NINE MONTHS TO RUIN HIM

Chapter 3: The Photograph

Somewhere between finishing my cold coffee and forcing myself to shower, I decided the newspaper deserved a second look, the kind of look I had been too shaken to give it the first time around. I pulled it back out of the drawer and smoothed it flat on the counter, studying his photograph the way I might study a stranger's face in a lineup, searching for something that would make the last twelve hours make sense.

The picture had been taken at some kind of business event, Constantine standing beside a podium in a dark suit that fit him the way expensive things always fit people who never had to think about money. His expression in the photograph was nothing like the man from the bar, guarded and distant, a mask worn for cameras and shareholders instead of the quiet, curious face he had shown me in the dark.

I traced the edge of the article with one finger, reading the caption beneath the photograph again. It named him as the sole heir to Drăgulescu Shipping, a company that had, according to the article, weathered "the turbulent years following the Calloway family's exit from the industry" with remarkable strength. Turbulent years. Exit from the industry. The words felt like small, polite knives, each one designed to make ruin sound like a simple change of season.

My phone buzzed against the counter, and I nearly dropped the newspaper flinching at the sound, my nerves still raw from everything I had just read. It was Marisol, asking if I wanted to get breakfast the way we usually did on Sundays, completely unaware that my entire world had rearranged itself sometime between midnight and dawn. I typed back that I would meet her in an hour, because some habits felt like the only solid ground left under my feet.

Getting dressed felt like performing a normal life I no longer fully believed in. I chose plain clothes, nothing that would draw attention, the same careful blandness I had worn for years since watching my family's downfall taught me that visibility invited danger. I had learned, in the aftermath of everything, how to make myself forgettable, how to walk through a room without leaving an impression, and today that skill felt more necessary than ever.

The walk to the café took me past the edge of the harbor district, close enough that I could see the cranes stretching up against the gray sky, close enough to hear the distant clang of machinery and the low groan of ships settling against their moorings. I had avoided this part of the city since Julian died, unable to stomach the sight of the water that had taken him, but that morning something pulled me toward it instead of away.

I stood at the edge of the promenade for a long moment, watching gulls circle over gray water that gave nothing away, no answers, no confessions, just the same restless motion it always had. Somewhere beneath that surface, three weeks ago, my brother had drawn his last breath, and somewhere in the glass towers overlooking that same harbor, a man whose family owned half the docks had drawn me into his bed without either of us knowing what stood between us.

The unfairness of it settled into my chest like a stone, heavy and immovable, and I found myself speaking to the water in a voice barely above a whisper, the way I sometimes did when the silence in my apartment grew too loud to bear. I told Julian, or the memory of him, or whatever part of the universe might still be listening, that I had learned something important, that I finally had a name to attach to the vague, formless anger I had been carrying since his funeral.

A gull cried out overhead, sharp and sudden, and I flinched again, my nerves still stretched thin from lack of sleep and the weight of everything I now carried. I told myself I was being foolish, standing at the edge of a harbor talking to dead men and gray water, and yet some stubborn, grieving part of me needed the moment anyway, needed to say the words out loud before I could carry them forward into whatever came next.

Marisol was already seated when I reached the café, her dark curls pulled back from her face, two cups of coffee steaming on the table between empty chairs. She took one look at me and set down her cup immediately, her expression sharpening the way it always did when she sensed something was wrong before I had said a single word.

"You look like you saw a ghost," she said, and I almost laughed at how close to true that felt, because in a way I had, the ghost of everything my family used to be, staring back at me from newsprint over a headline about port control.

I sat down across from her and told her everything, the bar, the rain, the stranger who asked me what I would do if I could disappear for a year, the newspaper this morning that turned a stranger into a name I had sworn to destroy. Marisol's face moved through several expressions while I spoke, shock giving way to disbelief, disbelief giving way to something close to fear.

"Vesper," she said slowly, using my real name the way only she ever did anymore, "please tell me you're joking."

I told her I was not, and watched her set down her coffee cup with a hand that was not entirely steady, watched her look around the café as if the walls themselves might be listening in on a conversation that could get either of us hurt. Marisol had known my family before the fall, had watched from close enough to understand exactly what the Drăgulescu name meant to the people who had loved and lost alongside mine.

"You slept with him," she repeated, like saying it again might make it easier to believe, "and you didn't know."

I told her that was exactly right, that fate or grief or bad luck had thrown me into a hotel room with the one man in Veskara I should have recognized and avoided at any cost, and now I did not know whether to laugh at the cruelty of it or cry at how close I had come to letting myself feel something real for a man whose family's fortune was built on my family's ashes.

Marisol reached across the table and took my hand, her grip firm and grounding the way it always had been since we were teenagers sneaking out of our respective family homes to escape parents too consumed by business and grief to notice we were gone. "What are you going to do," she asked, and I heard real fear in the question, the kind of fear that comes from loving someone reckless enough to walk toward danger instead of away from it.

I told her the truth, that I did not fully know yet, only that I could not let this discovery slide past me unused. I had spent three weeks grieving in silence, watching the police file on Julian's death gather dust in some drawer marked closed, and now, suddenly, impossibly, I had a thread connecting directly to the family whose hands I believed had pulled him under the water.

"That's insane," Marisol said, though there was no real conviction in her voice, only worry, "you can't get close to him again, Vesper. If he finds out who you are, if he connects you to Julian, to your family—"

I told her I understood the risk better than anyone, that I had grown up watching what happened to people who crossed families like the Drăgulescus and the Vosses, and still, sitting there with cold coffee and warm dread pooling together in my stomach, I could not make myself want to walk away from the opening fate had accidentally handed me.

We sat in silence for a long moment, the café noise rising and falling around us, the smell of fresh bread and burnt espresso doing nothing to settle the storm building behind my ribs. Marisol studied my face the way she always did when she knew arguing further would be useless, when she recognized the particular stubborn set of my jaw that meant my mind was already made, regardless of what wisdom said.

"At least promise me you'll be careful," she said finally, and I promised her that, though even as the words left my mouth I understood how little a promise like that would actually protect me from what I was about to walk into.

We finished breakfast talking about smaller things, easier things, the way old friends do when they need a break from the weight of a conversation too large to hold for long. But underneath the small talk, my mind kept circling back to the same restless question, turning it over and over like a stone worn smooth by water. If Constantine Drăgulescu's family had truly ruined mine, if his father's hands, or his own, had somehow touched the water that took my brother, then I needed proof, real proof, not just suspicion and grief-soaked instinct.

Walking home alone after breakfast, I let myself remember, for the first time since the funeral, the exact details of the morning they told us Julian was gone, the sound my mother made when the officer at our door said the word accident, the particular gray color the sky had turned that day, as though the whole city had gone still in mourning alongside us. I had buried those details deep, unwilling to relive them, but now I understood I would need every piece of that memory if I was going to find the truth buried somewhere beneath it.

By the time I reached my apartment, the decision that had been forming all morning had fully hardened into something unshakable. I was going to learn everything I could about the Drăgulescu family, quietly, carefully, using every skill I had taught myself since my family's fall from grace. And somewhere in that pursuit, whether I wanted it to or not, I suspected I would have to face the memory of exactly how my brother ended up in that water, a memory I had spent three weeks trying very hard not to look at directly.