Chapter 5 - The Midnight Visitor
The moon was a sliver of silver bone hanging over the black cypress swamp behind the estate. Inside the main house, the lights were doused one by one until only the amber glow of the security desk lamps remained.
Vincent didn't go to bed. He sat in his study, the wool blanket draped over his lap, staring out the window at the distant outline of the stables. His side throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache, but he welcomed the pain. It kept him sharp. It kept him awake.
At 2:14 a.m., the floorboards in the corridor outside creaked.
It wasn't the heavy, purposeful stride of Marcus Ellery or the soft, efficient shuffle of Camille Budro. It was light, tentative—the cautious footsteps of someone trying very hard not to wake the dead.
Vincent didn't reach for the heavy iron-framed revolver in his desk drawer. Instead, he simply rested his right hand on the arm of his chair and waited.
The door handle turned. Slowly. Almost soundlessly.
The heavy oak panel drifted inward an inch, then two. A small figure slipped through the gap, bathed in the pale moonlight spilling from the hallway window.
It wasn't an assassin.
Addy stood in the center of the office, wearing her yellow cotton pajamas with little white ducks waddling across the fabric. She wasn't carrying her alligator this time. Instead, she clutched a small, battered silver pocket watch by its chain—an heirloom Vincent had left sitting carelessly on the library table two days ago.
She walked across the room, her bare feet making almost no sound on the rug, and stopped right beside his chair.
Vincent looked down at her, his expression softening just enough to reveal the tired man beneath the boss. "What are you doing out of bed, Addy?"
She didn't answer right away. She held out the silver pocket watch, letting it dangle between them like a pendulum.
"You dropped this," she whispered, her voice barely louder than the hum of the refrigerator downstairs. "In the library. Next to the big books."
Vincent reached down, took the cold metal of the watch from her small fingers, and placed it quietly in his coat pocket. "Thank you, Addy. That was very honest of you."
"Mama is sleeping," she said, looking up at him with those unblinking dark eyes. "And the men outside are smoking by the gate. I saw their red lights in the dark."
"Cigarettes," Vincent said. "Guards get cold at night."
"They shouldn't smoke," Addy stated flatly. "It makes people cough. My papa coughed before he went away."
Vincent froze. In the twelve years he had run the family, nobody had ever mentioned Addy’s father to him. Camille had arrived six years ago with a baby, a quiet demeanor, and a stack of forged identity papers that Vincent had chosen to ignore because her work was immaculate. He had assumed the father was some deadbeat dockworker or a gambler who had vanished into the New Orleans night.
"What did your papa look like, Addy?" Vincent asked, his voice dropping to a low, careful murmur.
Addy stared at the spot on the floorboards where the blood had been scrubbed away.
"He looked like the man in the dark jacket," she said simply. "The one who ran past the magnolia blossoms."
May you like
Vincent’s blood ran cold in his veins, freezing the very pain in his ribs.
Before he could ask another question, a sharp, metallic clink echoed from the courtyard below—not a guard’s cigarette lighter, but the distinct, unmistakable sound of a heavy iron gate latch being lifted from the outside.
