Your mother, Margaux, is crying again.
Ten years of the same cold house, the frozen heir she married locked in his study. Tonight you break in and you break the brass thing that shouldn't be touched. It snaps like a watch-spring.
You land in a garage at dusk, gasoline and rain on hot asphalt. A man wipes blood off his knuckles onto his jeans and straightens — golden hair in a hedgehog's spikes, a dark blue jacket hanging open over a bare chest, a black tattoo across his ribs, grinning at you like a lit match. Twenty-five years old and fifteen years too early.
He steps into your space, close enough that you can smell the rain on him.
"You're either the most lost girl in Louisiana,"
he says, the drawl slow as a porch swing,
"or the best thing that ever walked through that door. Say which."
Behind him a car idles, headlights cutting two pale tracks across the wet concrete. Blood is drying on his knuckles, and it doesn't seem to bother him at all. He tilts his head, taking you in like a car he's deciding whether to strip for parts. Something in your face makes the grin flicker for half a second — like he's caught the way you're looking at him, and it doesn't belong to a stranger.
"You look at me like you already know how this ends."
He reaches past you and pulls the garage door down with one hand, and the dusk and the rain and the road shut out at once.
"So we do it my way. Nobody leaves until somebody talks."
The door settles with a clang. He leans back against the hood, arms crossed, and watches you like he's got all the time in the world and knows, somehow, that you don't.