Chapter Two : The Photograph

I stared at the photograph until the edges blurred, telling myself it couldn’t be him even as I turned it over again and read the same four words. He never stopped looking. Four words that shouldn’t have meant anything, and yet my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

“Zaire?”

I shoved the photograph into my pocket before I even turned around, and found Ren standing a few feet away, watching me with the kind of attention I usually only got from customers.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“Maybe I did,” I said, and he laughed until he realized I wasn’t laughing with him, and his smile slowly disappeared into something more careful.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s bullshit.”

I grabbed my jacket instead of answering him. “I’m going home.”

“You just finished a VIP.”

“I know.”

“And you’re leaving without counting your tips?”

“I don’t care,” I said, and that finally made him stop talking, because in two years he had never once heard me say those words.

I walked through the back entrance into the cold night air, and the city carried on like nothing had happened, cars moving through the streets, people laughing outside restaurants, music spilling out of clubs into the dark. Everything looked normal. My world wasn’t.

I pulled the photograph out again under a streetlight and studied the man standing beside my younger self, one hand resting on my small shoulder, and I remembered that hand more clearly than I wanted to, the weight of it, the cologne that used to cling to his jacket, the deep voice telling me not to be afraid of anything. Then I remembered the funeral that came after, the coffin, my mother’s tears soaking into a black dress, and the words that had rearranged my whole life. Your father is gone. I had been eight years old, and I had believed every word of it for sixteen years.

My phone buzzed in my hand and I nearly dropped it into the gutter. Unknown number. I stared at the screen long enough that it almost stopped ringing before I answered.

“Hello?”

Silence answered me first.

“Who is this?”

Nothing, and then the call ended on its own, like whoever was on the other end had gotten what they wanted just from hearing my voice. A second later a message lit up the screen.

Don’t trust Dorian Veyl.

My heart slammed against my ribs hard enough to hurt, and I spun on the sidewalk looking for someone, anyone, who might be watching me from the shadows, but there was nothing except strangers and headlights and neon signs that didn’t care what was happening to me. My thumbs moved before I could think it through. Who are you? Three dots appeared, hovered there long enough to make my chest tighten, and disappeared without a single word coming through. I called the number back immediately and got a dead line telling me it didn’t exist.

“Fuck.”

I shoved the phone into my pocket, and I should have gone straight home and locked the door and pretended none of this was happening, but instead I turned around and walked back into Velvet Room like the night wasn’t already trying to swallow me whole.

Ren looked up when I came through the door. “You forgot something?”

“Where’s Lucien?”

He pointed toward the office without asking why, though I could feel him wanting to. “Why?”

“I need to talk to him. Now.”

Lucien Hart owned Velvet Room and was one of the only people in this building I actually trusted, and I knocked once before pushing the door open and finding him behind his desk buried in paperwork, the kind of paperwork that made a man look busier than he wanted to be.

“You’re supposed to be gone,” he said without looking up, until he did look up and saw whatever was written across my face. “What happened?”

I set the photograph down on his desk instead of answering, and watched him go completely still. For several seconds he didn’t speak, didn’t blink, didn’t do anything but stare at the image like it had reached out and grabbed him by the throat.

“Where did you get this?”

“Dorian.”

Lucien stood up so fast his chair rolled back and hit the wall behind him. “Are you sure?”

“He left it for me.”

He picked the photograph up, and I watched his fingers tighten around the edges until the paper started to bend. “You need to stay away from him.”

My stomach dropped somewhere below the floor. “Why?”

“Because men like Dorian Veyl don’t walk into places like this without a reason.”

“He comes here every Friday.”

“Exactly,” Lucien said, like that single word should have explained everything, like I was supposed to already understand the danger he was seeing that I couldn’t.

“What does he want?”

He looked at me for a long moment before he answered. “I don’t know.”

“You’re lying.”

His jaw tightened until a muscle jumped along the side of his face. “Zaire.”

“No. You know something.”

He set the photograph back down on the desk, slower this time, like it might shatter. “I know the Veyl family.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting tonight.”

I reached down and snatched the photograph back up before he could stop me. “Then I’ll find out myself.”

Lucien came around the desk fast, faster than I’d ever seen him move. “Don’t.”

I stopped walking, not because he’d raised his voice, but because he hadn’t. His voice had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere I’d never heard it go before. Not angry. Afraid.

“I’ve watched people get destroyed by that family,” he said quietly, each word landing like it cost him something to say out loud. “Don’t become one of them.”

I wanted to ask him what he meant by destroyed, wanted to shake the whole story out of him right there in that office, but my phone buzzed again in my pocket before I could get the words out. Another message. I looked down at the screen and felt my breath catch somewhere in my throat.

Ask your mother what happened the night your father disappeared.

I looked up at Lucien slowly, and I knew before I even spoke that he had already seen it, because the color had drained out of his face like someone had pulled a plug somewhere inside him.

And standing there in that office, with the photograph shaking in one hand and my phone burning in the other, I understood something I couldn’t unknow. Whatever Dorian Veyl wanted from me, whatever he’d started the moment he set that envelope down on my table.

Lucien already knew the answer.