His Obsession

Chapter 2 - The Warning Inside

Nessa had received threats before.

None had ever arrived with a photograph of a dead man.

She read the messages again, her thumb hovering over the unknown number.

DON'T RETURN IT.

HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD.

A sensible person would call the police. She considered it, then looked at the broken watch on her desk.

Something about the messages bothered her more than the threat itself.

Whoever had sent them knew what was inside the package. When she had opened it. And judging by the timing, they were watching closely enough.

She crossed to the front window and examined the street.

A woman hurried beneath a red umbrella. Two men argued beside a parked motorcycle. Across the road, a black car sat beneath a streetlight, its windows too dark to reveal anyone inside.

Nessa watched it for several seconds.

Then the car pulled away.

She returned to her desk and locked the front door.

The watch lay where she had left it, its broken glass catching the overhead light. She picked it up carefully, turning it between her fingers. The leather strap was worn soft with use, and a shallow scratch crossed the silver casing.

This wasn't an expensive watch. Nor the kind a wealthy man would wear to impress people.

It looked old. Used. Kept for a reason.

She pressed the crown.

Nothing happened.

She tried again, then examined the back. Four tiny screws held the casing together. One had been replaced recently; its head was cleaner than the others.

It caught her attention.

She kept a small repair kit. She took out a screwdriver and loosened the screws.

The back plate lifted with a soft click.

Inside, the mechanism was damaged, but not beyond recognition. Someone had worked on it before. A thin metal strip sat beneath the movement, concealed so neatly that she might have missed it if she hadn't noticed the replaced screw.

Nessa eased it out.

A narrow piece of folded paper slid onto her palm.

Her heartbeat quickened.

The paper was yellowed at the edges, though the crease down its center looked fresh. She unfolded it beneath the desk lamp.

Four words had been written in black ink.

ASK WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT.

Nessa read the sentence twice.

Which night?

She turned the paper over. Blank.

Her gaze shifted to the photograph.

The man in the black suit stood with his shoulders squared, his expression composed. He wasn't smiling, but he wasn't looking at the camera with hostility either. He looked as though the person taking the photograph had interrupted something important.

Nessa lifted it closer to the light.

There was a faint reflection in the window behind him. A second figure stood several feet away, almost entirely hidden by shadow.

She tilted the photograph.

The figure remained indistinct.

Someone had wanted the man's face visible. Everything else was secondary.

Nessa placed the photograph beside the watch and opened her laptop.

She began with the image.

A reverse-image search produced nothing useful. She tried different combinations of words—black suit, unidentified man, old photograph, missing person—but the results were ordinary faces, fashion advertisements, and news articles unrelated to the picture.

Then she remembered the message.

He's supposed to be dead.

She searched for men reported dead eleven years earlier, narrowing the results to people associated with organized crime. Most of the articles were sensationalized. Some names appeared repeatedly; others vanished after a few lines.

One name caught her attention.

LUCIEN VEYR.

The article was brief. Lucien Veyr had been linked to a criminal organization that operated across several cities. His death had reportedly ended a violent struggle for control, though the circumstances were never fully established in the public record.

No confirmed body had been mentioned in the article.

Only a declaration of death.

Nessa glanced at the photograph again.

The resemblance was unmistakable.

She read the article again, searching for a date, a location, anything that might connect the watch to his disappearance. The information was frustratingly thin. Later reports referred to Veyr as a dead criminal whose former organization had splintered after his death.

A second article described him as ruthless, secretive, and almost impossible to photograph.

Nessa stared at the screen.

Almost impossible to photograph.

Yet someone had sent her a clear picture of him.

Why?

She opened another page and found an archived photograph attached to a report about Veyr's former associates. The image was grainier than hers, but the man's face was the same.

She placed the two photographs side by side.

In the archived image, Veyr stood among several men outside a building. He was younger, perhaps, but the eyes were unmistakable.

Nessa felt an odd pressure beneath her ribs.

She had never met Lucien Veyr. She had never heard her mother mention him. Yet something about his face tugged at a memory she couldn't reach.

It wasn't recognition exactly.

More like the sensation of hearing a familiar voice through a wall.

She shut the laptop.

It was late, and she was tired. Exhaustion could make an ordinary face seem significant. She wasn't going to invent a connection simply because a stranger had sent her a disturbing package.

Still, she couldn't shake the feeling.

Her mother had once told her that the most dangerous lies were the ones built around a truth.

Nessa had never understood what Mara meant.

Now she wondered whether her mother had been warning her about something specific.

She pulled one of Mara's old notebooks from the cabinet beneath her desk. Its pages contained dates, names, and descriptions of belongings returned over the years. Nessa flipped through several entries, looking for the name Lucien Veyr.

Nothing.

She checked another notebook.

By the time she reached the fourth, frustration had replaced curiosity.

There were hundreds of names in those books. Some belonged to people whose families had been found; others belonged to people who had never been identified. If Lucien Veyr appeared anywhere, she might need days to locate him.

Her phone vibrated again.

Nessa froze.

The unknown number had sent a photograph.

It showed her shop from across the street, taken through the front window.

Her desk was visible. So was the open notebook beside the broken watch.

The photograph had been taken minutes earlier.

A second message followed.

YOU'RE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACE.

Nessa's fingers tightened around the phone.

She moved away from the window and turned off the desk lamp. The shop fell into darkness, broken only by the glow of the streetlights outside.

Someone knew what she was doing.

And about the watch, Lucien Veyr, and her mother's notebooks.

She reached for the watch again to shove it back in the pouch. Her thumb caught on something. Inside edge. Another seam.

There was another seam.

Nessa brought it beneath the faint light from her laptop and examined it carefully. The metal strip had concealed one compartment, but a second, smaller space had been cut into the casing itself.

She pressed against the edge.

A tiny panel shifted.

Inside lay a sliver of paper, folded so tightly that she had to use tweezers to remove it.

Her hands had begun to tremble.

She unfolded the paper.

The handwriting was different from the first note. The letters were cramped, as though the writer had been running out of time.

HE HAS KILLED EVERYONE WHO KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT.

Beneath the warning was a date.

Eleven years earlier.

Nessa stared at the words until they blurred.

Then she looked at Lucien Veyr's photograph again.

For the first time, she noticed something she had overlooked.

The man's left hand was clenched at his side.

Between his fingers, barely visible, was a silver ring.

Nessa knew that ring.

She had seen it once before, years ago, in a photograph her mother kept hidden inside a locked drawer.

And Mara had been so frightened when Nessa found it that she had slapped the photograph from her hand.

Nessa had never forgotten the look on her mother's face.

Now she understood why the stranger's eyes had felt familiar.

She had seen them before.

In her mother's house.

On the night Mara told her never to open the locked drawer again.