Counterpoint (The Guardians #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

Luca

The storm had been building since noon. The faint smell of river mud meant rain would begin within the hour.

I could read it in the house before I could see it in the sky.

The courtyard fountain ran higher than usual, as the iron balcony rails ticked, absorbing the day’s last heat.

I had maybe forty minutes before I needed to move the lemon trees’ terracotta pots onto the higher brick along the courtyard wall.

Seven years in this house had taught me its patterns.

I knew which drains clogged first when the gutters overflowed and which windows swelled shut when the air hung heavy with humidity.

I understood how the parlor’s acoustics changed when the French doors were open and the barometric pressure dropped.

A thousand-piece puzzle of a Venetian harbor covered a small card table near the salon window. It was Dominic’s latest attempt to convince me patience had its virtues.

He stood at the Steinway.

He wasn’t playing. He was studying. A full orchestration of “When the Saints Go Marching In” stood open on the rack. He had a pencil in hand, one finger resting lightly on the page as though he could feel the structure through the paper itself.

His silver hair swept back from his lined face. Behind him, a linen jacket hung on the chair. A silk pocket square remained in the breast pocket.

Dominic made one small mark on the score. Erased half of it and made it again, smaller.

I watched from the doorway without announcing myself.

He was seventy-two years old, and he moved through rooms with authority. After seven years, I still carefully oriented myself slightly in his presence.

It was a Sunday evening in mid-August, with the concert twelve days away. Dominic lifted both hands slightly, as though the orchestra were already present.

I walked to the courtyard to move the lemon trees. I had just set the second pot down on the bricks when the shot came.

One crack, compressed and almost polite, like a hard book dropped flat on a table. Then the high, bright sound of broken glass scattering across the marble tile. I ran through the foyer back to the salon.

Dominic remained where I’d left him. He hadn’t moved. He turned toward a tall window facing St. Charles Avenue, hands still slightly raised, and looked at the upper pane, or what remained of it. The glass shards on the marble reflected the low beams of light from the gas lanterns outside.

I crossed the room and put my hand flat on his chest without thinking. My eyes said he was fine, but my hands needed confirmation.

He was whole.

“I’m fine.” He moved my hand. “Luca.”

“I know.” I stepped back. “Don’t move.”

I opened the front door. The gate remained latched. I scanned the balcony, shadowed but empty. St. Charles Avenue continued to run with headlights slightly blurred by the start of the storm.

I looked up at the bullet hole. It was high, embedded in the plaster well above where Dominic’s head would have been. Eight inches lower and he would have been dead.

For a moment I pictured Dominic the way I had seen so many men as a child—lying still, eyes closed, waiting for the lid to close on the casket in my mother’s funeral home.

I shivered and forced the thought away.

The rain picked up, and the streetcar bell sounded once on the avenue, muffled by the gathering wind.

No second shot.

I stood in the broken glass and understood that the shot was a message. Whoever had sent it had the skill and position to place the bullet somewhere else entirely, but chose not to. They wanted us to know how carefully they measured the placement.

Dominic watched me work through it, his hands down at his sides. He moved to the wall, raised one arm, and touched the hole in the plaster with his fingers.

“The angle,” he said.

“Angled up. Maybe crouching at ground level.”

He nodded once and didn’t ask how I knew. He understood some people read rooms how he read scores.

The parlor smelled of gunpowder beneath the usual citrus and old wood. It was a scent that had no business in the room.

I reached out for the piano to steady myself and stopped. There, on the piano bench, was a folded sheet of music, centered precisely.

It had not been there before the shot. I would have noticed it.

That meant someone had been inside when the shot was fired.

I picked the sheet up with two fingers, already understanding that the careful placement meant something delivered, intended to be read. It was cream-colored, heavy stock. They’d written the notes in a precise, unhurried hand.

“When the Saints Go Marching In.”

I knew it before I finished reading the first measure. You couldn’t grow up in New Orleans and not carry “Saints” somewhere in your chest, resting close to your heartbeat. This arrangement was off. The melody was intact, but transposed to a minor key.

I had grown up in the back offices of my mother’s funeral home in the Tremé, doing homework at a folding table while she processed paperwork for families who had come apart at the seams. “Saints” was structural for me.

It began with loss and moved, measure by measure, toward something that wasn’t exactly joy but was a refusal of despair.

When the key resolves and the brass section takes over, everyone who has buried someone feels the back of their throat tighten.

In a minor key, it would never resolve.

It would remain in the dark, circling.

In the bottom right corner, the anniversary date was circled in red. August 29, 2026. The twentieth anniversary of the Jackson Square moment, a concert Dominic had been designing for eighteen months. Circled carefully. Not slashed or underlined. Twelve days away.

“Luca.” Dominic’s voice was quiet and level.

I turned, crossed to him, and held out the sheet.

He took it. Studied it in silence while I listened to sheets of rain spattering the marble as they splashed through the broken windowpane.

He didn’t speak. He looked once more at the bullet hole, then back at the page. The pencil was still in his left hand. He set it on the piano lid with a quiet, definitive click and straightened.

“Call Celeste,” he said.

Not should we, or perhaps we ought to. He’d already arrived at the necessary action.

No performance of alarm. Dominic St. Clair had conducted through the AIDS plague years and through the aftermath of Katrina.

Whatever fear lived in him had learned long ago to dress well and take a seat in the back.

I already had my phone out.

“The police—“ I started.

“Celeste. The police will manage the narrative. Celeste will solve the problem.”

He was right, and we both knew it, so I found her number and handed him the phone. I watched him carry it to the far end of the parlor, away from the rain coming through the broken glass.

I swept shards while he talked. My hands needed something to do, and the floor needed clearing. Dominic’s voice on the phone reached me, low and stripped of everything nonessential.

“Saints in minor.” A pause. “The anniversary circled.” Shorter pause. “Before the shot, yes.”

I heard one clear comment from Celeste through the phone. “I’ll make the call.”

Dominic returned my phone without ceremony. He stood near the Steinway. Not frightened. Interrupted.

“She knows someone,” I said. Celeste Boudreaux Hargrove had navigated New Orleans’ power structures for fifty years; she didn’t keep contacts so much as tend them. If Dominic needed help, Celeste would know whom to hire.

“She does.” He picked up the minor-key “Saints” from the piano lid and looked at it once more. His face gave nothing away, but his hands held the page with care.

He set it back down.

“Don’t touch the glass near the door,” he said. “Leave the bullet. Whoever comes will want to see it in place.”

“Understood.”

He nodded once and moved toward the kitchen—for the Armagnac. It lived in a bottle stored in a cabinet next to the refrigerator. This evening required it.

“Luca.”

“Yes.”

“Lock the courtyard gate.”

In seven years, I’d never once heard him say those words. The courtyard was at the rear of the house. The gate stayed latched but was never locked. That was a key principle of the house.

“Yes,” I said. “I will.”

I locked the gate and stood in the courtyard while the rain came down.

My father sold architectural salvage: iron balcony rails, old cypress doors, and load-bearing beams pulled from buildings scheduled for demolition. He believed structures held what they’d witnessed. Wood absorbed sound. Iron remembered the hands that had shaped it.

Someone had entered and moved through the house before the shot. They’d placed that sheet on the bench with surgical composure, walked back out, and waited.

I thought about the handwriting. Decades of practice in it. The arrangement itself was technically accomplished; the transposition not vandalism but recomposition. It was someone who understood “Saints” from inside the music.

Dominic was in the kitchen with a glass of Armagnac in his hand. “This isn’t about the concert,” I said.

He turned toward me. In that moment, he was not my employer or the man whose dry commentary had made me laugh at some deeply inappropriate junctures over the past seven years. He was simply a man who was a victim of a home invasion.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

He raised the glass and drank slowly.

“It’s about me. Whoever this is,” he said, almost to himself, “they’ve been living with it for a long time.”

“Yes.”

“Long enough to have made something out of it. We’d better understand what they’ve made before they finish it.”

We occupied the kitchen for a while, with Dominic at the counter with the Armagnac and me at the stove with a teakettle. He stared into the middle distance above the copper pots. “I want Celeste’s contact information for whoever she’s sending, and I want it by morning.”

“Already on the list,” I said.

He looked over. “What else is on the list?”

“Security review of all possible entry points. A call to the Orpheum’s venue manager before we get deeper into production week.” I poured the water for my tea. “And I need to move the lemon trees back once the rain stops.”

Dominic offered a dry half-smile. “The lemon trees.”

“They were already stressed from the heat.”

The house was ready to absorb another chapter in its history. The bullet hole was part of it now, and the minor-key “Saints” was part of it too. I didn’t like either fact, but I understood them.

Around ten, Dominic said goodnight and went upstairs. He closed every day regardless of its contents. It was how he was still standing at seventy-two.

I stayed in the kitchen a while longer.

There were two unread texts from a man I’d been seeing occasionally, a visiting cellist, uncomplicated and warm, the kind who liked a slow drink after rehearsal and knew how to kiss a man without asking permission for it first. He was not the kind of man you called when a bullet had come through a window.

I had always liked men who arrived in a room already settled in themselves.

Men who knew how to stand close without crowding and could rest a hand at the small of my back and mean it.

I had grown up around men like that: big voices, warm hands, and the Creole ease that made a room feel alive the moment they stepped into it.

For most of my life, that had been enough. Lately, I found myself wanting something steadier than charm alone.

I thought about texting my cousin, Camille. She owned a café in the Bywater and had a talent for making things feel roughly proportionate. But it was late, and the rain would have emptied the streets, and I didn’t have the shape of the thing yet clearly enough to hand it to someone else.

After securing plastic over the broken pane, it was time for bed. I turned off the kitchen lights and went back through the parlor.

The gas lanterns were burning low. The felt cloth covered the Steinway.

Following Dominic’s directions, the glass remained strewn across the floor.

I’d checked again that the front door was locked, and the bullet hole was a shadow in the plaster above the podium mark, barely visible in the low light.

I went upstairs and did not sleep well. I spent a long time in the dark replaying the moments before the shot, working backward through the evening, looking for what I’d stood beside and missed.