“That was my company.”
“That is not the defense you think it is.”
“I didn’t approve those notices.”
“But you signed something somewhere, didn’t you?”
Julian had no answer.
That bothered him more than the smell.
She held out a hand. “Out of the crates, billionaire. You’re scaring the clams.”
He took her hand.
Her grip was strong. Warm. Work-callused. Real.
When he stood, she stared at him for a long second, and for the first time that night, Julian felt seen without being measured.
Then her nose wrinkled.
“You smell like dead shrimp and bad decisions.”
“That seems fair.”
“What did you do, exactly?”
“I escaped my engagement party.”
“Congratulations.”
“It wasn’t a real engagement.”
“Most disasters aren’t real until someone pays for the tent.”
He almost laughed.
He had forgotten laughter could arrive without permission.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Sienna Cruz.”
“Sienna.”
“Don’t say it like you’re tasting wine. I run a stall, not a vineyard.”
“I’m Julian.”
“I know. Your face is on three business magazines and one very ugly billboard near the harbor.”
“That billboard was my mother’s idea.”
“So was the engagement?”
He looked toward the rain-dark street.
“Yes.”
Sienna’s sarcasm softened, not into pity, but into something more dangerous: understanding.
For one second, the noise of the market faded.
Then a woman’s voice echoed from outside.
“Julian!”
His spine went rigid.
Sienna glanced through the curtain again. “Is that her?”
“My mother.”
“She sounds expensive.”
“She is.”
“Is she dangerous?”
Julian thought of his father’s funeral. Of his mother taking his hand in front of reporters and whispering, Stand straight. Voss men do not fold.
“Yes,” he said. “But not with weapons.”
“Those are usually the worst kind.”
Isadora Voss entered the market as if the rain had personally offended her.
She wore a cream coat, pearls, and fury so polished it looked like manners. Behind her came Vivienne Ashcroft, dry beneath a black umbrella held by someone whose name she probably did not know.
The market quieted.
Everyone knew Isadora Voss.
Not because she was famous.
Because rent notices carried her signature.
Julian stepped from behind the stall before Sienna could stop him.
His mother saw him.
Her eyes moved from his soaked hair to his ruined tuxedo to the fish water dripping from his sleeves.
Then she looked at Sienna.
“Oh, Julian,” Isadora said softly. “Tell me you did not abandon your own engagement celebration for a fish girl.”
Something in the air tightened.
Sienna’s face went still.
Julian had heard his mother humiliate people before. Employees. Assistants. Contractors. Friends who became inconvenient. He had hated it quietly, the way cowards hate thunder from inside a warm house.
But now he saw the insult land on Sienna in front of people who knew her, people who worked beside her, people who would have to hear it repeated.
And something in him, already cracked, finally split open.
“Her name,” Julian said, “is Sienna Cruz.”
Isadora blinked once.
A warning.
“Come home,” she said. “Now.”
“No.”
The word shocked him as much as it shocked her.
Vivienne’s perfect expression sharpened.
Isadora stepped closer. “You are wet, embarrassed, and emotional. This is not rebellion. This is spectacle.”
Julian looked at the woman beside him, the crates, the stained floor, the stall lights buzzing overhead.
Then he looked at his mother.
“No,” he said. “The spectacle was upstairs. This is the first honest place I’ve been all night.”
Sienna muttered, “That’s dramatic. But continue.”
Julian almost smiled.
Isadora heard her and turned cold eyes on her.
“You think this is amusing?”
“I think your son looks like a man who ran out of oxygen in a room full of flowers,” Sienna replied. “And I think you should stop talking to him like a misbehaving investment.”
A ripple moved through the market.
Julian stared at her.
No one talked to Isadora Voss that way.
No one sane.
His mother’s smile thinned. “And you are?”
“The woman whose barrel he fell into.”
“Then thank you for your service. Send an invoice.”
Sienna’s chin lifted. “I already planned to.”
Vivienne finally spoke. “Julian, enough. We can manage this quietly.”
Julian turned to her. “Is that what you want? Quiet management?”
Her eyes flickered.
For the first time, he wondered whether Vivienne had wanted this marriage any more than he had.
But Isadora answered first.
“What he wants is irrelevant tonight.”
There it was.
The whole truth dressed in silk.
Julian reached into his ruined jacket, remembered his phone was dead, then looked at Sienna.
“Do you have a phone?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“I need to call my lawyer.”
“Your engagement lawyer or your fish-barrel lawyer?”
“My real one.”