Chapter One #2
I got up at six. Made coffee, cleaned the kitchen, scrubbed the bathroom until the grout looked new.
Checked my phone twice for updates from Hebert.
Nothing. Tried the chain a third time. The morning had a rhythm as long as I kept moving, and I wasn’t ready to find out what lived in the silence when the rhythm stopped.
BY NINE A.M. THURSDAY, Sloane Woodall — my attorney, my friend, and the only woman in Louisiana more hardheaded than me — was in full fix-it mode.
“I’m hiring someone,” she said, which was how Sloane started conversations: no greeting, no easing in, just the solution arriving fully formed before you’d had coffee.
“You’re hiring what?”
“Close-protection specialist. Private security. I’ve used this firm before for clients. I’ve already made the call.”
“Sloane.” I switched the phone to my other ear. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You’re the sole witness to a Dixie Mafia execution and you live alone two blocks from your bar during the biggest week of the year. You don’t need a babysitter. You need someone who carries a gun and doesn’t sleep.”
“I carry a baseball bat and I didn’t sleep last night. Close enough.”
“Jenna.” Her voice dropped out of lawyer mode into the real one, the one she used when she meant it. “This isn’t negotiable. He’s already on his way.”
“He?”
“His name is Dane Gatlin. Ex-U.S. Marshal, now private sector. He comes recommended and he carries a gun. I’ll text you the details. I love you. Don’t argue.”
She hung up before I could. Ex-U.S. Marshal. Witness protection. The fact that Sloane had found someone whose old job was keeping people like me alive should have helped. It didn’t. It made the whole thing real in a way that Hebert’s card in my pocket hadn’t.
That was Sloane. She’d handled the bar’s LLC, the lease negotiation, and a noise complaint from a neighbor who hated live music, and somewhere between the legal work and the wine on her patio, we’d become friends who didn’t bother with small talk before dropping bombs.
When Sloane decided you needed handling, you got handled.
That was why she was a good lawyer and a terrifying friend.
My phone buzzed a minute later. Sloane’s text: his full name, the firm’s name, a headshot that told me nothing except that he was white and had a jaw, and my address listed under “client location.” So she’d already given him where I lived. Of course she had.
I tried to force down a piece of toast and quit after two bites.
The bathroom mirror was honest — dark circles, flat eyes, everything about my face saying I hadn’t slept.
I showered, pulled my dark hair back, put on lipstick because I don’t leave home without it, and changed into jeans and my work boots.
Footsteps on the stairs. Heavy. Deliberate. Then the knock.
I checked the peephole. The headshot hadn’t done him justice.
I opened the door with the chain still on.
“Dane Gatlin,” he said through the gap. “Sloane Woodall hired me.”
I slid the chain and stepped back.
He filled the doorway. Tall, broad through the chest and shoulders, with a duffel over one shoulder and a holster visible under the open collar of a rolled-sleeve button-down.
Brown hair, short but not military-tight.
Strong jaw. Gray eyes that moved past me into the apartment, fast, automatic, reading the room before he’d been invited into it.
Jeans, boots, hands that had never been soft.
He stepped inside and the apartment shrank around him. He dropped the duffel by the door.
And then he grinned.
It was a weapon, that grin, and he knew it. I could tell by how easily he wore it. My stomach flipped. I blamed the coffee.
“You practice that in the mirror?” I said.
“Naturally.” His gaze dropped to my mouth, then came back up without apology. “Red lipstick before ten a.m. You weren’t planning to hide.”
“It’s not for you.”
“Didn’t say it was.” The drawl was Southern but transplant-Southern, an accent that could’ve been Georgia or the Carolinas before it got sanded down by years somewhere else.
Up close, it was worse. Warmer. “Sloane filled me in. You witnessed a shooting, the grand jury’s in a week, and the shooter saw your face.
I’m here until you testify. That means I go where you go, I sleep where you sleep —”
“You sleep on the couch.”
“— and I need to see your workplace before tonight. How far’s the bar?”
“Two blocks. And I was heading there anyway.” I grabbed my keys off the hook by the door. “But the bar stays open this week. My staff depends on Mardi Gras tips and I’m not shutting them out of their best earning week because some asshole thinks I scare easy. That’s not negotiable.”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t bristle. Those gray eyes watched me for a beat, recalculating, and then he nodded once.
“All right. Bar stays open. I’ll work around it.”
That was it. No argument. No pushback about how he knew best and I should listen. He just absorbed the hit and adjusted without losing a degree of that steady confidence.
I wanted to be relieved. Instead I was irritated, and I was honest enough to know why. I’d been braced for a fight. I’d wanted one. Fights I knew how to win. Whatever this was — this easy willingness to let me set the terms — left me with nothing to push against.
I locked the apartment behind us and we walked.
The morning was warm and the Quarter was waking up slow, delivery trucks idling on Chartres, someone hosing down a sidewalk, the smell of beignets drifting from the corner.
He kept pace a half step behind me and slightly to my right, and I realized he’d put himself between me and the street without saying a word about it.
I unlocked Proof and let us in. He stood just inside while I hit the lights, and I watched him take in the room: the long counter, the stage, the courtyard entrance, the hall to the stockroom. His eyes stopped on the back hallway.
“That go to the alley?”
“Stockroom first. Alley door’s at the end.”
He walked the hall without asking. I heard the deadbolt rattle, the sound of him testing it twice, and then he came back.
“That lock’s a problem.”
“I know. It’s been on my list.”
“It just moved to the top.” He glanced back down the hall. “I want a camera on that door. I’ll install it tomorrow. And I need your alarm code.”
I gave it to him. He didn’t write it down.
I went behind the rail and started pulling bottles for the well. He stayed on the other side, one elbow on the wood, watching me and the room at the same time. It should have felt intrusive. Mostly it felt like having a large, armed piece of furniture that hadn’t been there yesterday.
“You always come in this early?” he said.
“During Carnival, yes.”
“Good. That’s my shift too.”
I looked at him across the rail and caught it — not the charm this time. A quick, quiet focus. He was deciding how to keep me alive for a week, and he’d already started.
I turned back to the bottles and didn’t say anything. The thing sitting in my chest right then wasn’t irritation and wasn’t relief, and I didn’t trust it.
HUCK SHOWED UP AT FOUR. The servers trickled in after. I prepped, briefed the staff, and tried to run a normal Thursday like there wasn’t a man with a shoulder holster sitting at the end of the rail watching everyone who walked in.
The Thursday crowd filled Proof wall to wall by eight.
Five days before Fat Tuesday and the whole Quarter was electric, the crowd noise rising with every opened door.
I poured, I smiled, I kept the register moving.
Dane sat in his corner and didn’t get in the way.
He didn’t try to help. He didn’t make conversation.
He just watched: the entrances, the crowd, the alley hall, and when he thought I wasn’t looking, me.
We closed at two. I sent the staff home and locked up while Dane waited at the entrance, and we walked the two blocks back in the dark.
The streets were still loud, stragglers weaving home through the Carnival debris, a trumpet playing something slow and sad from a balcony somewhere above us. Neither of us talked.
At the apartment, I pulled sheets and a pillow from the hall closet and dropped them on the couch.
He looked at the couch, ran his hand along the arm, and raised an eyebrow. “This thing’s an antique.”
“That belonged to my grandmother. Nineteen-fifties, original velvet. You put your boots on it, I’ll put you through the window.”
His grin came back. Slower this time. “Yes ma’am.”
“I work until two or three most nights and I sleep until nine. Stay out of the bathroom between nine and nine-thirty. Don’t touch the thermostat. And don’t rearrange my furniture.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“And Dane?”
He’d been reaching for the sheets. He stopped.
“I didn’t ask for you. I don’t need you. You’re here because Sloane is a force of nature and I pick my battles. So you’re in my space, on my schedule, and in my way. Stay out of my way.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said again, smooth as breathing, and that grin — warm and slow and infuriating — didn’t move.
I closed my bedroom door and turned the lock.
I pressed my back against the wood and listened.
The duffel zipper. A boot hitting the floor, then the other.
The couch frame settling under his weight.
Then the apartment went quiet except for the muffled noise of Bourbon Street filtering through the walls, and the fact of him, ten feet away, breathing on the other side of my door.
I’d survived a murder in my alley and the Dixie Mafia knowing my face. I could survive a week of Dane Gatlin in my apartment.
My apartment had never felt this small.