The doorbell interrupts, and Broussard checks his feed on his phone and sighs. “Excuse me. My neighbor has more packages delivered than she knows what to do with. They’re always leaving them here instead.”
“Sure thing,” I say, with adon’t worry about itgesture.
As he heads to the front door, my thoughts are already shifting to how I’m going to convince O’Connor to invite my father. He was receptive to my half-assed seduction this morning to distract him from what I was really doing this afternoon. Maybe it could work again?
The doorbell goes off again.
Kissing him hadn’t meant anything. The only thing I’d felt had been disgust.
The lie sits in my thoughts for a second, just long enough for me to feel how disingenuous it seems—before I hear the gunshots.
I’m on my feet and running toward the sound before I think twice. Over the sound of my flats slapping against the floor, there’s the glaring lack of any other noises—no screams, no moans, nothing.Please be okay. Please be okay. Please be okay.I can’t do this again.
The front door is open, and Mr. Broussard’s body is sprawled half in, half out of the threshold. A pool of blood spreads underneath him. Before I fall to my knees beside him, I fist a doily from one of the side tables and press it into the blood seeping from his shoulder.
Retrieving my phone with my free hand, I somehow manage to call for an ambulance, whispering reassurances to Mr. Broussard.
My brain goes fuzzy and white for a minute, or maybe longer than a minute. Nearby, an older couple spills out of an identical cottage. Someone is screaming, shouting, but all I can take in is the blood. Instead of Mr. Broussard’s body, I see my mother’s. Instead of the sidewalk, I see the grand staircase of our former home, where I found her the night she died.
By the time the nightmare releases me from its grip, bystanders hover, phones pressed to their ears or cameras poised to photograph the morbid tableau. I stare numbly at nothing for so long that an ambulance and several police cars materialize seemingly out of nowhere, right in front of me.
The paramedics take Mr. Broussard, and I push to my feet, still clutching the bloody doily, as I experience everything through a layer of cotton. It’s not until someone shakes me, hard, that I focus on the person in front of me.
My brows furrow when I recognize Reggie, Yasmine’s brother. Dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, he has his badge and gun strapped to his waist.
Nick Donovan, captain of the New Orleans Police Department Homicide Unit, strides toward us.What is he doing here?I think dully. Did Reggie hear my name and call in the cavalry? That’s absolutely something he would do. They shuffle me to a sedan with darkened windows, and Reggie shoves me inside before climbing in after me.
“Catriona!” Reggie says, one hand cupping my cheek. “Are you hurt? What happened? C’mon, sweetheart, you’ve got to talk to me. Donovan,” he shouts through a crack in the window. “Get a medic here for her. I think she’s in shock. Can you hear me, Ri? C’mon, girl, say something.”
Time telescopes around me. I’m here, and I’m not here. Someone is begging to go to the hospital. To follow the ambulance and Mr. Broussard, and once Nick and Reggie finally agree, I realize that the person begging was me.
“What were you doing here, Ri?” Reggie demands, his deep baritone comforting in its familiarity. “Can you tell me anything about what was going on? Give me a clue here. Did you see anything that happened? When I heard your name at the station, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I try to remember the cover story I’d come up with at the first meeting with Mr. Broussard, but the truth spills out instead. “He’s a private investigator. He’s been helping me look into my mother’s death. We were having some tea when the doorbell rang. He thought it was from”—I swallow hard, then push the panic from my mind—“a deliv-delivery. The next thing I heard was the gunshots. I found him in the doorway. I don’t know anything else, I swear.”
He curses fiercely. “Jesus Christ. You got so fucking lucky. They could have hurt you, too.” There’s a pause before he continues, “I can’t believe you didn’t come to me. I would have helped you. Does Yas know about this?”
I shake my head. “Not everything. But she knows I’m looking into it. I couldn’t drag you into it, too. It was a long shot, anyway. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t, in retrospect. I mean, look what happened to Mr. Broussard?” My voice cracks by the end. “I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you or Yasmine.”
“Goddammit, Ri. I care about you. I don’t give a fuck about the department—sorry, Cap?—”
Nick waves him away.
“I would have helped you. Yasmine mentioned you were torn up over your mom, but she never said you thought someone killed her. Christ, Catriona.” He scrubs a hand over his close-cropped hair. “You’re practically walking into bullets for fuck’s sake. Yasmine is going to kill me, bring me back to life, and then kill me again when she finds out what happened.”
“It’s okay, Reg. I’m fine. I promise. I’m just worried about Mr. Broussard. This is all my fault. Are we close to the hospital?”
“We’re almost there,” Nick says with a no-nonsense voice. “Did you get a look at the person who rang the doorbell?”
I catch Nick’s gaze in the rearview mirror and try to school my expression despite the panic. As a former behavioral analyst with the FBI, he’s the kind of man who I swear can sometimes read what you’re thinking just by looking at your face, as evidenced by his direct, penetrating stare. They used to call him the human lie detector because until the year he left the FBI, he was never wrong.
And the one time he was, it resulted in his leaving the FBI altogether.
“I was in his office. I didn’t see anything.”
I let out a breath when we pull into the hospital parking lot, and he has to look away. Reggie bustles me up to the floor where they brought Mr. Broussard, and I let him tuck me into a waiting room while they attempt surgery to repair the damage. Because I’m not family, I’m not privy to any more information than that. Reggie tries to get me to leave, but I won’t budge, and he won’t tell me anything more than they’re still processing the scene.
“I knew something was going on when you wouldn’t answer my text messages.”
