Joe turns to Nelly, eyes burning with a quiet fire.
“Y’know why I love you?” he says. “It’s ’cause you’re a little bit dangerous to the status quo.”
Nelly raises an eyebrow, smirking. “Dangerous how?”
“You dropped the whole debt forgiveness thing like a bomb—like, boom—right in the middle of the IMF’s banquet hall,” Joe says, grinning. “And you didn’t flinch. You just smiled that crooked smile of yours like you already knew the pope was listening in.”
He leans closer, voice lowering.
“And the way you mess with the Bavarian Illuminati’s heads? Like some kind of holy trickster. Every time you speak, they twitch. You make their temples rattle, Nelly. You make ’em doubt the algorithm.”
She stares at him for a moment—half touched, half suspicious.
“That’s either the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she says, “or the weirdest.”
Joe laughs. “It’s both. But I mean it. I didn’t fall in love with you because you’re some saint. I fell in love because you’re the kind of girl who breaks their pyramids and builds people’s homes out of the bricks.”
Nelly smiles. And somewhere, in a marble boardroom in Zurich, an Illuminatus sneezes.
