Claimed by Wild Thorns

1. Small Mercies

Chapter one

Small Mercies

Idropped the lamp.

I did not expect anyone to notice. No one did, at least, not anyone I could see.

The lamp hit the gravel driveway with a sound that was somehow both loud and anticlimactic: a dull thunk instead of the dramatic shatter my anxiety had been preparing for.

I stared at it for a moment, lying there in the afternoon sun like an accusation, the hand-painted flowers on its ceramic base catching light they didn't deserve.

And then I laughed.

It was a ridiculous laugh—the result of running on four hours of sleep after a restless night of dreams that ended in nightmare.

A nightmare all too real. The kind that stems from uprooting your entire life, running from a madman, spending eighteen hours on buses and back roads hoping to find peace in a place you've never seen, planning to build a life you have absolutely no blueprint for.

Of course, I would fumble the first thing I attempted to carry.

When will the hits quit coming? I wondered.

The memory surfaced unbidden—Marcus’s hand on my wrist, that night, and the smell I could never explain. Not just his cologne. Something underneath it, acrid and sulfurous, like something burning that shouldn’t be.

The lamp didn't break. Small mercies. I'd bought it at a flea market outside Baton Rouge, drawn to the way the painted magnolias glowed in the afternoon light.

A woman with silver rings on every finger had wrapped it in newspaper and told me it was lucky.

This one wants to go home with you, chère, she'd said, and I'd paid her twenty dollars without haggling because something in her voice made me believe her.

I picked it up, checked for cracks. None.

Fourteen Thornwood Drive was better than the listing photos.

The main house rose before me, two stories of white clapboard with a wraparound porch that looked like it had hosted a hundred years of sweet tea and secrets.

The architecture was pure Southern Gothic: tall windows and doors with dark green hurricane shutters, columns that had probably seen the Civil War, a roofline that peaked and dipped in ways that suggested the house had grown organically over generations rather than being built all at once.

But it was the magnolia tree that stole my breath.

I'd seen it in the listing photos, of course.

That's what had drawn me to this place to begin with: scrolling through rental listings at the Greyhound station, desperate for anywhere that wasn't Atlanta.

The photo had shown a large tree in a yard.

What the photo hadn't captured was the presence of it.

The trunk was massive, easily four feet across, the bark gray and ancient and scarred with the kind of marks that came from surviving storms, droughts, centuries.

The branches spread wide enough to shade half the front yard, heavy with white blooms the size of dinner plates.

Their perfume hit me from twenty feet away: sweet, heavy and somehow familiar, though I'd never smelled anything quite like it.

Each flower was a sculpture, waxy white petals cupping golden centers, and there were dozens of them, maybe hundreds, scattered through leaves so dark green they were almost black.

Something hummed at the edges of my awareness when I looked at that tree. Not a sound, exactly. More like a vibration, a frequency I couldn't quite hear but could feel in my chest. Like standing too close to a speaker at a concert, only gentler. Almost welcoming.

That's the sleep deprivation talking, I told myself. Trees don't hum.

But when I’d reached out to steady myself on the trunk, the shadows beneath the lowest branches had shifted—not with the wind, but toward me, like they were leaning in to listen.

I photographed it anyway, four shots from different angles, the designer in me unable to resist documenting the way the afternoon light filtered through those leaves, turning everything beneath them golden-green and secret.

The photos wouldn't capture whatever I was feeling.

Photos never did. But I took them anyway, some instinct telling me I'd want to remember this moment. The moment I arrived.

The air here was different than anywhere I'd been.

Heavier, yes, thick with Louisiana humidity that pressed against my skin like a warm, damp hand.

But there was something else beneath it, an electricity, a charge.

Like the stillness before a summer storm, when the pressure drops and every living thing goes quiet, waiting for whatever comes next.

The Spanish moss draped from the surrounding oaks swayed in a breeze I couldn't feel. The shadows beneath the trees seemed darker than they should be at this hour, pooling in ways that didn't quite match the angle of the sun.

And somewhere in the distance, from deep in the property where the cultivated lawn gave way to wild preserve, Something howled—not a dog, not a coyote. The sound rose from darkness. Something fuller, deeper, more resonant. The kind of sound that vibrated in your bones.

I'd heard it last night too, on the final leg of my drive, windows down because the rental car's AC had given up somewhere around Hammond.

The sound had risen from the darkness beyond the headlights and followed me for miles.

I'd told myself it was the radio, or another car, or my imagination working overtime after too many hours on the road.

Don't be ridiculous, I told myself now, gripping the lamp a little tighter. There aren't wolves in Louisiana. Are there?

I made a mental note to google it later. Added it to the list of things I'd research when I had Wi-Fi and a full night's sleep and wasn't standing in a stranger's driveway having a minor breakdown.

I headed for the stairs.

The garage apartment was above the main structure, accessed by an exterior staircase that wrapped around the side of the building.

The listing had mentioned this, had shown photos of the door at the top, the little porch with its wrought-iron railing.

What the listing hadn't mentioned was how exposed the stairs would feel.

How visible I would be, climbing them with my arms full of boxes, my back to the yard.

I was halfway up when I felt it.

The sudden certainty of being watched.

My whole body knew before my mind caught up. The back of my neck prickled. My shoulders tensed. My hands, which had been steady enough a moment ago, trembled.

He found you, some panicked voice whispered. He's here, he followed you, he's—

I turned, heart hammering, already calculating escape routes.

There was a man in the backyard.

Not Marcus.

The relief hit me so hard my knees nearly buckled.

Not Marcus. Wrong build, wrong posture, wrong everything.

This man was taller, broader, built like someone who did physical labor for reasons beyond vanity.

His shoulders strained against a worn gray t-shirt, arms roped with muscle that looked functional rather than decorative.

Dark hair. Darker eyes that I could somehow feel even from thirty feet away, though that should have been impossible.

He was chopping wood.

The axe hung suspended above his head, frozen mid-swing, because he'd stopped what he was doing to stare at me. And he wasn't just looking. He was unabashedly staring. Taking stock of every detail with an intensity that should have felt threatening and somehow didn't.

The axe lowered slowly, deliberately. He stood there holding it with an ease that suggested he could do terrible things with it and was choosing not to. His posture held the coiled readiness of a predator: stillness that could detonate into motion without warning.

He was very deliberately not approaching.

Which was its own form of approach.

We stared at each other across the yard. The air between us felt strange, charged with that same electricity I'd noticed earlier. Heat unfurled in my chest—not fear. Not quite anything I could name. Recognition, maybe, though that made no sense. I'd never seen this man before in my life.

His eyes caught the light, and for just a moment, just a fraction of a second, they seemed to flash gold.

Then he blinked, and they were dark again, and I was clearly losing my mind from exhaustion.

The landlord, I thought, filing him away with deliberate effort. Small-town curiosity. Possibly dangerous. Definitely distracting. I turned and climbed, moving at a normal pace even as some animal part of me wanted to flee.

My hands were steadier than they should have been.

That bothered me almost more than the staring.

After Marcus, after everything, my hands should have been shaking.

A strange man watching me from a backyard with an axe should have sent me into a full panic spiral.

Instead, I felt... calm. Settled. Like whatever was happening here was supposed to happen.

Which was insane. I was insane. Sleep deprivation was making me insane.

The apartment was exactly what I needed.

One main room with good bones: hardwood floors worn smooth by decades of footsteps, crown molding that someone had painted white over what was probably beautiful original wood, windows on three walls that let in so much light the space practically glowed.

A small kitchen with vintage appliances that might actually work.

A claw-foot tub in the bathroom that I was already planning to fill with hot water and epsom salts and never leave.

The kind of space that felt like possibility.

I set the lamp on the kitchen counter and looked around.

The listing had said "furnished," which apparently meant a bed frame, a mattress that looked newer than the building, and a single wooden chair by the window that had the worn patina of something someone had sat in for years.

Good enough. I'd sleep on the floor if I had to.

I'd slept in worse places during the last six months.