Sweet Romance25 min read
Borrowed Clothes, Burning Truths
ButterPicks18 views
I picked at the corner of the travel itinerary like it was a splinter and said, "I know. You can go."
"Second Young Master," Bruno said, "this is today's schedule."
"Thank you," I murmured, and slid the paper aside. I set the solved Rubik's cube on the table, the bright colors an insult to the gray day outside the porthole.
Bruno bowed and left. The door clicked. I inhaled and, on impulse, folded the letter twice and tucked it into my pocket.
"You sure you'll be all right?" he asked from the hallway.
"Of course," I said, though I was not entirely sure of anything. I was Jimena Singh, and I'd been living as a boy for eighteen years. I had learned how to be certain. I had learned how to hide.
A clump of footsteps and distant shouting reached the cabin. I went to the door and found a letter on the floor. It had my name in precise, dark ink: "Jimena Singh, for your eyes only."
"Second Young Master," Bruno called. "There are pirate ships tailing the liner. The captain is requesting backup from the Loxford Coast Guard."
I laughed, because people tailing a luxury liner to rob a merchant felt like a plot twist. "Pirates that chase a cruise ship? That’s either romance or very bad geography."
Bruno did not laugh. He stood rigid, like a man who carried a family name in his chest.
"Tell my brother we will delay arrival," I said finally, and shut the door.
I unfolded the envelope carefully. Inside were two photographs. Parents. My parents' faces were younger in the photos than the memory I nursed in a chest in my heart. The photos were splattered with blood.
"Come on," I said to the empty room, and put my palm flat against the glossy paper. "If this is a ploy to drag me somewhere, fine. I will go. I have been chasing this for years."
Bruno knocked. "Second Young Master, Loxford's patrol will escort us as we berth. They'll need to offload passengers for inspection."
"Tell my brother we’ll be a little late." I smiled, and left.
I walked the corridor, and Bruno followed - for now. I kept downward, under a linen scarf and a waiter’s jacket I had taken from a serving boy. The jacket smelled faintly of lemon and cigarette smoke. I had a ridiculous feeling that wearing someone else’s clothes made my steps lighter.
Outside, Loxford's skyline slotted into the horizon. I could see buildings and the sprawl of a port city. The air tasted like salt and something metallic.
Bruno hesitated at the door. "Second Young Master, you asked me if I would step away."
"You can go now," I said, and made my voice casual.
He blinked. "My orders—"
"I know your orders," I said. "Go fetch the others. I'll wander a little. I just need a walk."
He tried to read my face. He failed. That was my line of defense.
I slipped down the gangway and disappeared into the crowd.
Two blocks from the harbor, I changed out of the waiter’s jacket into something that fit the rumor of me better — a plain coat and a cap. I hailed a cab to a house my godfather had left me in Loxford. "The key is your birthday," he had told me years ago, when his face had been full of mischief. The words were a warm, ridiculous thing I clutched when the city felt too cold.
"Who are you?" asked Otto, the gardener-turned-butler who kept my godfather's property in order.
"Call me Little Jim," I said lightly. He blinked and smiled because I had taught him to.
"Master Jimena," Otto corrected, bowing once. "We've kept your room ready."
"Good," I said. "And the cake—"
"Must be eaten on arrival," he grinned. "Master Francisco always said that."
I went upstairs and lay on the bed. My chest ached with the old emptiness. The faces in the photos had names but no voice. It was a hollow I had learned to live with like a shadow.
The city hummed outside. I dialed the one number I trusted.
"Hello?" a warm, teasing voice answered. "Who woke me at breakfast time? I'm in the middle of tea and tyranny."
"Sergio," I said. "There's someone at my house unconscious. Bring your doctor's bag."
"You're dramatic," he said, but his boots were already on the floor in my mind. "Send me the address."
We had a history of jokes and difficult decisions. Sergio Archer, who kept other people's bodies functioning like careful machines, was the sort of friend who refused to be anything but steady.
When he arrived, he muttered about me being uncanny with timing. "Why am I not surprised that you fell into trouble," he grumbled, noticing the boy with the blood-streaked shirt in my guest room. "Is this another one of your theatre projects?"
"He passed out on my doorstep," I said. "Just patch him up."
Sergio's hands moved sure and swift. "We need to watch tonight," he said. "Fever, infection. Keep him still. If it spikes, call."
"I will," I said.
I sat by the sleeping boy and listened to him breathe. He had a jawline that might have been carved; a cut above the hand that had been stitched and bandaged. I had scant chance to learn names that didn’t belong to our list already — his name, when he finally spoke, came out in a thin voice.
"Jonas," he said. "My name is Jonas."
I laughed. "Nice to meet you, Jonas. I'm Jimena."
He made a face at Jimena. "You are trouble."
"Trouble and charm should be mutual," I said, and then I watched as pain made his eyes close again.
The Loxford University reared into my days like a set I was assembling piece by piece. I'd come for the same thing I had chased for years now: answers. The note on the ship had said so plainly. Come to Loxford University. There you'll find the answer.
So I enrolled, and I moved into a student flat that, by some bureaucratic miracle, had my name assigned. The campus buzzed with gossip faster than I liked. A boy with my face — or rather my disguise — was already doing a saltwater impression.
"Who's that?" someone asked in the quad.
"A new freshman," another whispered. "Did you see his hair? Cute."
I loved the fact that cute could be meaningfully weaponized.
There were three boys I met just by being late for coffee. A tall man who kept his back too straight — Jonas Rossi — and his brother, Dion Kuhn, who laughed like someone who expected to be forgiven for everything. And Octavio Roux, who scented danger like a beast scents wind. They were quick to annoyance and quicker to laughter.
"You must be the famous new 'second young master'," Jonas said once, eyes cold and unreadable.
"Second young master?" I smirked. "Only in title."
"You will regret underestimating me," Jonas said quietly.
"That sounds personal," I teased.
"You will see," he said.
I learned quickly about the three family hubs everyone muttered about: Jonas's family, the Daws (I later learned the family name he used at times), the Muellers — but Muellers was wrong — it didn't matter. Names were fluid here. The city liked many names to be on the tongue but seldom said the same one twice.
I found friends I hadn't asked for. Isabela Newton — tall-haired, laughing like she held an entire season in her pocket — became my first true companion. "Who needs a boyfriend when you have a friend who can fake one?" she said, and forced me into her life like oxygen.
"You're mine," she declared once, fierce and smiling. "We have agreement."
"Friends," I corrected. "Friends who will fight if you suggest 'otherwise.'"
She glared playfully. "Deal."
One night, a seed of mischief sprouted into a rowdy plan. "We need to take down some of those petty clubs," I said, refering to clandestine groups that pushed their luck too far.
"Dangerous," Jonas said.
"Exciting," I said.
"Don't die on me," Octavio said, half warning, half joke.
"Please," I said. "You lot are dramatic. I can handle a fight."
We started small. A computer hack here, a misdirection there. My hands remembered how to work machines like second languages. My fingers flew over brass and code, and we found the one who had blacked out Jonas's online tracers months ago. He was almost nothing but a ghost — a thought that thought itself too loud. But when I coughed into the network and forced an opening, I smelled history.
The men who organized deals and poison and secrets — they called themselves the Oak Circle in whispered corners. Their headquarters stood like a stub of tooth. I had a map and friends and an appetite. We struck at night, the city all sleep and shadow and glass.
"You go for the head," I told the men around me in a café with three bright lamps. "Knock the teeth out of it, and it falls."
Octavio smiled thinly. "That's dramatic."
"It should be dramatic," I said. "This is personal."
The first fight was an ugly noise of boots and groans. I moved like I always had in the training camps, where they'd made men out of wild boys — I'd been the misfit who learned to sway and strike and trust the world to my fists. They had no idea what hit them.
We left the headquarters smoking. In the aftermath, someone exploded the building across the lane. I should have known the danger of lighting a match near a nest of bees.
"Who did it?" I asked, my voice not steady. "Who would send a detonation after us?"
Tomas Valdez, my brother, was already in the city. He arrived silent and sunlike. He had his questions in the hard calm of a man who was used to giving orders and having them obeyed.
"You chose this city for answers," he told me, in his office on the top floor overlooking the rush of small lights in the night. "Why?"
"Because there's a thread," I said. "And I've pulled it all my life."
"You'll be careful," he said.
"I always am." The lie was softer because he believed it.
He was wrong the night the Oak Circle burned. He was wrong when someone in the flank of that chaos decided to push forward.
I went to the birthday gala — a polite, glittering staging — because that was where the local alliances whispered and made promises. They called the event a 'family celebration,' but anyone who'd ever served power knew what quieter words meant. It gathered many people in one room, and in one room, anything could be done.
We sat at a long table, napkins folded like sails. I listened to talk sliding toward business. My Rubik's cube sat smug in my jacket pocket, a small homey thing I couldn't let go of. The sea had given me one paper clue; it had given me this.
"Jimena," Isabela said in my ear. "Don't get carried away."
"I'm not," I said.
"Don't," Jonas said.
"Why? You don't like fireworks?" I teased.
Jonas's face did not move. He left the table in a tight turn, a shadow in the room of lights. He was going to do whatever Jonas did when he left: watch or wait or pull a string.
That night, I watched Dempsey Dawson — the man with the scar like a parenthesis over his eye — laughing too loud. He had the kind of grin that settled into a cruelty. He was the kind of man who ground his thumb along the edge of people's reputations like one polishes a blade.
"He runs an empire of debt and small cruelties," Octavio told me under his breath as we watched the dance of appetizers. "He thinks everyone owes him something."
"Everyone around here thinks they own the world," I said. "But we will have the last laugh."
My brother sat across from Dempsey like a man in a suit that could cut, and the room didn't notice how low the temperature dropped. I felt it under my skin, the slight tilt of my brother's head and the look he gave me that said we were close to a planned motion.
"Jimena." Tomas's voice meant he had a game in mind. "Go on stage with me. Introduce the charity endeavor."
"Are you serious?" I asked. "Me? On that stage?"
"Just follow what I say," he instructed.
On the stage a few minutes later, lights hummed and glasses chimed. I smiled and played the part of the reckless young sponsor: bright, brittle, and full of mischief. The crowd liked me. They liked youth as an emblem to soothe greed.
Tomas stepped forward with a thin folder. "Tonight," he announced, "we celebrate, and tonight we will settle a debt."
The room paused like the held breath before a first kiss. People turned towards Dempsey Dawson.
Dempsey stood, proud and smiling. "What debt?" he asked, voice gloved.
Tomas clicked a button. A projector hummed to life. The screen went black, then filled with frames of messages, photographs, and a video.
My fingers tightened around the Rubik's cube in my pocket.
The video showed what thieves seldom liked to show: receipts and faces. It showed men shipping vials of old drugs to a place they shouldn't go. It showed Dempsey's men taking boxes and marking them with a logo. It showed a house — the little house by the lane that used to belong to my parents.
The room reacted slowly, like a thing waking.
"Where did you get this?" Dempsey asked, the first rumor of shock breaking his smile.
"From your ledger," Tomas said. "We found a ledger. We found messages. We found a link between you and those who took my sister's parents from their car fourteen years ago."
The room made a soft noise, like cloth rubbing. A few phones turned toward the screen, capturing the footage. Someone drew a breath and started to murmur.
Dempsey's expression flickered: smug, then puzzled. "You have no proof of that," he said.
Tomas tapped another file. Photographs fell onto the screen. There were images — older, grainy — of a van that matched Dempsey's shipments parked outside an estate the night the two bodies were taken. A ledger entry matched the time. A name, an account. The camera, the still images, the handwriting.
The hubbub in the room grew into a chorus. Someone muttered, "Is that the man who bullied his way through the docks?" Another elbowed a friend and whispered a guess. The phones moved like a tide.
Dempsey's face hardened. His jaw moved in a slow, deliberate way. "This is slander," he said.
"Aren't you tired of living by slander?" Tomas asked. "Tonight we ask the crowd to judge what you have wrought. You have been behind shipments and extortion and — worst of all — you were complicit in killing innocents. Your men took the wrong van that night. You signed the check. You scheduled the shipment."
People were no longer murmuring. They were reaching for their phones. I saw one woman in a silver dress stand up. "You put my husband in debt," she hissed, "and he could no longer pay medical bills."
Dempsey's voice rose in denial. "I run a business," he said. "I never—"
Tomas clicked again. A slow, methodical reveal spread on the screen: conversations where Dempsey's voice was recorded, a ledger entry with his name, a truck manifest signed, a courier checkmark, security footage of a courier dropping a box at 2:17 a.m. A child's drawing slid into a frame — my mother's handwriting on a note left between two photos.
"No," Dempsey said at last. Denial clung to his tone like a suit too tight.
A man at a nearby table stood. "I have proof your men took my sister's watch and sold it off!" he shouted. Others replied with accusations. The room's breaths turned into a storm.
Dempsey's eyes flicked to me like a blade. "You—this is orchestrated," he said, grasping.
I put my hand on the cube in my pocket. "You orchestrated their deaths," I said aloud.
He smirked at the audacity. "You have no proof," he repeated, trying to shove the panic back under the smile.
"Then explain these pictures," Tomas said. "Explain the ledger. Explain the audio."
Dempsey's face went white, then red, then white again. "These are—fabrications," he said. "I will sue you. This is libel."
"Do that," Tomas said. He looked like he would enjoy the courtroom, like sharks enjoy open water. "But first, explain why you're clearing out our shipments the night my sister's parents were killed."
Someone in the room started to clap, uncertain, like someone testing a window.
"You're hiding," Jonas hissed under his breath, but loud enough that I heard it. "Don't let him escape."
Someone came forward with a phone and played a recording. It was Dempsey's voice, captured on a cheap device, ordering a delivery and referring to a name that matched the ledger. The crowd leaned closer as though to listen again.
Dempsey sputtered. "That's fake," he said. "That's not me."
"Then sing for us, Mr. Dawson," Tomas invited softly. "Tell us where the trucks went. Tell us who you sold the boxes to. Tell us why you thought you could sleep with their guilt."
"You will not get away with this," Dempsey said. He was shaking now. The bravado slid off, leaving the man raw. "You have no claim."
The phones took it up. "He says he has no claim," someone repeated into a camera, voice trembling with wonder. "He's the one who runs—"
Cameras clicked like rain on tin.
Dempsey's face blackened with a new emotion — comprehension. He glanced to the room, seeing faces like a book of verdicts: betrayed clients, small-business owners, widows.
"I didn't—" he started, but the words were smaller.
"Is that so?" Tomas asked. He extended a photograph and handed it to the nearest person. It showed Dempsey at a loading dock, his hand on a crate.
Dempsey's eyes flicked to the photo, and then for the first time he lost control. He lunged for the projector as if he could silence the image by killing the machine. Security blocked him. Phones recorded him.
"Don't touch me," he snarled, and then, as the chef's assistant tripped on a napkin, as a guest shouted, the room erupted.
"Shame on you," said a woman, voice cracking.
"How could you?" someone else sobbed.
Dempsey's posture changed: braggadocio gave way to panic. "This is a lie!" he screamed, and his voice was ridiculous in the chandelier-light. "I didn't— I didn't kill anyone! I said only to scare. I didn't mean—"
"You're screaming, Mr. Dawson," Tomas said quietly. "You are trying to drown your truth in noise."
People closed in. A man in a tuxedo took out his phone and started recording, eyes wide.
"I never—" Dempsey repeated. "Please. I'm sorry. It was business. I didn't know their names."
A woman who had lost money to his scams strode forward. "You knew their names," she said. "You knew their faces."
"No, no, please—" Dempsey dropped to his knees as the room went still with tension. He looked small on the marble floor, hands shaking, jacket rumpled.
"Beg for what you did," Tomas said.
Dempsey's mouth moved in a frantic prayer. "Please," he begged, voice breaking. "Please, I was only protecting my business—"
"There's no protection in murder," said a silver-haired guest, stepping up with a huff. "You hurt people. You thought yourself untouchable."
Phones whirred like mechanical birds. People were filming; hands were raised to record as if to preserve a public justice. Some guests clutched napkins and wept; others sat in stunned silence. A group of young men clapped with an odd, savage rhythm.
"Get him out," someone shouted. "Police."
Security arrived, faces pale. Dempsey pushed and shoved, trying to regain dignity by lunging, but dignity does not belong to panic. He sprawled lower and clawed at the floor like a man desperately trying to gouge the earth for an explanation.
"You will be judged," Tomas said, as policemen cuffed Dempsey's wrists. "Not by me alone, but by the people you crushed."
Dempsey's face crumpled into something raw and animal. His earlier arrogance dissolved, then marshaled into the last shape of men in such moments: abject denial, then bargaining, then sobbing pleas.
"Please," he begged to the room. "Don't let my family—I've got a child—"
One woman in the back snapped. "You used other people's children to pay for yours."
People murmured into the cameras. "He is the man," whispered a voice, and the phrase spread. Shadows started to pull away from Dempsey's name like dew.
He clawed up, knees scraped, and tried to bargain. "I'll pay back. I'll fix it. Please, don't ruin me."
"We want justice," the woman said. "We want the truth. Fees can be repaid. Lives cannot."
The crowd hissed. A clump of young men moved closer, eyes bright. Someone shoved a hand into Dempsey's hair and forced his head up for a camera. "Say it!" the man demanded.
Dempsey's veneer was shattered. He lashed out in words and wails, and the room recorded each one. Cameras went from merely decorative to instruments of public reckoning.
"You will be remembered like this," Tomas said into a microphone. "Not as the man you pretended to be but as the deeds you did. History will not be kind."
Phones launched like fireworks, uploads began, and by the time security guided Dempsey away, the room had changed. Where there had been a glossy party there was now a tableau — memory recorded in digital and flesh.
He went through denial and anger: "This is fake!" he had said.
Then he flailed into bargaining: "I'll prove it wasn't me! I can—"
Then, breaking entirely, he collapsed into pleading, hands spread like a beggar. "Please, please. I beg you."
By the time the police took him, people had started to shout his past offenses — one by one, the pile of small cruelties had grown into a mountain. There were cheers of satisfaction. People who had been cowed by him for years clapped as if they'd been waiting for a herald to say it aloud.
Phones streamed; the clip went viral within hours. Comments flooded screens: "Finally," "Public justice," "How many more?" Buttons clicked. The live footage spent three days on the front page, and Dempsey Dawson's smug image — the man with the half-moon scar — was replaced with the man weeping on marble floors, pleading to a room he had thought too small to hold his crimes.
I left before the room settled. Jonas walked me out to the cab.
"You did well," he said, voice softer than I'd heard before.
"You looked like a thorn," I said. "How do you do that?"
"Watch who you pick," he said. "Not everyone smiles like that for nothing."
We rode in the faint blue of passing traffic. Isabela texted ten messages of congratulations and mischief. Octavio sent a thin, proud smile.
That night, back in my room, I took the photographs out of my pocket — the ones Bruno had given me, the ones that had sat under my palm all day. I remembered the long, cold road of wondering and the short moments of fury.
Tomas stopped by later, carrying a small box.
"For you," he said.
"A bribe?" I asked.
"Consider it...", he said. "A truce."
I opened the box. Inside lay a small, leather-bound journal and a fountain pen. On the first page, in an old, certain hand, was a name: "For Jimena. Find the stitch. Tie it with truth."
I looked up at him. "You orchestrated all of this."
He shrugged. "I didn't make the evidence. I just put it where the light would hit."
"You wanted the man to be revealed publicly," I said.
"I wanted answers," he replied. "And I wanted you safe. Public truth keeps people honest. I will not let anyone burn you out."
"You could have punished him privately," I said.
"People like him hid in private," Tomas said. "Public light is the only way to get the kind of justice that wakes people up."
I thought of the Rubik's cube still humming in my pocket. "And if the wrong man falls?"
"Then we find the real culprits," he said. He meant it. His jaw tightened. "But if Dempsey was complicit, he must be accountable."
The city slept around us. I tasted ash and sweet victory.
Days passed. The online trail snarled into a quilt of interviews and accusations. Dempsey's empire showed cracks. Men and women came forward in unexpected numbers.
I kept working my way toward the heart. The letter, the photos, the ledger — all of it seemed to be a tangled rope thrown in a well. Someone had planned years ago with precision that made the chill run up my spine.
One afternoon a package arrived at the flat: a square box carefully wrapped in newspaper. No name.
Inside was a brass watch with my parents' initials engraved inside, and a note: You missed this on the night you ran. — Signed with a single initial: T.
My heart went cold. T. Tomas? No. Another T? A traitor? My mind spun.
I met with Octavio and Jonas. "This T sign," Octavio said, "isn't the kind of signature someone leaves for grace. It's a mark. Someone flaunting their work."
"Someone from inside powerful circles," Jonas said. "Be careful who you trust."
"Who else?" I asked.
"We have no names," Jonas said. "We have threads. We will pull the rest together, but we need you," he said, and for once his voice softened. "We need your stubborn, dangerous brain."
I thought that was the first time he'd called it mine — dangerous's allure was an honest compliment.
We worked secretly, late at night. We traced shipments, matched handwriting, cross-checked banks. I lived between lectures and the glow of code, between coffee and the taste of threats.
Then, when the ledger opened like a mouth, it showed a name tucked into a dark ledger entry: a corporation with Tom's initial between the dots. The ledger pointed to a shell company: "Dawson & Thread."
Jonas's eyes narrowed. "Thread," he said. "Cotton, fabric, seams. The world of something stitched to silence."
"It smells like an inside job," Octavio said. "Someone with access."
"Someone wants us to blame Dempsey," I said. I had learned from the way paper felt between my fingers that things were never single-edged. "What if Dempsey was the mask and someone else pulled the strings? Someone much higher up."
We had to keep moving. Truth was like a river with hidden rapids.
One evening, a call came in. "We intercepted a transfer," said a voice I didn't recognize on the line. "We followed funds through three shell accounts. They end at a lettered account." His voice was gentle; his message, a hammer.
"Who is behind it?" I demanded.
"There is a name," he said. "A name on the paper. A man called Jonas Rossi was listed as beneficiary once. He denies it."
I stared at the phone. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. The bank flagged an entry that used a family's name," he said. "It's messy."
A coldness rose up my spine. Jonas stood across the room, carrying a mug. He froze when I asked who it might be.
"It's a trap," he said finally. "Don't call me a name yet."
"Why would your name be in it?" I asked.
His jaw clenched. "To set me up," he said. His hands were folded like a man expecting someone to demand his head. "To turn friends against me."
"Who would benefit most from that?" I asked.
He looked away. "People who like to hide in plain sight."
We had no time to divine motives. We had to clean the slate and find the true sewers.
I thought of my parents on a rainy night, of the letter that had sent me here. The more I peeled, the more layers there were. Somewhere under the sewings of low men and windbag lords, someone had cut a chord and bound it to the heart of the city.
A week later, Tomas returned with a ledger of his own — old invoices, stamped envelopes, a list of names. He sat with me in the dim light.
"This is a map," he said. "Somebody wanted you in Loxford. Somebody wanted you to trip over this rope."
"Who?" I asked.
He looked at me for a long time. "We will find out," he promised. "Together."
"Together," I echoed, and for once the word felt like armor.
Jonas had his own issues. He was quiet and cold and at times unbearably private. Yet when he asked for help, he did it with an odd gentleness that I had only begun to notice. One night, after a long stretch of secrecy and clandestine nights, he stood in my doorway and simply said, "I owe you the truth."
"Speak," I said, and he did.
He told me a story of ledger entries and forced loans, of men who owed promises and then tried to collect with violence. He described a hand that pushed people into holes, one that used merchants as scapegoats.
"Someone on the inside used the wrong names," he said. "They hid a signature with a T and threw it at us."
"Someone with access," I said. "Someone daring."
"Someone who can make the sea listen," Jonas answered quietly.
I watched the pattern unfold. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't a single villain with a monocle and a mustache. It was a net with many knots. The public punishment of Dempsey had been a betrayal in itself — useful, but partial. He was a man with hands in too many pots. He took the fall for sins that may have been his, but not all of them.
At dawn, my brother sat across from me and said, "You must keep going. You must go to the university registry. You must follow the ledger that points us to the foundation."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because it's the place where they hide truth with pilastered names," he said. "Because it's where the sewn pieces come together and because I've never met a pattern I couldn't break."
I found a name there — an old ledger entry with a signature that matched the "T" I'd seen on the watch: "Tomas." But the handwriting was different, and when I rolled the paper under the desk lamp, another minute redaction came to light. A blot of ink had been hurriedly scratched over. Somebody had tried to hide the hand.
"Who would do that?" I asked.
Tomas's face went cold. "Someone who wanted my name to appear as a smoke-screen. Someone who used familiarity to make us stumble."
"Someone who wanted you to be blamed," I said softly.
He put his hand over mine. "You are not alone in this," he said. "And if someone used my name as a rope, we will find who holds the other end."
Weeks of pulling at threads followed. We found more shell companies, a hidden server farm in a rented farmhouse, an accountant with shaking hands and a mouth that ran too fast. Each name we traced flickered and died like a match. People in this town learned early how to vanish.
Then we found the letterhead that glowed. It was stamped in a thin font, elegant and ancient. The paper felt like a promise.
"Francisco Golubev is the one who kept this ledger," said Otto when he came in with news. "He calls himself a patron."
"Francisco?" I echoed. "He is—"
"An old family friend of yours," Otto said. "He had ties to your godfather."
"Bring him in," Tomas said.
Francisco arrived smelling of oranges and salt and the sort of calm old men had when they'd seen more than their share of ruin. He sat and folded his hands.
"I did not expect to see you like this," he said when Tomas spoke the plain words.
"We want to know what you know," Tomas said. "Who owns a marked account with a T? Who moved the crates? Who profited from a night that took two lives?"
Francisco's face tightened. "The ledger is old and dangerous. Men used it like a map. They stitched names and transfers like one stitches cloth."
"Name one man who would benefit from hiding behind other men," Tomas said.
Francisco breathed. "He is bold. He is not content with stealing from merchants. He wanted to erase a family."
"Why?" I asked.
"Power," he said. "A sure place to stand when the tide goes out."
"Who is he?" I pressed.
Francisco's eyes darted to a place I'd been avoiding. "In every room of strategy, there is a voice no one says aloud. The voice is Tomas."
My weight dropped like a stone into the hollow.
"No," I said.
He nodded. "They wrote your name as the mark of the man who was to be blamed if anything went wrong. An allegory. Like a burnt piece in a chess game."
"Who wrote it?" I asked.
Francisco looked outside like a man who had swallowed brine. "Someone with ink on their fingers and a cold heart. Someone who kept ties inside and outside. Someone who wore nameplates like jewelry."
"Who?" I demanded.
He shook his head.
Tomas slammed his hand against the little oak table. "Enough," he said. "One more lie will not stand. We will find the hand on the pen."
We found the pen in the end, where men put their tools and think no one looks — in the small waistcoat of an accountant who had been too proud to hide. He gave us trembling names. His voice broke when he said "Dawson & Thread. Dawson & Thread. The money passed like a river and we buried it in foundations."
We followed the path, and each step showed us a man who had borrowed other men's sins like coats.
The person who benefitted the most — who had an interest in twisting a family's grief into a chain — used the town's affection for charity as a way to move money. The man with a gentle laugh and a public face.
We planned. We moved. We lay traps.
And then the truth came down like thunder.
It was the gala again — this time a different room, a banquet hall filled with people who loved the shape of their forks. We invited the press and hidden cameras and people who had been wronged. We built a stage where a roast became a reveal. I should have expected nothing less.
I stepped into the light and felt the familiar press of the cube in my pocket. I had folded the photographs into my palm for most of the night.
"We are here to celebrate," I said, voice steady. "And here to show what the light sees."
I spoke the name slowly this time so everyone heard it.
"Tomas Valdez."
A hush that tasted like iron fell across the room.
"No," he said quickly. "They picked my name at random."
"You will not like being the puppet," I said. "You will not like the cords."
People murmured; the cameras leaned forward.
A screen flashed up and projected an old ledger page. The signature that looked like "T" had been forged, overwritten with indentations from a pen that had been used by another hand. The ink had been tampered with. We displayed photographs, times, and bank transfers. The man who thought himself safe was not in the ledger. The man who had used Tomas's name as a mark was someone else.
"You have been framed," I concluded, voice calm. "The person who set this all into motion wanted to make you their scapegoat, Tomas."
The villain of our story — the man who had sewn the lines — had long ago thought to stitch together a nameless identity out of others. In the end, his stitches unraveled in public.
"Who?" someone hissed.
I reached for a hidden clip. "The man behind those shadows," I said, "is Dion Kuhn's benefactor."
It's strange how a name can tilt a room.
The man who had once worn a smile of public charity — a man from an old lineage who'd smiled like a cream on the surface — stood and tried to laugh away the accusations.
He had been patient. He had earned accolades. But in the end he wanted others dead to make a road. The list of the accused included men who had used small crimes to build big empires. He had colluded with Dempsey to make shipments vanish for his political theater.
We had the documents, curated like weapons. We had bank records, shipping manifests, cheesed receipts, the cough of a shifty accountant who'd finally split. We had witnesses. We had a man in the center who had expected his friends to close ranks and hide him.
Instead, as we turned the lights on, the room began to roar.
Faces changed from smiles to claws. Phones recorded. People laughed like a wave. The man went from confident to pale, then into the stages of denial, then trembling humiliation, then complete collapse.
"Please," he begged. "This is slander. Not me. My name—"
"It is you," I said.
He tried to weave a comeback. "You can't do this here! I have donors! I will sue you!"
"You will answer," Tomas said. "The law will do what the law does. Tonight, the court of public opinion has already spoken. The witnesses will not be bribed away."
The man, once a pillar in the town, was led away in blinking confusion. People filmed, neighbors who had lost small fortunes stepped forward. Cameras streamed into a waiting room of the world where justice could be performed in hour-long loops. He had been a man too sure of his thread to know how fragile it was until it was pulled.
I slept with the Rubik's cube in my hand that night.
They tried to patch their houses. They tried to quiet the cameras. The men who'd done damage had their reputations shredded in real time, and we had done it without a court's sterner hand, but with a court that no longer let a name be a net for cruelty.
In those dizzy weeks after, the city shifted its gait. Small businesses who had had enough came forward. Names leaked and were pinned like insects. I kept working from the shadows and from the bright heat of the cameras. I found truths sewn between receipts and old smiles. I pieced together a map that circled back to one central seam.
One night, Tomas and I sat on the roof, the city spattered at our feet.
"You kept your promise," I said. "You didn't tell me to stop."
"I didn't have your right to tell you to stop," he said. "You're bright and dangerous in equal measure."
"Is that—good?" I asked.
He smiled, small and feral. "It's why I won't try to cage you."
We sat in a silence that meant a great deal.
A week later, the courts took the foremost man. Dempsey and his cohort faced charges. So did the man people had once trusted. Their fall was recorded in the open and raw. The cameras showed a man who had been smug become unshaven and pleading. He knelt before a camera and said, "Please. I can make restitution."
People clapped, not out of cruelty but because the city was tired of being bullied.
The person who had orchestrated my parents' deaths — and the people who had profited off the confusion that followed — were in the process of being named. I learned, in pieces, that men will keep their hands clean by making others dirtier. I learned that public light cuts deep and heals slowly.
When it was all over, people asked me why I had chosen to go to school, to hide as I had. "Why did you risk everything?" they asked.
"Because truth was a debt I owed my parents," I said.
They asked if I intended to keep living as I had.
"Not forever," I said. "This disguise saved me once. If it helps now, it will last until it doesn't."
Jonas drew his card closer one night. "Will you ever tell them that you are a woman?"
I thought of the photographs, of Tomas's hand in mine, of the cube I twisted between my fingers when I thought of my childhood, and of the aunt on the campus news who had smiled at me when I walked past.
"One day," I said. "When the timing is right."
He looked at me for a long time and said, quietly, "I'll be there."
So many of our days were stitched together after that. The ledger entered memory like a scar. Names rearranged and men returned to the press of ordinary life, smaller and chastened. People recorded apologies and some large men apologized like children. Some made motions toward restitution.
Dempsey's face still came on the news sometimes — a reminder that cruelty had consequences. The man who'd hidden behind a hundred masks had bent under the weight of public light. He had gone from smugness to shock, denial, collapse, and begging in front of hundreds. The crowd recorded, gossiped, and judged, some with merciless delight and some with a cautious relief. The clip stayed online. Children asked about it for months. The class lectures in law school used it as an example of how social exposure can shift the center of power.
In the end, the truth had many faces and none of them belonged to just one narrative. We had done a thing that felt both medieval and modern. We had exposed what the ledger had wanted to make invisible.
"Did you get what you wanted?" Tomas asked once, as we walked by the channel where ships went and came like mobile metronomes.
"I found answers," I said. "I found pain. I found people who knew and let it be. But mostly I found that if you keep pushing, the rope will release."
Tomas nodded. "Then keep pushing. Keep asking."
"We will," I said. "Together."
He squeezed my hand. "Promise?"
"I never make promises," I said, twisting the small cube again. "But I will keep troubling the kind of men who call everything a business."
He laughed softly. "Always the mischief."
The season passed. Classes hummed. I kept the watch with my parents' initials in the drawer beside my bed. Some nights I turned it over and thought of small people who meant big harm.
On clear days I go back and sit on the harbor wall and count the boats. I roll my Rubik's cube in my hand and think of all the pieces that have to line up for one truth to be revealed.
This story is a stitch in that long cloth: of a girl who pretended to be a boy to survive, of a brother who would not let her go alone, of friends with edges, and of a city that grew braver when its secrets were pulled into light. There was a public reckoning. It was ugly. It was necessary.
And once, after everything, I opened my small box of childhood things and found a note folded inside the watch: "Tied strings come undone. Keep your hand steady."
I smiled, and for the first time in a long time I felt that the world had room for both my stubbornness and my truth.
The End
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