black dress leaned into a boy wearing a sand-toned suit, no shirt beneath-just bare chest and antique gold chains. Another, with eyes the color of glacial melt, poured champagne into crystal flutes with the ease of someone who'd never known consequence. A young woman in a blazer cut like armor exhaled smoke without expression, lips burgundy, gaze bored to the point of cruelty.
And in the center of it all, languid and perfectly unbothered, sat Yves Saint Vallois-the boy with the glacier eyes. At that moment, he was pulling a redheaded model into his lap, pressing slow kisses to her collarbone. It looked intimate, like she was his girlfriend.
But everyone in the room knew better.
That was just how he showed interest.
They weren't just rich.
Their wealth was mythic-passed down, untouchable.
"We call them les élites," Christina said, her tone balanced on the edge of envy and irony. "Because they never had to come from where we did. Our parents clawed their way up. Theirs were never down to begin with. Royal bloodlines. Inherited power. A seat at the table passed down like a trust fund."
She turned to Elaina, smile as sharp as it was rehearsed-not cruel, just calculated.
"You can see it in the way they move. That effortless indifference. Like the rest of us are just... set dressing."
Christina's shoulders lifted in a shrug too polished to be dismissive. "Even with my dad buying into the Sainté Group, I'm still down here. Still not one of them." A pause. "Oh well."
She took a sip, eyes flicking back toward the upper level where laughter spilled like champagne, and secrets slept behind sunglasses worn after midnight.
"I don't want to waste my night on them," she said softly. "But sometimes I wonder..."
Elaina tilted her head. "Wonder what?"
Christina's lips curled.
A beat.
"We have a name for them. I wonder if they have one for us."
A flicker of silence passed between them, pierced only by the low pulse of bass and the shimmer of glass.
---
And then-
a sharp ripple sliced through the club's hum.
A sudden gasp.
A woman's startled shriek.
Chairs scraped. Crystal chimed.
The sound of the elite crowd reacting to something unexpected.
Christina and Elaina turned instinctively, trying to see past the rising heads and shifting bodies-
but before they could get a glimpse-
Tap. Tap.
The bartender's knuckles rapped softly on their table.
They looked down.
Two fresh drinks.
And between them-
a card.
