MY RUIN: In Love With My Step-Uncle-Chapter 57 - Fifty-Seven: The Paper Trail

//CLARA//

Beatrice was already in the carriage when I climbed in, her silk skirts taking up more than their fair share of the bench. She looked like a girl about to go to a ball, not a soot-stained warehouse in a neighborhood where polite society usually only went to collect rent.

"Do you think he’ll be wearing that leather apron again, Miss Thorne?" she whispered, her cheeks a dusty rose. "The one with the ink stains? It’s so... industrious."

"Industrious," I repeated, my mind miles away. "Sure, Miss Sterling. It’s this century’s version of a grey hoodie. Very hot."

"A what?"

"Nothing. Just... focus on the sketches, okay? If we’re going to build a factory, we need to look like we know what a factory is."

The carriage lurched as we hit the cobblestones of lower Manhattan. The smell hit me first—coal smoke, horse manure, and the salt-spray of the harbor. It was loud, filthy, and honest. I missed the Guggenheim estate’s lavender-scented lies for exactly three seconds before the adrenaline kicked in.

We pulled up to Oliver’s workshop, and the man himself was already at the curb. He looked like he’d been dragged through a printing press backwards. Hair wild, sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms that were, admittedly, very industrious, and a smudge of black ink across his cheekbone that Beatrice looked ready to lick off.

"Miss Sterling!" Oliver’s face lit up. He started to reach for her hand, then snatched his back, suddenly aware of the grease under his nails. "I did not expect—that is, Eleanor said you might come, but I was not certain—"

Beatrice laughed, the sound bright against the grey city street. "I would not miss it, Oliver."

His ears went red. "Right. This way. I’ve just cleared the back table for the schematics."

I followed them in, my eyes already scanning the perimeter. The warehouse was a cathedral of gears.

The Linotype stood in the center like an iron god, surrounded by half-finished parts and reams of paper. I let Oliver walk Beatrice through the newly refined casting mechanism, watching as her industrious crush deepened with every technical explanation he gave.

"You are paying attention," he said.

She tilted her head. "I am allowed to be interested."

He blinked at her. Then he laughed, a little breathless, and launched back into his explanation.

The sketches were better than I’d hoped. Oliver had drawn up plans for a building three times the size of this warehouse. Assembly lines, storage, shipping docks. It was a footprint for an empire. I studied the figures he’d scrawled in the margins—the cost of raw materials, the labor, the overhead.

It was a lot of money. But the numbers didn’t lie.

"We have to be careful with the finances," I said, running my finger down the column. "Bankruptcies in this town are... well, they’re messy. Like Thurston Holdings."

I let the name flow casually, dropping it into conversation like a pebble into still water. For anyone listening, it was nothing—a reference, a passing thought, the kind of thing anyone might say when talking about business failures. But I was hoping my instincts were right.

Oliver set down his pencil.

"Thurston was shipping," he said. "Different industry entirely."

I kept my face neutral, but something in my chest tightened. He knew the name. He did not ask who they were or why I was bringing them up.

"Still," I said, flipping a page. "What happened there? I heard the bankruptcy came out of nowhere."

I was gambling that he knew more than I did, and that he would tell me without realizing why I was asking.

He leaned against the workbench, his brow furrowed.

"They were overextended. But the bankruptcy came faster than anyone expected. One week they were fine, the next they were finished. A debt was called in, and the banks turned on them overnight. In shipping, if you lose your credit, you lose your fleet."

"Who called the debt?" I asked. I tried to sound curious, like a bored socialite interested in gossip, but my heart was doing a frantic rhythm against my ribs.

"No one ever said for sure." Oliver shrugged, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. "People assumed it was one of the big houses. Vanderbilt, maybe. Or...Guggenheim."

The last name was barely a breath, a secret whispered in a church. He looked at me then, his eyes dark with a question he was too polite to ask: Do you know whose blood is on the gold in your pockets, Eleanor?

"Just rumors," he said, clearing his throat and looking back at the gears. "Corporate gossip. Nothing more."

"And the family?" I pressed, the curiosity now feeling like a cold stone in my stomach. "What happened to the Thurstons?"

"Mr. Thurston killed himself," Oliver said flatly. "His son, Silas Thurston, disappeared. Some say he went West."

Jackpot. I had a name.

Silas Thurston.

I let it echo in my head. It wasn’t just a ledger entry anymore. It was a person. A son with a motive and a very long memory.

"Mr. Thurston," Beatrice said suddenly.

She had been quiet, flipping through a stack of old ledgers by the window, but she turned now, her face pale in the dusty sunlight. "I haven’t heard that name in years."

She crossed back to the table, her silk dress looking absurdly out of place next to a lathe. She sat on a stool, propping her chin in her hands, her eyes unfocused.

"I was fifteen," she whispered. "I was supposed to be in bed, but I passed my father’s study and heard voices. A man was in there, begging. I remember my father saying, ’I apologize, Mr. Thurston, but I cannot help you. The letter was clear.’"

"The letter?" I asked, my voice barely a breath.

Beatrice shook her head. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

"I never saw it. But days later, my father told my mother that Mr. Thurston was dangerous. That he’d gotten involved with people who would swallow him whole. He looked... frightened. My father is not a man who frightens easily."

She looked up at me, her brown eyes wide and searching.

"I think the letter was a warning. A hands-off order from someone higher up the food chain. My mother scolded him for speaking of such things at the dinner table. I did not think about it again. Not until now."

The silence that followed was heavy. I could hear the distant clatter of carts on the street, the creak of the warehouse walls settling. Oliver picked up his pencil and turned back to his sketches. Beatrice reached for another drawing, her attention already drifting elsewhere.

The questions were piling up in my head like a car wreck.

Did Casimir send that letter? Did he systematically cut off a man’s air supply until he had no choice but to pull the trigger?

I looked at the Linotype. Casimir funded it. He funded me a hundred thousand dollars without so much as a blink.

"Eleanor?" Oliver’s voice broke through the fog. "You’ve gone pale. Is the heat too much?"

"I’m fine," I lied, closing the ledger with a snap that sounded like a gunshot. "Just a bit of a headache. I think we should head back, Miss Sterling. The sun is going down."

I looked back at the warehouse one last time. Casimir was keeping me in the dark, acting like a shield against a ghost he’d helped bury.

But the more I heard, the more I realized I wasn’t just standing in his shadow—I was standing in his wake.

How deep does this shit actually run? How does a simple broken axle turn into a scavenger hunt for a dead man’s secrets?

It’s like pulling a loose thread on a vintage sweater and watching the entire Guggenheim empire start to unravel at my feet.