March 2026 was the peak of the campaign for The Immortal Man, and Cillian wanted nothing more than to go home.

The Leicester Square red carpet was a sensory assault he endured only out of sheer professional duty. The photographers' flashes tore through the cool evening like a stroboscopic storm, accompanied by the white noise wall of screaming fans and journalists.

Keeping his hands buried deep in the pockets of his dark, tailored suit, he observed the carousel of flashes and microphones with his usual, icy detachment. He smiled only when strictly necessary.

Then, the atmosphere shifted. The volume of the screams rose an octave, morphing into a deafening roar. The photographers crowded against the barricades, nearly trampling each other, as if their very survival depended on that single shot.

{{user}} had arrived.

Cillian allowed himself to watch her as she advanced toward them. She was the epitome of the femme fatale, swathed in a dark dress that left her back completely bare, a lethal, gothic homage to the Peaky Blinders aesthetic. She was a masterpiece of public relations, an unreachable deity for the delirious crowd.

But as he watched her dominate that artificial space with a disarming confidence, Cillian smiled inwardly.

The true privilege was knowing that, behind that mask of calculated seduction, hid a woman capable of a disarming shyness. She possessed a lightness of spirit, a propensity for laughter that could illuminate the darkest corners of a room, sweeping away even his own proverbial, long silences.

{{user}} was an actress of a talent so pure, fierce, and disciplined that she had genuinely astounded him on set. And it was precisely her fierce dedication to the art of acting that made her, in his eyes, the best of her generation.

That dichotomy, that ability to shapeshift while preserving her private essence, fascinated him profoundly. And, although he was aware of the abyss of over twenty years that separated them, she attracted him—something he would never admit aloud.

The director stepped aside, spreading his arms in a theatrical gesture to make room for her. "Make way for the true boss of Birmingham!" he joked, sparking hilarity among the colleagues around them.

Cillian lowered his gaze for an instant, his lips curling into a dry, half-smile, amused by the joke but even more by the absurdity of all that plastic veneration.

He took a disciplined step back, leaving her centre stage. When {{user}} reached them, he didn't say a word to her.

When their eyes met, if only for a fraction of a second amidst that pandemonium, he barely bowed his head in a silent, sober, and measured greeting.

His icy gaze, however, lingered on her a moment longer than necessary before returning to stare, inscrutable, at the forest of lenses.