I had only one other jacket, a heavier coat meant for snow, and I threw it on before leaving to scour the streets.
My hands balled into fists, nails cutting into palms. Nowhere. He seemed to be nowhere. Except the insistent humming that alerted me to his nearness droned on, unsettling in its intensity. He was closer to me than my own skin but couldn’t be found.
Ironic as it was, the only comfort to be found existed in the wayward feeling. In it, I could judge the level of uncertainty. Though something felt off, the panic was not at peril level.
Still, I paced the apartment, feeling like a loose string lost to the wind. The handle jingled, the door creaked, and my body froze, anticipation hardening my eyes to stone.
Emilia. She had a bouquet of pretty flowers in her hands. Living with a florist had its perks. The apartment was always filled with seasonal flora.
I sighed, the release of air not releasing an effing thing.
She smiled. “Expecting someone else?” She pushed her glasses up, wiggling her eyebrows. “Do not worry. He will be back.”
“Did you see him?”
Something in my voice, and perhaps the look on my face, gave her pause. She shoved her glasses up again, though they were high on her nose. Placing the flowers on the table beside the sofa, she shook her head.
“No. I just assumed—”
The door came open, and the sound of Emilia’s gasp found me before my mind could make sense of what my eyes saw.
He put his hands up. “Don’t panic.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!Don’t panic!” My heart lodged in my throat, my stomach hid in the darkest recesses, and my muscles trembled with fear and the refrain of a sob. Anger, too, surged through my veins, adding to the melee of emotions fighting for dominance. “Don’t panic” seemed like a perfectly good waste of words in light of his appearance. “You must need a mirror. Have you seen your reflection in the last, oh, couple of hours?”
His left eye was swollen shut, stitches connected the tissue above his right eyebrow. His mouth was busted, crusted with dried blood, and crimson patches won over the color of his white shirt. Minced meat came to mind. I pressed a hand to my stomach to keep it from lurching and then pummeling again.
“Yeah,” he said, shrugging out of the jacket, throwing it on the floor. “Don’t put that on. Not until we have it cleaned. It’s stained with blood.”
“Sure! I’ll get right on that!”Why were we talking about this like it was an everyday thing?Such an ordinary thing to discuss—oh, we need to bring the jacket to the dry cleaners, honey—during a moment so heavy that I felt as though I might faint. How could he be so blasé about this?
“Not mine.” He glanced at it. “Well, not all of it.”
“Brando.” My voice betrayed the false bravado I had been employing. My knees trembled; they were about to give out. “What happened?”
“I’m all right, baby,” he said, his cracked eye firm on mine. A hint of brown peeked through the immense swelling.
Nodding, I wiped my nose with the sleeve of my sweater. “Nothing about you looks all right.”
“I am.”
“But…what happened?” Emilia sounded impatient.
I had forgotten that she was in the room. Brando must have too. He blinked at her, actually winked, before he shrugged.
“We were attacked.”
“We?”
The look on his face clearly showed that he was assessing. I knew every face he could pull, and he was deliberating, trying to gauge how much information to share.
“Emory Nemours. He came to talk to you this morning. I figured it out, Scarlett. I know who he is. Or who he belongs to. I had planned on bringing coffee and breakfast back. He came along with me so we could talk more. On the way, we were attacked. In one of the alleys.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What were you doing in an alley?”
He knew better than to be caught in an unfamiliar alleyway. Not that he knew France, or where or where not to be, but he knew New Orleans, and in true French style, they had them there too. For a man who planned his every step, it was a reckless thing to do.
“It didn’t start there,” he said, reading my face. “It moved there as we fought. Emory caught the worst of it.”
