Sweet Romance13 min read
The Doll Promise and the Watch I Wound
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I had never imagined that a dying man’s last instructions could redraw the map of my life.
"My grandson and your grandfather were brothers in arms," Grandpa Franz had said in a voice thinner than the paper he once read on rainy nights. "You must go to South City. Find the Burgess family. There is an agreement—a baby promise. See what fate brings." He patted my hand, eyes fogged but steady. "Promise me."
"I promise, Grandpa," I told him. I did not know then how heavy a promise could be.
I am Nova Christian. I grew up smelling earth and garlic and the slow heat of my grandfather’s kitchen. When I landed in South City with a bag of home-grown vegetables and a faded address, I still smelled of soil. The taxi driver stared at me until I paid. When I stepped into the Burgess driveway, the villa looked like a fortress made of glass and smooth stone.
A small, dignified old man opened the door. I said, "Mr. Burgess? My name is Nova Christian. My grandfather—Franz Hoffman—asked me to visit."
He frowned a moment, then smiled like morning. "Come in, child. Come in."
Inside, the old Burgess—Brennan Lombardo—did not have the coldness I had braced for. He put his hand out, voice soft. "You are Franz's granddaughter? Sit with me."
"I am Nova," I said, and sat.
Dinner meant introductions, and my presence stirred the house like wind through paper. Faces watched me over candlelight—some with genuine curiosity, most with the cool distances people keep when they have position to protect.
"Where is your grandson?" Brennan asked at the table. He looked only slightly less eager than a child. He glanced at an empty chair as if expecting it to fill.
"Mr. Burgess, perhaps your grandson is busy," said a woman across the table—Burgess's daughter-in-law, Ava Nakamura. Her smile did not reach her eyes. "These days, children have plans."
"He is called Zion Burgess," Brennan said. "He is my heir. He will decide like anyone else. But meet him—see if you two..." He trailed off.
I met the house's cold gaze and answered for both of us. "I will stay a little, if that is all right," I said. "Grandpa wanted me to see whether two people might actually want to be—" I paused, awkward—"—friends before any promises count."
Some people snorted politely. "A baby promise," Ava said loudly enough that forks paused. "This is the age of contracts. We cannot be bound by old past agreements. Besides, she's from the country. She brought vegetables."
They laughed in the way of people who think themselves safe: loud around edges, small in the middle.
After dinner, I left. I told Brennan I would sleep in my own apartment, and I walked out to the street and across to the little motorcycle I loved. I liked speed. I liked the sound of tires on asphalt. "You came all the way here by bike?" someone had said once; I had grinned wider than the moon.
I did not know that the person I would meet next had long since learned to live with smoke and hidden knives. Zion Burgess was not a man who smiled for crowds. When I stood in his office, under a glass sky that looked down over the city and thought him everything I had imagined—handsome, dangerous—he only said one thing: "You are Nova Christian."
"Yes," I answered, trying to steady the ridiculous flutter in my chest. I had come to do one thing: make Zion uninterested in me so the promise could be forgotten. My plan had three parts: disgrace, shock, and escape. It was not noble, but it was fast.
I painted my face like a caricature of silk and color. I wore the silliest dress I owned. I walked into his office and declared, deliberately, "Eli—Zion! My grandfather wants you to take me out today. I want to buy many pretty things. Buy me everything."
"Go wash your face," he said.
The assistant—Nicholas Jacobs—escorted me to the washroom as if he had been asked to take in a wild animal. I thought that step had failed my plan. Then I washed my face and looked in the mirror. I felt ridiculous. I scowled at myself and then smiled the real smile that comes from knowing your own intentions.
When I came out, I had not meant to be noticed. Zion looked at me and something flicked behind his eyes. He led me into the city with a manner that seemed to say: Do what you must. Who else could stand the smoke and steel of his life?
At the jewelry store, I performed the second act. I chose the gaudiest things. "I would like this," I said, palm flat on the counter. "And this. Put it all into boxes."
"You are sure?" the attendant asked.
"Very," I lied.
Zion did not balk. He paid, and watched me with something like amusement. I had expected the scoff of a man repelled by gold and glitter. Instead he looked like a man looking at a puzzle that amused him. "Take them," he said. "If you want something, take it."
By the time I left his car with the bags jangling at my feet, the plan was ruined. I had not wanted him to care. He had the air of a man who cared only when it suited him, and right then it suited him to walk me to my building and watch me put the packages inside my door.
Two days later, the mother's voice called my name with the venom I had already felt at the table. "One thousand million," she offered me like a bad fruit. "Leave my son. Take this, and leave."
"I've already made a plan," I said, because I am not easily bought. "My grandfather told me to find my fate."
"You do not need his fate," Ava said. Her voice was practiced charity. "Take the money, leave the number of a country, disappear."
She was trying to buy what she could not bargain for: my consent to be replaced. I left, amused and angry. "Tell Zion to give me back the jewels," she told the empty air.
He had gone to another country the next day. Someone had shot at his boat; someone had tried to take him. He was wounded and his body was a place of fever and blood. When I heard of it I boarded the next plane.
At the hospital I met Hamza Deleon: a man whose hands were born with a surgeon's patience. He assessed Zion—"His fever is stubborn," he said, flat as a rule. "He needs something the Western medicine cannot give alone."
"I can help," I said. And so we began to work. I am a tinkerer, a coder, a healer of the little things most people dismiss as hobbies. Some of those hobbies had led me to people who kept secrets. S—Kinley Vasiliev—an old friend and agent for me, whispered names into my ear like wind. C—Faron Sanchez—and others had taught me to read the shadow parts of power. I knew names, and I knew how to make a call.
Hamza looked at me, wry. "You are sure?"
"I am," I said. I learned acupuncture and not just the polite variety—little manipulations that make fever sweat. The needles are delicate and precise, and we worked hour after hour.
When Zion opened his eyes for the first time, he kissed me as though to make me the thing I’d been born to be: necessary. "You came," he said. I had been more than the announcement. He kissed me again, clumsy with a pain that still lived under his ribs.
Later, he and I sat across, in the private office that had become our house on days when danger could lurk in corridors.
"I believe someone wanted me dead," he said. "They found the coordinates of our boat. The shots were aimed. Only one side of the ship took the real bullets."
"You think there is a traitor—" I said.
"I know there is a traitor," he corrected. "And the line of that traitor goes up."
We made a plan. He would pretend to be out of the game. I would step into it.
"I will go back to my...life," he said. "Let the world mourn me. Let them think me broken and gone. While enemies move, I will be a ghost."
"Play sick," I said.
He did. The public statement said Zion Burgess had collapsed from grief, fatigue, an illness so serious he could not work. The shareholders panicked and the stock plunged. People began to move. When you are thought dead, many hands are revealed.
"Who would do this to you?" I asked at night as he lay on the couch pretending to sleep.
He sat up and looked at me like a man with a blade hidden between his ribs: "My mother—Ava. And—you must know this—my uncle Fergus Cao. There are others with hands in the dark."
"Your mother?" I repeated. The idea was a hard pebble in my mouth. "Why?"
"Power," Zion said. "She wanted control. She wanted her own son—someone of her choosing—near our fortunes. I would not play the pawn."
We started quietly. I called Kinley and S arrived: slender, sharp, a woman who could listen to a socialite and later, over coffee, break a man's spine with an unsigned subpoena. Kinley moved through the city's underbelly like a hand through silk, and we had friends in the M-country dockyards and in places where men spoke in numbers instead of names.
"Who gave the order?" I asked one night as we traced the payments and phone lines from the car driver's pockets.
"An old number; a pay-phone connection," Kinley answered. "Clever, but not perfect. The traces lead to an executive in a development firm—Fergus Cao's firm."
Fergus, I later learned, put on the face of a respectable businessman but kept a ledger of favors and debts that spoke the way of old crimes. Between him and Ava something old had been passed, something that smelled like oil and whispers.
We played along. Zion sank deeper into his act. "I am done," he said publicly. "Do not trouble yourselves with me."
Behind closed doors I taught him to move like an invisible thing. I installed little programs on his laptop—my own designs that let me see people move through the net. I made him a watch—a little device that could trigger a hidden interface to the villa’s cameras. He wore it like armor.
Then we struck.
We called a shareholders' meeting under the pretense of picking a new deputy. The room was full of the city's elegant, the men with money who attached their teeth to fortunes. The air smelled like expensive cologne and older lies. I sat beside Zion. Kinley leaned like a shadow near the doorway. Nicholas and Dixon kept the inside doors shut. Hamza sat far away, looking tired, like a man who'd sewn one too many wounds.
Zion stood. His chess piece had returned to the board.
"I want to show you something," he said. His voice was soft, the soft of a man who had been told all his threats were noise. "This meeting is not just to pick names."
He put on the watch and tapped it. The room's large screen hummed to life.
First, we played a hundred small clips. "I will show the board the truth," Zion said. One by one, the cameras on the screen revealed bribes, the exchange of envelopes, furtive late meetings—Ava Nakamura with Fergus Cao, Fergus's men handing over envelopes to a man near the docks. The room grew hot with betrayals. "You sent the men to the sea," he said. "You made a plan to remove me, to remove anyone who would stand in your way."
Ava's face, usually smooth like pressed silk, went red. Her hands flew to her throat as if something had suddenly tried to throttle the skin off her. "This is slander," she said.
"Is it?" Zion asked. He tapped the watch again and the screen cut to a new file: the phone logs, the bank transactions. They were clean for the daily dealings, and then a line of payments that connected to the pay-phone from months earlier.
Someone in the room gasped. A whisper became a murmur, and the murmur found its throat and grew teeth. "Who filmed this?" someone demanded.
"I did," I said. My voice was small in the room, but the silence was a large anvil. "Not just this. I have everything."
"Take her away," Ava shouted, for the first time not a charade but a real command from a cornered animal. "This is my house. Security—"
Dixon and Nicholas stood as if on springs. "No," Dixon said. "This house does not belong to traitors."
"The law will decide," I said. "But right now, everyone can see."
They watched as two men—Fergus's associates—argued on tape in a parking lot, their voices raw with greed. They watched as a man in a suit accepted a thick envelope and then finished a phone call: "It is done. The driver is ready."
Ava moved like lightning. "This is false. Zion, you—I can't believe you would—"
Zion's face did not tremble. "You worked with Fergus Cao. You gave him the right to move money and men," he said. "You hired men to threaten me. You directed a man to drive wrong on purpose. You are not the only one who wants the seat."
This is the part of the story I will not soften. Ava's mask fell in front of eighty shareholders and a sound man and the house staff and the cameras that hummed like bees. Her voice rose and dropped, then rose again. She accused, denied, then stuttered as if her mouth had been made heavy by guilt.
"Is there someone else?" she asked, suddenly. "A third party—"
The room laughed. "No," Zion said. "Only those who pushed me. Only those who thought taking a life would be an easy way to a better face."
Fergus stood. He had always been a man with a steady face, but even he looked older in that light. "This is a set-up," he insisted. "You can't just—" He could not finish.
"Watch," I said as the screen flicked to the phone call from the driver. His hands, unsteady, promised money and protection. "We have his testimony."
In the foyer, the servants whispered of scandal. Phones blinked across the room as people recorded. A video went live. The room turned into a tide of people taking sides: some gasped, some shot flinty glances at Ava, and a group of younger shareholders pushed forward, murmurs telling of long-ignored doubts.
I had to make sure the punishment was not merely a private humiliation—a domestic scene with a few angry words. The Five Rules of our little family of hackers had taught me: punish in public, make the fall visible, let the world watch the reckoning so the guilty cannot quietly rebuild.
So we went to the next level.
Zion, with a slow hand, signed a public letter asking for an emergency shareholders' inquiry. "I step down from public duties until the truth comes out," he said, and his voice shook a fraction of bone. "I will not be a puppet."
The floor boiled. Ava was taken aside by two of her own council men who now looked as if their stomachs had been pared. She tried to gather strength, to speak, to slap her own wound with the same practiced charm that once bought men. Newspapers would call it a meltdown. The cameras would call it footage you could not erase.
But the real punishment was a different thing.
Two weeks later, at the open annual charity gala where Ava had planned to make speeches and charm donors, we came again. The gala’s champagne glassware tasted like a mirage. The city's loyal press streamed the night and the lights made diamonds of greed. The stage was set for a display meant to bury suspicion beneath roses and music.
Instead, we played the truth.
The moment Ava stepped up to the podium, an assistant from the charity saw the screen flicker and felt the silence of something breaking. The room was a blade. One by one, the gala's big donors looked at the screen as it showed Fergus Cao in a private office with a ledger, and then the ledger open to a line of names, and then the unapologetic signatures linking him to offshore trusts.
Ava's face drained. She tried to pull a smile like a curtain and failed. The donors had cameras; they had phones. Her hands—those hands that had once smoothed linen as if smoothness made a life—began to tremble.
"Step down," a woman in the audience said into a microphone, and then the sound caught like a spark. "This gala will not be a stage for criminals."
Ava's voice rose. "This is an attack. You are—"
"—a liar," said one of the sponsors. "You sold land to our foundation under false promises. We will not give. We demand restitution."
The room that had once been a net for her safety became a net holding her. Spectators stood, some in tears at the betrayal; others whispered of the poor families her foundation had cheated, the men whose companies had been burned down to get at the land. A young journalist began to read a list of the victims that had been signed away in pages Fergus and Ava had once called 'minor deals.'
Fergus was taken by the police inside, but Ava—Ava was left to stand while the cameras showed the clips of her babbling to men, giving names, arranging transfers, and then the phone call to the driver's hand. She began to shriek at the lights, at privilege, at the cameras. For the first time that night she was wholly without an audience that loved her.
"No!" she cried. "This is a lie! Zion—" She had no Zion to call now—the man she had tried to play with had timed his retreat and his strike to perfection.
I watched as she lost more than money. She lost face, she lost contacts, and she lost the charity's support. Donors rose as a block and left. The city's top law firm, formerly her friend, stepped forward and handed an envelope to the Gala's board: a letter of withdrawal of all legal support.
Her reaction changed stages as our rules demanded: first denial, then anger, then frantic bargaining, then the small breakdown of the sort of woman who had never learned to be human except as a chess piece. She walked off the stage; a few cameras followed her like hounds.
We had given her three punishments—not just public exposure, but removal of fund sources, removal of legal backing, and the social shunning that would let the law do the rest. The watchers in the room photographed and streamed. People posted the exchange in real time. Ava sat in the car outside and watched strangers with their lights turned on, watching a woman unravel while the city's social web rewired itself around the truth.
Later that week, there would be depositions. There would be arrests. Fergus would be taken and charged with conspiracy. Ava would be brought to hearings where family names that mattered would shut their eyes. The real punishment, though, was watching her reputation unmake itself in the public square: the boards that had once accepted her gifts returned them; the days when charity and power walked together split apart like ice.
It was the kind of fall that dissolves a person into rumor and caution. People who had once laughed at the country girl now used her as a landmark: "Remember Nova? She was the one who pulled the mask." They used the story to show how fragile the gilded can be. For Zion, it was a vindication. For me, it was a hard taste of justice that left me winded and small.
After the public punishment, the board of Burgess holdings changed. Zion named a caretaker. Investigations moved like winters through the halls. I returned to our quiet apartment, to our patched sofa and my slow cooking, and felt the long afterburn of the night.
We were not naive. We had achieved a public unmasking, but the world does not mend itself simply because you expose the lie. There were still men who would not stop at being merely exposed. There were still shadows on the water.
"I thought I would feel lighter," Zion said one night as we sat on the balcony. His face was hardly human—too sharp, too carved. "Instead, I feel like I lost something and gained a tax called vigilance."
"Justice is not a warm thing," I said. "Justice is a careful coldness that marks out wrong and remembers to watch."
He laughed softly. He reached into his pocket and took out a watch. "The watch you gave me," he said. "You wound it."
"I did," I admitted. "It's set to remind you to breathe. To remind me to not forget what matters."
He closed his fingers over mine and said, "You are my strange, terrible promise."
"Your only promise that had weight," I corrected, because some promises are heavy and some are light.
We kept working—on the company, on the house, on small things like a tea that we both liked. We kept unspooling the web of deceit. Kinley went back to the dark networks and kept them clear. Hamza returned to his patients. Dixon and Nicholas rebuilt the staff because some of the old people were not fit. The rest of the story is ordinary and small and daily: laundry, emails, the way Zion hummed when he walked through the kitchen. Even monsters can clean a dish when they love someone properly.
When the worst of it had settled, I went to see Brennan Lombardo. He sat in his armchair as steady as a timepiece. "You did right," he said quickly, hands folded. "You honored the promise."
"I honored caring for the man who needed care," I said. "Grandpa was wise to make me keep my feet moving."
He smiled. "Do not make him happier than he can be. He is a man who likes to fight. He will always test you."
I leaned my head back and remembered the watch. "I wound his watch," I said. "Every minute it reminds him not to sleep on the job."
He chuckled. "Then don't wind your life into his clock. Keep your own."
I stood, looking at the old man, and felt how small we all were—a village, a city, a network of choices.
We had punished the people who thought of murder as a tool. We had changed how the city saw certain golden names. But we had also learned how fragile victory can be. You show the truth in a meeting and the city applauds. You take the truth to a gala and they stream it. But you must still sit with those you love and let the quietness of a life heal the parts that the fireworks cannot touch.
That night, when I wound Zion's watch, he turned it over to me and said, "Tick it once for each day you let me keep you safe."
I tightened the crown and thought of the river where a car had fallen and a woman had come back from the dark, and I thought of an old promise like a string tying two people across years.
"Tick," I said, and let the second hand move away. The room held its breath and then released it.
We lived with the ticking; we lived with the promise. We kept the watch wound.
The End
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