Tides of Ruin (Dark Dynasties #5)

Chapter 1

CALLIE

The call from Tavros & Sons had been going on for twenty-three minutes. I'd known for twenty of them how it was going to end.

I let Stavros work through it at his own pace.

Third generation, prone to theatrical sighs, deeply committed to the idea that suffering was a legitimate form of business communication.

The September olive oil shipment. The customs delay in Piraeus.

The Michelin-starred chef in New York who had apparently expressed his displeasure at a volume his sous-chefs would be describing for years.

I listened. Made notes in the margins of the contract open on my desk. Didn't look at the lake.

The lake was for when I needed it.

"The chef," I said, when Stavros paused for dramatic effect, "has already received a personal letter and a replacement case, at no charge.

The restaurant's star will survive." A beat.

"Your September shipment was delayed by a customs issue that affected seventeen importers across four countries.

Your contract gives you a fourteen-day grace window.

We were within it." I turned a page. "I'd rather talk about the spring allocation. "

The pause on his end was the specific pause of a man recalibrating. Grievance becoming opportunity. I'd learned to recognize it years ago.

"How new is the harvest?" Stavros asked.

"New enough. I'll have preliminary numbers to you by Friday." I tapped my pen against the contract. "Are we resolved on September?"

We were resolved on September.

I set the phone down and finally looked at the lake.

November in Chicago was its own particular punishment.

The water was the color of old pewter all the way to the horizon, flat and indifferent and vast, and the sky above it wasn't doing anything useful.

Three years I'd had this view—since I moved Vasilakis Holdings into the fourteenth floor—and it still did something to me I couldn't explain.

The lake didn't care about Michelin stars or harvest projections or any of it. It didn't care about anything at all.

I found that genuinely comforting.

I was reaching for the Dubois file when Elena knocked.

The knock was wrong. That was the first thing.

Elena Vassos didn't knock like she was asking permission.

She announced herself—two sharp raps, confident, the way she'd done everything since we were fourteen and sharing a lunch table at St. Catherine's and she'd decided, apparently on sight, that I was going to be her best friend whether I wanted one or not.

She knocked like she already belonged in the room.

This knock was soft. Careful.

"Come in."

She came in holding an envelope.

I registered it in the first second—heavy cream stock, international registered mail, the green customs sticker in the upper corner. Greek return address. My name in a typeface that suggested lawyers.

My thumb found the scar on my inner left wrist before I'd consciously decided to touch it.

A piece of broken glass at nine years old, reaching for something I'd been told not to touch.

Healed clean. My mother had left when I was twelve.

My father never explained it. You reached for things and sometimes they were gone.

I'd noticed somewhere in my mid-twenties that my hand went there when I was trying not to feel something I was about to feel anyway.

"Came by courier," Elena said. "Not post. They waited for a signature."

"I see that."

"The return address is a law firm. Athens."

"Elena."

She set it on my desk and didn't leave. That was the second thing.

I picked it up.

The firm was Alexandros, Petros & Drakos Legal Associates. Three pages, single-spaced, the Greek legal terms translated into English in brackets as a courtesy. The courtesy felt like the first insult.

I read it once quickly — structure first, then substance. Then I read it again, slowly.

Then I set it down and stared at the lake.

The Vasilakis-Drakos Marriage Contract. Dated November of the year I turned seventeen.

Valid and binding under Greek civil law at the time of its execution.

My father had signed it as legal representative of the family, with full authority to do so.

The agreement contained a specific activation clause: upon my father's death, the Drakos family could enforce it within twenty-four months.

My father had died eighteen months ago.

The Drakos family was electing.

I had known about the contract. That was what kept hitting me.

I had known. My father mentioned it once, when I was nineteen — casually, the way he mentioned things he expected to shock me, like watching a lab experiment.

I told him, with the flat certainty of someone who'd been managing her own life since she was twelve, that I would not be marrying anyone on the basis of an agreement I hadn't signed myself.

He'd given me the smile that meant you'll understand when you're older and changed the subject.

I'd been twenty-six when he died. I organized the funeral, settled the estate, declined the condolences of men I recognized as his associates, and caught the first flight back to Chicago. I hadn't cried. I'd been waiting to feel grief for a long time. It hadn't arrived.

What had arrived, eighteen months later, was this.

The photograph was the last thing in the packet. I assumed it was meant to be reassuring.

He was standing on the deck of a yacht — and God, the yacht.

The kind of vessel that didn't just cost money but cost the kind of money that came with a whole separate vocabulary.

He stood at the rail like he owned not just the boat but the ocean underneath it.

Dark-haired, broad-shouldered, with a jaw that had absolutely no business looking like that.

Tan even in what looked like autumn, wearing sunglasses that probably cost more than my customs broker's monthly retainer and a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow.

The careless ease of a man who had never in his life had to work for warmth.

He was smiling at whoever held the camera. Easy. Certain. The smile of a man who had never been told no and had made it everyone else's problem.

He was, objectively, beautiful — and that made me furious.

I turned the photograph face-down on my desk.

The deadline was in six days.

I read the consequences section twice more. Then I sat back in my Eames chair — black leather, the one thing in this office I'd bought for myself the day the company turned profitable, a promise I'd made at twenty-five when everything was still uncertain — and stared at the ceiling.

The distribution agreements that kept Vasilakis Holdings alive ran through Drakos Shipping subsidiaries.

I had known this. Had considered it mildly uncomfortable and ultimately unavoidable, the infrastructure of Mediterranean imports being what it was.

Those agreements could be terminated with forty-eight hours' notice under terms I had signed myself, in good faith, three years ago.

Without them, we wouldn't survive the quarter.

There was more. My customs broker in Piraeus was a Drakos associate.

My bonded warehouse in Athens — holding six months of art consulting inventory for clients who paid for discretion and expected to receive it — sat on a lease with an early-termination clause I hadn't paid close enough attention to when I signed it.

Three of my largest American clients maintained relationships with Drakos family interests that predated their work with me.

Cold fury moved through my chest. Then something underneath it — something that had the texture of fear, which I refused to name out loud even to myself.

He had planned this. Both of them had — my father and Nikolas Drakos, between themselves, while I was busy building a life neither of them had consulted me about.

Two men had arranged my future like a real estate transaction and they'd been thorough about it, laying the groundwork years ago for exactly this moment.

I looked at the photograph, still face-down.

Didn't touch it.

"Callie." Elena, from the chair across from my desk. She'd sat down at some point without being invited, as she'd done for eighteen years.

"I'm thinking."

"You've been staring at the ceiling for four minutes."

"That's within normal parameters."

"It is genuinely not within normal parameters."

I sat forward. Put both hands flat on the desk. "My father entered into a marriage contract on my behalf when I was seventeen. The other party has decided to enforce it."

I watched her face go through several things in quick succession.

"Who?" she finally said.

"Nikolas Drakos."

A beat. "The shipping family."

"The same."

"Callie—"

"I know."

"That's—"

"I know."

She went quiet. One of the things I valued most about Elena: she understood the difference between silences that needed filling and silences that didn't.

I picked up the letter and read the consequences section a third time.

As if rereading it would reveal an exit I'd missed.

It didn't. I had good lawyers — had used them when a distributor tried to rewrite a contract mid-term, when a customs dispute threatened to hold six figures of inventory for months.

My lawyers were excellent. They also needed time I didn't have, and money that would be irrelevant if the business collapsed while the case was still pending.

I could walk away from Vasilakis Holdings. Start from nothing. I had done harder things.

Except there was Sofia Andreou, my warehouse manager in Piraeus, two daughters in secondary school, nine years with the company.

David Park, my customs broker in LA, who'd turned down a position at a major firm to stay with me.

And Elena, sitting across from me with her jaw tight and her hands folded and her eyes doing the thing where she was very carefully not showing me what she was feeling.

My father had built the leverage into the people I loved. Of course he had. He'd always understood me better than I'd ever wanted him to. I would sacrifice almost anything for myself — and almost nothing for myself if it cost someone else.

The rage settled into something cold and clear and useful.

I set the letter down.

"I need you to clear my schedule for the next three weeks."

Elena's breath caught. "Callie—"

"Tell Castellano we'll reconvene in December. Push the Dubois call to the twenty-eighth. The Tavros spring numbers go to Marco by Friday — flag it for him." I paused. "And I need a flight to Athens."

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to." I kept my voice level. "I'm choosing to."

Because I wasn't losing everything I'd spent a decade building. Because if I had to walk into Nikolas Drakos's house, I was going to walk in on my own two feet, on my own terms, and I was going to make sure he understood exactly what he'd gotten himself into.

I didn't say any of that. Elena would hear it anyway.

"Not their plane," I added. "I'm not arriving on their plane."

She opened her notebook. Clicked her pen — the Montblanc I'd given her on our fifteen-year work anniversary, matte black, the one she used for everything that mattered. "First class or—"

"Business. I want to sleep, not perform."

I stood. Walked to the window. Pressed one hand flat against the cold glass and looked at the lake — still pewter, still doing nothing, still entirely indifferent to this particular Tuesday morning in November.

I'd been to Greece exactly once. I was nine, a week in Santorini tacked onto one of my father's business trips.

White buildings and blue water so blue it didn't look real.

A donkey on a stone path that had regarded me with profound boredom.

I remembered standing at the edge of the caldera with my father's hand in mine, the drop enormous below us, the whole island curved around an ancient wound in the earth.

This is where we come from, Callista. Remember that.

I hadn't thought about it in years.

I reached back to my desk.

I turned the photograph right-side up.

Nikolas Drakos looked back at me from the deck of his yacht — sun-warm, certain, that easy smile pointed at some camera he probably didn't even register. Like being photographed was just something that happened to him, inevitably, because everything did.

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I picked up my phone and called my lawyer.