Chapter 2 - The House Behind the Curtain
The Tremé was a neighborhood where the history of New Orleans was written in the cracks of the sidewalks and the peeling paint of the shotgun houses. It was beautiful, but it was poor—the kind of poor where people kept their curtains closed because daylight only reminded them of what they couldn't afford.
Roderick kept his distance, his dark sedan idling half a block away under the shadow of a dying oak tree. He watched Adriana walk down the cracked concrete. She wasn't wearing the expensive silk blouses he had bought her for their engagement dinners. She wore an oversized canvas coat, its hem stained with something dark, and a pair of worn boots. She carried a heavy leather medical bag—the one she had used during her early days as a street-clinic volunteer.
She didn't look like a woman on her way to a lover. She looked like a soldier marching into a trench.
She stopped in front of a small, narrow house with a missing porch rail. The windows were covered from the inside by thick, green velvet curtains that looked like they had been salvaged from an old theater. She knocked three times—a specific, rhythmic tap—and the door opened instantly.
A man pulled her inside. It wasn't Beckett Hume this time. This man was younger, his skin covered in the heavy tattoos of the Bayou Boys—a vicious local street gang that Roderick had been trying to eliminate from his shipping routes for months.
Roderick’s grip on his steering wheel tightened until his leather gloves groaned. A Bayou Boy.
He got out of the car, his boots hitting the damp asphalt with no sound. The street was empty, the mid-morning heat keeping everyone indoors. He reached the porch of the green-curtained house within seconds, his hand resting instinctively on the butt of the revolver in his waistband.
He didn't knock. He put his shoulder against the old wooden door frame and pushed. The lock was cheap; it gave way with a sharp crack that echoed down the narrow hallway inside.
"Adriana!" Roderick barked, stepping into the dim, humid interior.
The air inside smelled instantly of copper, rubbing alcohol, stale sweat, and old soup. It didn't smell like a trysting place; it smelled like a battlefield hospital.
From the room to the left, a man shouted a curse in French-Creole. A shadow moved quickly. Roderick didn't wait—he drew his gun, turning the corner with his barrel raised, ready to clear the room.
"Roderick, no!"
Adriana threw herself directly in front of his weapon. She was covered in blood. Not her own—her apron was soaked in dark crimson, and her hands were gloved in latex that was slick with fluid. Behind her, lying on a stained mattress on the floor, was the young tattooed gang member. His stomach was sliced open, a crude surgical drain protruding from the wound.
Standing over him with a needle and suture thread was Beckett Hume, his glasses splattered with tiny red dots.
"Put the gun down!" Adriana screamed, her gray eyes flashing with a wild, desperate ferocity he had never seen before. "If you shoot, he dies! If you move, the stitch breaks! Put it down, Roderick!"
Roderick lowered the barrel an inch, his gaze moving from Adriana’s bloody hands to the dying boy on the mattress, then to Beckett Hume, who hadn't stopped stitching despite the mafia boss standing in the room.
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"What is this?" Roderick asked, his voice shaking with a dangerous mixture of confusion and residual rage. "Adriana... what the hell are you doing here?"
"I'm saving his life," she gasped, wiping her forehead with her shoulder to keep the blood from her eyes. "Just like I save all of them. The ones your world leaves behind to rot."
