Chapter 1 #2
Every camera that might have helped had been disabled, corrupted, looped, or mysteriously unavailable.
Vesper knew exactly what I would do.
So she dismantled the trail before giving me the breadcrumb.
Then there's the other photograph.
A piece of white paper.
One dried teardrop in the center.
No explanation.
I never asked.
She never offered.
Those are the pieces of her I know.
Caramel hair.
A mouth designed to ruin good judgment.
A shoulder.
A thigh.
A tear on paper.
And a mind that irritates me enough that I've spent years coming back for more.
We were supposed to meet once.
London. The bridge.
I went.
She didn't.
At least I don't think she did.
Maybe she stood twenty feet away and watched me.
The possibility still irritates me.
She had wrapped the entire area in a digital shell.
Camera loops.
Blank feeds.
Missing footage.
Corrupted storage.
Vesper could have been standing across the street laughing while I dismantled half of London's municipal camera network trying to find her.
I never did.
We haven't tried again.
Yet.
But lately the photographs have been getting riskier.
The conversations longer.
The jokes more personal.
The pauses after one of us says something too honest harder to ignore.
Sooner or later, something has to give.
I look at Haverhill's + Guest again.
Imagine asking her.
Nearly laugh.
Would you like to attend the wedding of an NBA star with a man whose real name you don't know? Black tie. Don't hack the venue.
She'd probably agree just to irritate me.
Then disappear before the ceremony.
Maybe I should hire someone instead.
Find the cheapest call girl in Manhattan.
Put her in couture.
Walk her into Haverhill's wedding purely to watch the room panic.
With the number of NBA players, professional athletes, agents, billionaire investors, and old-money families expected to be there, I'd need to perform a triple background check.
No.
Quadruple.
Possibly genetic testing.
I smile into my Scotch.
Tempting.
The fire drops lower.
Outside, wind throws itself against the windows.
Newport used to feel permanent.
Royal Oaks especially.
That place had its own gravity.
The halls.
The oak trees.
The uniforms.
The ridiculous belief that whatever happened inside those gates mattered more than everything beyond them.
For a while, maybe it did.
Now another generation walks those corridors.
New names.
New scandals.
New boys convinced they're the first ones to discover power.
Let them have it.
We passed the baton.
Royal Oaks belongs to them now.
College is done as well.
My father forbade me from attending anywhere in the States.
Too ordinary.
Too visible.
Too much wasted time pretending to learn things I already knew.
Oxford was the compromise.
Prestigious enough to satisfy my mother.
European enough to satisfy my father.
Useful enough to hide what I was actually doing there.
I spent more time inside Blackwell facilities than classrooms.
More nights in Monaco, Zurich, Paris, Rome, and Geneva than in my Oxford rooms.
Surveillance contracts.
Acquisitions.
Security breaches.
Quiet problems handled quietly.
Meanwhile, everyone else stayed on the other side of the Atlantic building lives.
I FaceTimed.
I flew back when I could.
Stanford eventually became more of a second home than Newport.
Basketball games.
Parties.
The occasional catastrophe requiring me to appear in person because Haverhill or Drew had managed to create something technology alone couldn't fix.
I got to know both of them well.
Especially Kane.
Hard not to respect someone who fought that hard to build a life nobody handed him.
But it wasn't the same.
Leo and Vale are different.
Always will be.
We aren't brothers by blood.
Blood is overrated anyway.
I've seen families sell one another for considerably less than a Blackwell stock option.
Leo and Tristan are my brothers because we chose it.
Because there are things we've done for each other nobody else knows.
Things we'll carry to graves separated by oceans, wives, children, careers, whatever comes next.
I would do anything for them.
Which is why I can't skip this wedding.
They'll all be there.
Leo.
Vale.
Drew.
Kane.
Jade.
The old and new crew in one place again.
But first there would be a bachelor party. Leo and Vale would ensure it.
I haven't seen some of them in far too long.
It’ll be an excuse to stay stateside until my father bids me back to Europe and Blackwell Inc. Whatever mess is currently brewing inside the empire I'm eventually expected to inherit.
There will always be another encrypted file.
Another breach.
Another politician.
Another board member.
Another piece of information somebody desperately wants buried.
Blackwell doesn't sleep.
Neither do I, apparently.
I lift the invitation.
+ Guest.
My thumb traces the edge.
Vesper's lower lip flashes through my mind again.
Ridiculous.
I set the invitation beside the fire.
Maybe I'll go alone.
Probably smarter.
Then again, smart has become remarkably boring lately.
My watch vibrates.
Not Blackwell Secure.
NULL.
I stare at it for half a second before opening the channel.
One message waits.
VESPER: Miss me?
A slow grin pulls at my mouth.
There she is.
I type back.
GHOST: I was enjoying the silence.
Her reply appears before I can take another drink.
VESPER: Liar.
We flirt in our own self made encrypted room for a while. She’s real but safe. Maybe a ghost of a romance is better than none at all.
Travers is double-fisting German beer off the stern of a rented yacht like he has personally declared war on his liver.
This is not how the evening began.
Vale had a plan. Vale always has a plan, usually one involving enough money to make ordinary logistical problems irrelevant.
According to him, taking Haverhill anywhere in the States for a bachelor weekend was impossible.
Kane can't walk through an airport anymore without somebody filming him.
Add Leo, Drew, Tristan, Jalen, and several recognizable professional athletes to the mix, and we'd have hashtags before appetizers.
So Vale solved the problem in the most Vale way possible.
He moved the bachelor party to Europe.
More specifically, the southern coast of France, where billionaires are common enough to be boring, private marinas ask fewer questions, and famous men occasionally get to eat dinner without somebody pretending not to photograph them from behind a breadbasket.
Fewer hashtags.
Less paparazzi.
Better Scotch.
I approved.
The boat is technically rented but calling it a rental is like calling Versailles a starter home.
One hundred fifty plus feet of polished teak and white leather, four sleeping cabins nobody intends to use, a galley larger than most Manhattan apartments, and enough horsepower beneath the deck to outrun several questionable decisions.
Which is fortunate.
We've made a lot of them tonight.
The models arrived around seven.
Not my idea.
Drew swears it wasn't his either, which means it was absolutely his.
Five women. Champagne. Cases of imported German beer. French wine nobody is sober enough to appreciate. A humidor of Cuban cigars Tristan produced without explanation and refused to explain even after Haverhill asked whether importing them involved an international incident.
Dinner came first. Five courses at a restaurant overlooking the marina where each plate had four bites of food and a paragraph-long description.
Then Vale took us to some hole-in-the-wall club in Antibes—Haverhill's words.
The hole in the wall had velvet booths carved into ancient stone, a seventy-thousand-euro sound system, private security, and champagne bottles arriving with sparklers.
Apparently definitions have evolved.
Now it's after two in the morning. The French coast is a ribbon of lights behind us, stars scatter across a black Mediterranean, and every man aboard is somewhere between drunk and useless.
Except me.
I'm drunk.
Not useless.
There's a distinction.
“BLACKWELL!”
I turn toward the stern.
Drew has lost his shirt.
That happened at some point after the club.
I don't know where it went, and I don't care enough to reconstruct the timeline.
He's also acquired the captain's hat.
It doesn't belong to him.
He lifts both beer bottles over his head.
“This is the greatest country in the world.”
Vale raises his head from the floating swim platform behind the yacht.
He's stretched across a pool noodle with one ankle hooked over the other. A floating drink caddy bobs beside him, tethered to his wrist like an emergency medical device.
His Scotch sits safely in the center.
“We're in France.”
Drew pauses.
Looks toward shore.
Looks back.
“Greatest France in the world.”
Jalen nearly folds in half laughing.
Haverhill covers his face.
I drink my Scotch.
This is why I remain functional around these people.
Someone has to remember where the bodies are.
A model named Ana—or Anna, possibly Hana, which would be spectacularly unfortunate—walks past in a white bikini carrying champagne by the neck.
Haverhill immediately finds something fascinating on the horizon.
One of the other women catches him.
“You're allowed to look, groom.”
Kane doesn't turn.
“I enjoy living.”
Drew points one beer at him.
“Bookworm got you trained.”
“Bookworm can hit a free throw better than you.”
“Bookworm is terrifying.”
“That she is.”
I smile into my glass.
Hannah Goodwin somehow took one of the most competitive men I've ever known and convinced him that marriage is the ultimate championship.
Still not sure how.
Advanced behavioral conditioning, probably.
Drew climbs onto the stern rail.
Vale notices immediately.
“No.”
Drew looks back.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Absolutely yes.”
“Drew.”
“Tristan.”
“You're married.”
“What does marriage have to do with swimming?”
“Nothing. The six nearly naked women behind you have something to do with swimming.”
Drew glances over one shoulder.
All the models are watching.
He processes this information for half a second.
Then shrugs.
“Isa married me knowing who I am.”
Haverhill calls from beside me, “That's not the defense you think it is.”
Travers chugs the first beer.
Then the second.
Beer runs down his chest.