Slipping into the house, no one noticed me but the guard close to the front door. I gave him orders to keep close and lock the door behind me—and to not let my family out of the house, unless it was on fire.
“Keep them together,” I said. Water ran in one of the bathrooms, the boys were in their rooms, I could hear their voices, and Scarlett still had a hold of Marciano.
Out back, the pitch-black darkness welcomed me. The gun tucked into its holster, hooked to my belt, gave me a sense of security. So did the knife sheathed into its own holder at my ankle. All the lights couldn’t touch me here. It couldn’t touch the coppice either. Which gave me and whoever lurked an upper hand.
In my favor, though, the lurker might assume that I was inside, giving me the element of surprise.
One of the guards, Silvio, making his rounds came into view. Stepping in his line of sight, I pinned him against the house, keeping my knife to his throat. Once he realized that it was me, he nodded and I released him, pointing towards the darkened strip of trees.
He crept with me, and we searched the area, splitting up so we could cover more ground.
There. Something moved to my left.
A full-grown magnolia gave me cover, still shielding, even though its limbs had been stripped of leaves by the harsh winter.
Another crack.
Two.
One more.
The figure stood before me, cloaked in black, as formless as a tree’s shadow during the night. Without so much as a sound, I came behind, wrapping my hand around his mouth, the knife going right to his throat.
He screamed like a girl, kicking out, attempting to bite me. If this was a man, he was the squirmiest man I’d ever laid hands on. Even the words that were coming out sounded….
“Cerise?” I said, letting her go.
She’d been fighting so hard that she lost her balance and fell when I wasn’t holding on to her anymore. Leaves rustled, twigs popped, and she cursed in French. Silvio rushed up, yanking a flashlight from his pocket, shining it on her. In the glow, I could see that she’d gone forward, like she was sliding into home base.
Silvio gave her a hand up, which she wiped on her clothes, trying to get the dirt off. Her hands were close to chapped, freshly cut in a few places from the fall, but her cheeks were on fire from the blazing cold. Her wild hair seemed to have frozen dew on the strands.
“What the f—”
“Ma chat!” she snapped, still swiping leaves from her clothes. More words followed this, but it was all in fast-flowing French. She used to have a growl, but after Livio died, she lost it. She didn’t seem as fierce without it.
Silvio and I looked at each other—he had no French either.
“Macat!” she hissed at us. “He is missing.”
“Your cat?”
“Oui!”
That I understood.
Her movements were jerky, panicky, almost unstable. What was she doing out this late at night by herself? Where the fuck was her husband? Dimitri hadn’t wanted to leave her to go to New Orleans, but he did. She had insisted on staying behind to teach her classes at the dance studio. He had to be home—their house came before ours, and he’d been dropped off.
“Tell me where your husband is,” I said.
She shrugged. “I need to findma chat!”
After she lapsed into French only, Silvio and I began to search the woods with his flashlight, calling to the cat—chat—every so often.Meow,meow,meow, Silvio called out, not knowing the cat’s real name, but the feline was nowhere in sight.
She began to cry in earnest when she realized the cat was not going to come jumping out. She mumbled about him being cold, old, or one of the two; maybe even both. French penetrated the air in thick gusts of anguished smoke.
“Silvio will take you home,” I said. “Maybe one of the dogs will find your cat—I mean,chat.”
She cried even harder, hiding her face in her hands. “Les chiens vont le blesser!”
