Chapter 5
REMY
Somewhere over the Atlantic, Isabella falls asleep against the window.
Good. She needs it after what she's been through. I watch her reflection in the dark glass, the way exhaustion finally won over adrenaline. Her breathing evens out, shoulders relaxing for the first time since Prague.
Sleep should come for me too. My ribs ache, burns pull tight under my collar, and every breath reminds me that extracting her from that warehouse cost more than I'd like to admit.
But sleep means dropping my guard, and old habits don't break easy.
The cabin lights dim for the overnight flight. Around us, passengers settle in with neck pillows and blankets. The businessman three rows up pulls down his shade. A flight attendant moves through the cabin with practiced quiet, checking on sleeping passengers.
I can't help tracking them all. Threat assessment never really turns off, even at thirty thousand feet surrounded by civilians who just want to get home.
Home.
Been too long since I walked those streets.
Years since I stood in St. Louis Cemetery No.
1 watching them lower Papa into the family tomb while Luc and Margot stood across from me, grief and anger carving their faces into strangers.
Years since I walked away from the Garden District mansion that carried our mother's scent in every room.
I'd been in Yemen when the call came about Maman. Hostage extraction gone sideways, my team pinned down in a compound that was supposed to be abandoned. By the time we fought our way out and I could get to a secure line, she was already gone. Heart attack, sudden, nothing anyone could have done.
Papa followed weeks later. They said it was a stroke, but I know better. He died of a broken heart, unable to exist in a world without Céleste Beaumont Pascal.
I made it back for his funeral. Walked into that cemetery, watched them place him beside her, and felt my siblings' accusation like physical blows even though neither of them said a word. I missed hers entirely, barely made it home for his, and they'll never let me forget it.
The flight attendant stops at our row. "Can I get you anything, sir?"
"No, thank you."
She moves on. Isabella shifts slightly, her head tilting toward me before she settles again. Even in sleep, she gravitates toward protection.
Dangerous, that instinct. Especially with someone like me.
I pull out my phone, check the encrypted messages from Fitz. Clean passports cleared customs without flags. The SUV is waiting in Baton Rouge long-term parking, keys in a magnetic box under the rear driver's side wheel well.
Once we land, we're ghosts until we reach the Garden District unless Luc shoots me on sight, then I'll be a ghost for real... little brother hits what he aims at.
My brother answered when I called from Vienna, voice flat and cold as January rain. Had I not been using a burner phone he might not have bothered. I told him I was coming home, that I needed to use the house, that I had someone with me who needed protection.
There was a long silence on the other end before he said, "Fine. Margot will want to see you."
That was it. No questions about why now, no demands for explanation. Just acknowledgment that I'd be sleeping under our parents' roof for the first time in a very long time.
I put the phone away and close my eyes. Not sleeping, just resting them while my mind maps variables and calculates risks.
Bringing Isabella into my family's orbit exposes them to danger they don't deserve.
Luc did his time in Delta Force, then made his fortune in offshore oil like Papa before coming back to New Orleans to begin an import/export business which covers for some less than legal, but highly lucrative work, including a contract to provide security for Dominion, a high-end private club in the Warehouse District.
Margot ran intelligence and surveillance for several private black ops groups before the family restaurant became her full focus. They can handle themselves.
But they chose different lives, built something legitimate, and now I'm dragging them back into the kind of fight they walked away from. Still, staying in Europe means staying in Lazarev's kill box.
At least in New Orleans, I know the territory. Margot and Luc will know which cops can be trusted, which politicians are on the take, which streets belong to which crews. The city's in my blood the way saltwater and gunpowder never quite wash out.
And maybe, if I'm honest with myself, part of me needs to face what I left behind.
The flight drags on. We land at JFK in early morning gray, move through the terminal like the honeymooning Fontaines we're supposed to be. Isabella handles it with the same composed intelligence she applies to everything else, playing her role without needing direction.
Houston comes next. Longer layover, enough time to eat something that isn't airplane food and watch the crowds for threats that don't materialize. By the time we board the final leg to Baton Rouge, fatigue has worn through my reserves, but I can't afford to show it.
Isabella watches me across the tray table in the airport restaurant, concern flickering in those dark eyes. "You need to rest when we get there."
"I will."
"Liar."
A smile tugs at my mouth. "Probably."
"Definitely." She takes a sip of her coffee, studying me over the rim. "How bad is it going to be? With your family."
"Bad enough."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got right now." I lean back, ignoring the pull in my ribs. "Luc's angry. Margot's furious. And they have every right to be."
"Because you weren't there when your parents died."
Not a question. She's already pieced it together from context, from the phone call she overheard, from the tension that's been building in me since we decided on New Orleans.
"Because I chose the mission over family when they needed me most. Because I missed Maman's last days saving strangers in a country most people can't find on a map. Because Papa died asking for me, and I was twelve time zones away debriefing in a facility that doesn't officially exist."
Her hand covers mine on the table, warm and steady. The contact grounds me, pulls me back before guilt can spiral into something worse.
"I'm sorry," she says quietly.
"Don't be. I made my choices." I turn my palm up, thread my fingers through hers. "Now I get to live with them."
We board the Baton Rouge flight without further discussion. This time I take the window seat, giving Isabella the aisle so she can stretch her legs. The plane is half empty, regional commuters and business travelers who barely glance our way.
Less than an hour later, we're on the ground in Louisiana.
The heat hits like walking into a wall. September in Baton Rouge means ninety degrees and humidity you could swim through. Isabella stumbles slightly coming down the stairs onto the tarmac, and I steady her with a hand at her elbow.
"Mon Dieu," she breathes, switching to French without seeming to realize it. "How do people live in this?"
"You get used to it." I guide her toward the terminal, scan the area out of habit. "Give it a day or two."
The lot is small, regional, exactly the kind of place where nobody pays attention to travelers passing through. I find the SUV right where Fitz said it would be, a dark blue Tahoe that's seen better years but runs smooth when I start it up.
Isabella climbs in, already pulling her hair back against the heat. I crank the AC, give it a minute to cool down, then pull out of the lot onto I-10 headed east.
New Orleans is an hour away. Time to prepare for walking back into a life I left behind, into a family that has every reason to hate me, into a house that won't smell like Maman's magnolias and Papa's cigars anymore.
The drive passes in relative silence. Isabella watches the landscape change from industrial Baton Rouge to wetlands and bayous, cypress trees draped in Spanish moss, water stretching dark and still on both sides of the elevated highway.
Beautiful in a haunted way, ancient and patient and utterly foreign to someone raised in Geneva's ordered streets.
"It's like another country," she says softly.
"It is." I keep my eyes on the road, but what she sees is clear enough.
The wildness, the sense that civilization is just a thin veneer over something older and more primal.
"Louisiana's always been its own place. French, Spanish, African, Caribbean—all of it mixed together until it became something new. "
"Like you."
I glance at her. "What?"
"French surname, American accent, but there's something else underneath." She tilts her head, studying me. "Something that doesn't quite fit either category."
She's not wrong. The Pascals have been in Louisiana since before it was Louisiana, Beaumont blood mixing with settlers and slaves and everyone in between until we became our own breed.
Maman used to say we were Creole in the truest sense—children of the colony, shaped by heat and hurricanes and the delta's slow drowning.
"My mother's family goes back generations in New Orleans.
The Beaumonts were planters before the Civil War, lawyers and politicians after.
My father was nouveau riche oil money from Houma, made his fortune in offshore drilling.
The Beaumonts never quite forgave Maman for marrying beneath her station. "
"But she did anyway."
"She loved him." Simple as that. Never simple at all.
"étienne Pascal was rough around the edges, but he worshipped her.
Bought her that mansion in the Garden District, restored it to its former glory, filled it with antiques and art, gave her everything she could want except the social acceptance her family withheld. "
Isabella's quiet for a moment. Then: "But they're both gone and your siblings blame you for not being there."