A Lethal Love Story

The rain came down in whispers, not the kind that soaked skin, but the kind that drenched memories. It slid down the iron gutters like tears from a ghost’s eyes. Under the flickering streetlamp of Rue des Fleurs-where time wore a cloak of dust and cobwebbed ivy-Helena stood, draped in a velvet coat black as mourning. Her eyes-smoky, ancient and still burning-glinted as she waited.

It was always here, always in the hush between footsteps, that she met Étienne.

He arrived as he always did-late, smelling of wind and gunpowder, his silhouette carved sharp against the gaslight fog. His hat tilted just so, his gloves too elegant for the hour and the scent of foreign cologne clung to him like sin. When he kissed her gloved hand, it was not out of courtesy. It was ritual.

“I trust you came alone,” she whispered, her voice silk wrapped around steel.

Étienne tilted his head. “Would I dare bring death to death herself?”

A smile bloomed on her lips like nightshade in moonlight. He was a liar. He always had been. But so was she.

They walked, slowly, arm in arm through the echoing corridors of the city, where each footstep felt like a heartbeat counting down. Their heels struck cobblestones like punctuation in an unwritten eulogy. They did not speak of the past-they wore it like perfume. Once, in another year, in another life, they had loved recklessly. She, the daughter of a disgraced aristocrat; he, the assassin sent to kill her father. A mistake, he had called it. Love had tangled his blade. Or perhaps love had simply made the blade sing sweeter.

Now her father was buried in an unmarked grave, and Étienne lived like a man who had outlived both punishment and forgiveness.

They stopped beneath the broken archway of Saint Madeleine’s ruin, where stone angels wept moss and ivy bled through cracks in the altar. Helena poured wine from a flask she had hidden in her coat, deep crimson, the color of the last sunset they had ever watched together.

“You remember Venice?” she asked with a faint smile, voice light as a funeral veil.

“I remember the sound your laugh made in a gondola,” he said, “as if the moon itself had tripped and fallen into the canal.”

There was silence then. A sip.

Étienne’s lips lingered on the rim of the silver cup. “It’s different.”

“French grapes,” she replied, eyes like knives. “More bitter this season.”

He nodded. Slowly. Too slowly.

Her gaze did not falter. “I saw the girl, Étienne.”

He stiffened. “What girl?”

“The one who wears my perfume.”

The quiet cracked like porcelain. A wind stirred the dead leaves at their feet.

He tried to rise. Tried to speak. But the words fell out of his mouth like broken teeth. His limbs rebelled. His breath stuttered.

Helena knelt beside him, brushing hair from his forehead with fingers cold and careful.

“You should have remembered, darling,” she whispered, as the stars blinked through cloud cover, “that love like ours doesn’t die. It kills.”

He tried to say her name. Just once. But the poison was tender, exact. She had chosen it with care.

The rain had stopped, but the stones remained damp, as though mourning him in their own silent way. The angels watched without judgment.

And Helena walked alone down Rue des Fleurs, her silhouette swallowed by the dark, her heels clicking a final stanza, the ghost of a smile curled like smoke upon her lips.

Somewhere behind her, the flask lay empty.

And beneath it, Étienne’s last breath melted into the cobblestones.