Read Chapter 13: The Scarred Man's Name

The silence in the library was thick enough to feel. Elodie stood at the window, watching the scarred man’s car disappear down the drive, taillights bleeding into the dusk. Behind her, Julien had not moved from the doorway. His arms were crossed tight over his chest, his jaw set in that stubborn line she’d come to recognize.

“Elias Thorne,” she said, turning. “That’s what he called himself.”

“That’s not a name,” Julien said. “That’s a stage.”

Odette had retreated to the kitchen to brew something strong and bitter, muttering about “men who wear other men’s faces.” Elodie envied her certainty. She pulled out her phone and began to type, her thumbs moving fast against the screen.

“He’s not in any directory. No license in Louisiana. No record anywhere in the state bar or the collector’s registry.” She looked up. “But he’s clean. Too clean.”

Julien stepped into the room. “What does that mean?”

“It means he’s careful. Professionally careful.” She set the phone down on the mahogany desk, next to the unopened letter. The seal with the downward crescent moon stared up at her like a shut eye. “A man like that doesn’t show up for a routine legal matter. He’s been waiting for a crack to slip through.”

She reached for her laptop, opened the browser, and began a deeper search. It took her twenty minutes, sifting through auction house records, obscure art journals, and a Louisiana history blog run by a woman in Baton Rouge who wrote about haunted heirlooms with the fervor of a true believer.

“There,” she said, tapping the screen.

Julien came around to read over her shoulder. The article was dated six years earlier. A profile of a private collector named Elias Thorne, who specialized in “cursed antiquities.” He had been quoted at length about the market for such items—the wealthy, he said, paid extraordinary sums to possess a story that could hurt them. The photograph beside the article showed a man in a tailored suit, his face smooth, untroubled. No scars. But the shape of the jaw, the set of the eyes, was unmistakable.

“He’s younger there,” Julien said.

“Before the scars,” Elodie agreed. “He got them somewhere in the years between.”

She scrolled further. There was another mention, two years later, in a New Orleans paper. Thorne had been present at the estate auction of a bank president’s widow, where a donation of historical documents from 1850s New Orleans had fetched a staggering sum. The bank president’s family had been in the city since the antebellum period. The article mentioned in passing that Thorne had purchased a single document for an undisclosed amount and left before the auction concluded.

Elodie’s skin prickled. “He collects pieces of the past,” she said slowly. “The paper trail. The proof. He doesn’t want the property. He wants the debt.”

Julien straightened. “If we can’t produce the original loan document from Émile’s estate, he stands to claim—what? The mansion? The land?”

“Or leverage them,” Elodie said. “To force sale through the Leveau family claim. He’d take possession and then strip it down. Sell the remnants, the history, piece by piece to the highest bidder. He’s not cursed. He’s trading on the curse.”

“So he gives us forty-eight hours knowing we can’t find a document we’ve never seen,” Julien said. “He wants us panicked. He wants us to run.”

“Or to make a mistake,” Elodie said.

She looked at the letter on the desk. Still sealed. She’d been avoiding it all evening, the way one avoids a hand outstretched in the dark. But the answer might be inside. And Thorne had known what it contained, which meant he had read it or had it read to him.

“He wore a locket,” she said quietly. “Identical to the one in the study wall. Marie Leveau’s photograph.”

Julien went still. “Then he’s connected to her. To the Leveaus.”

“To the family that was supposed to have died out generations ago,” Elodie said. “Or he knows what the locket holds. He’s been inside this house before us. Probably many times. He knew where the hidden panel was. He knew what was inside. He’s been waiting for the estate to move so he could step in and claim what his family—or his client’s family—believes is theirs.”

“His client,” Julien repeated. “You said he’s a collector.”

“Collectors have buyers,” Elodie said. “But this isn’t about money. Not entirely.” She picked up the locket from where she’d placed it earlier, on the desk beside the letter. The cold metal had warmed to her touch. She flicked it open. Marie Leveau stared out, beautiful and composed, a woman who looked like she had never lost a single night of sleep. “He wants what she wanted. He wants this house to remember them.”

The air shifted. The temperature in the library dropped by several degrees. Elodie looked up, but the candles Odette had set were still. No draft moved the curtains.

The music had stopped hours ago. The silence had grown so familiar that she’d almost begun to forget what had broken it.

Then the scream came.

It tore through the house like a blade through silk—high, thin, and utterly human. It was a child’s scream, or the memory of one, raw and terrified, torn from a throat that had not breath to spare. Elodie’s blood turned to ice. Julien staggered backward, one hand gripping the mantel.

The scream cut off. The silence returned, somehow deeper than before.

They looked at each other, and then they were moving. Julien hit the stairs first, taking them two at a time. Elodie followed, her heels loud on the wood, her heart hammering against her ribs. They reached the attic landing and stopped.

The door stood open. Dim light spilled from the hallway, carving a wedge across the floorboards. And there, in the far wall, the window that had been sealed shut for a hundred years stood wide open. The night wind pushed in, fluttering the dust that had gathered undisturbed for decades.

But no glass littered the floor beneath it. The pane was intact. The latch was twisted, bent outward at an angle that should have been impossible—as if something clawed at it from the inside, desperate to escape the room and the silence that filled it.

Julien approached slowly, his steps cautious on the creaking boards. He traced the bent latch with one finger, then examined the frame. Scratches, deep and parallel, ran down the wood beside the window, gouged into the grain by something with nails or claws. They stopped at the sill.

“Something tried to get out,” he breathed.

Elodie stepped into the room. The child’s piano sat in the corner, silent. The music box beside it gleamed in the dim light, sealed shut. The scorched word READ still marked the floor in the center of the room, burned into the wood as if written by a fire that left no ash.

“Or something got trapped and panicked,” Elodie said quietly. She knelt beside the window, studying the scratch marks. They were fresh. The wood beneath them was pale and splintered. This had happened minutes ago. They had been in the library, and whatever had been in this room had heard Thorne’s voice, or the letter’s seal breaking inthe air, or something else entirely.

Julien crouched beside her. “Clarisse?”

Elodie shook her head. “She looked empty. You said so yourself. That thing had her face but not her spirit.”

He was quiet a long moment. Then he said, “If it wasn’t her, then what climbed inside her form?”

Elodie had no answer. She pushed to her feet, crossed to the piano, and ran her palm along the smooth wood of its lid. It was the child’s piano, the one Bastien had left behind. She lifted the lid, revealing the keys. They were yellowed, some of them chipped. A thin dust lay over them, undisturbed until now.

But beneath that dust, on the lid’s underside, there was a carving. Someone had scratched a name into the wood, small and painstaking, as if done with a pin or a nail. Elodie tilted it toward the light.

LOUIE

Julien leaned in, reading over her arm. He went very still. “Who’s Louie?”

Elodie shook her head. She had never seen the name in any of the estate records, the ledgers, or the family letters. But she knew, with the same cold certainty that had settled in her chest since the scream, that it mattered. That it was the name the music was for.

She lowered the lid and looked back at the scarred window. The night outside was black and empty. No stars. No moon.

“We have forty-eight hours,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “And a name we cannot trace. And a document we cannot find.”

Julien came to stand beside her. He did not touch her, but his presence was steady in the collapsing dark. “We have each other,” he said. “And we have Odette.”

“We have a curse that’s waking,” Elodie said. “And a collector who wants what it protects.”

She closed her eyes. Beneath her feet, she thought—she could not be sure—she felt the faintest tremor. Not the piano. Not the house settling. Something deep below, under the earth, winding through the roots of the oak tree.

“Louie,” she said again, testing the name. It sat in her mouth like a piece of broken shell.

The silence that answered was longer than the last.