Read Chapter 17: The Voodoo Doll

The café was wrong for this. All of it—the marble tables, the clatter of porcelain, the tourists laughing over beignets. Elias Thorne sat across from Elodie with his scarred face half-turned toward the window, as if the afternoon light might soften what the rest of him could not. It didn’t.

He had chosen the place. She should have known better than to come.

“You’ve been busy,” he said, stirring his coffee with a slow, deliberate motion. “Nurseries. Historical societies. You’ve done the work I would have charged a fortune for.”

“What do you want, Thorne?”

“The same thing I’ve always wanted. The document. The house. The end of this conversation.” He set the spoon down and leaned back. “Forty-eight hours was generous. You have less than thirty now.”

Elodie kept her hands flat on the table, palms down, the way she steadied herself before a deposition. “The document isn’t a loan. You know that. It’s a grave deed—a promise to Abraham’s daughter.”

Elias’s eyes flickered. Not surprise. Interest. Like a collector hearing the true provenance of a piece he’d already decided to own.

“Is that what you think?” he asked.

“It’s what I know.”

“Then you know half.” He reached into the inner pocket of his coat. The movement was slow, almost ceremonial, and when his hand came back out, Elodie felt her chest seize.

It was small. Crude. A twist of dark cloth stuffed with what might have been moss or cotton, bound at the waist with red thread. A doll. But the cloth—that pattern of tiny blue flowers on faded cream—she knew it. She had touched that fabric in the nursery, felt it hold the dust of a century in its weave.

“Where did you get that?” Her voice came out low, sharp. The table between them suddenly felt too wide and too thin at once.

Elias set the doll on the marble like a chess piece. “From the same place you found the quilt. The mansion keeps its secrets in layers. I’ve been peeling them for years.”

“That’s from Céleste’s bassinet.” She was on her feet before she made the choice. Her chair scraped the floor with a sound that turned heads at the neighboring tables. “You were inside the house. How were you inside the house?”

“I wasn’t.” He didn’t flinch. “The mansion gives what it chooses. Sometimes to the people who knock. Sometimes to the people who listen.”

Elodie’s hand shot out and grabbed the doll. The cloth was rough under her fingers, and something inside shifted—grinding, granular. Dirt. Bone dust, maybe. She didn’t want to think about that.

“You’re a parasite,” she said. “You collect people’s pain and call it antiquities.”

Elias smiled. It pulled the scar on his cheek into a pale crease. “I collect what others throw away. And I know what this house hides better than the family that lost it. Do you want to know what’s really buried under the oak tree, Ms. Marchand? Not a child’s bones. Not a broken promise.”

He paused, letting the silence breathe.

“Gold.”

Elodie stared at him. “What?”

“Marie Leveau didn’t just hide a daughter. She hid an inheritance—the family’s fortune, melted down and sealed in copper boxes when the Union army came within a day’s ride of the city. The music was never just a lullaby. It was a lock. A spell that kept the treasure sleeping until the right blood called it awake.”

“That’s not in any record.”

“Records lie. The house doesn’t.” He tapped the doll still clutched in her hand. “That’s why I need the deed. It doesn’t govern the curse. It governs the cache. Whoever holds the document can command the earth to give up what it holds. The curse is just the door. The gold is the room behind it.”

Elodie’s fingers tightened around the doll. The red thread bit into her palm. “And Clarisse? Julien? What are they to you—obstacles?”

“They’re collateral.” He said it without cruelty. Without anything at all. “The curse doesn’t care who it takes, and neither do I. But you—” He finally looked at her directly. “You care. That’s your weakness. It’s also your leverage, if you choose to use it wisely.”

She wanted to throw the coffee in his face. Wanted to shatter the cup and press a shard against that scarred throat. The violence of the thought surprised her. She hadn’t felt this kind of anger in years—had trained it out of herself in boardrooms and courtrooms, filed it away under professional composure.

The doll was warm in her hand. It should not have been warm.

“You have less than a day,” Elias said. He stood, buttoning his coat with unhurried movements. “The curse took the girl’s name tonight. Next, it takes the living. And I’ve seen who the house favors most.”

He leaned down, close enough that she caught the scent of bay rum and something older—dust, wax, the dry rot of attics.

“It will take Julien next,” he said softly. “Unless you deliver the deed. Not the loan. Not the grave. The deed to the Leveau fortune, whatever form it takes. Find it, and I’ll call the curse back. Fail, and you’ll watch him unmake himself piece by piece, starting with the parts of him that love you.”

He turned and walked out. The door chimed. The café resumed its cheerful murmur, oblivious.

Elodie stood frozen, the voodoo doll clutched against her chest. Through the window, she watched Elias Thorne disappear into the crowd, a man carrying a locket with Marie Leveau’s face and a map to a treasure buried beneath a century of grief.

The doll seemed heavier now. And somewhere, distantly, she could hear the lullaby—whether in her memory or through the thick walls of the mansion across town, she couldn’t tell anymore.