Chapter 4 - Shadows in the Courtyard
By the fourth night, the rhythm of the Esplanade mansion had swallowed Del whole.
She had moved into the guest suite—a room larger than her entire apartment, featuring a clawfoot bathtub and a balcony overlooking the brick-paved courtyard—and had even arranged for her landlord to drop Biscuit off with a two-month supply of thyroid medication. The orange tabby cat had immediately taken over the antique velvet armchair in the corner of the nursery, treating the Moreau estate with the supreme arrogance of a feline landlord who believed he owned the mafia.
The triplets were thriving.
Under Del’s care—interspersed with quiet hums, simple routines, and a total ban on the frantic, over-compensating nannies who used to flutter around the nursery like nervous birds—the babies had started sleeping through the night. They ate with enthusiasm, crawled across the Persian rug with determined grunts, and treated Del like a permanent fixture of their universe.
Antoine, true to his word, had cleared his schedule.
He didn't disappear into his study or vanish down to the shipping yards until midnight anymore. Every evening at sunset, he sat in the corner of the nursery with a stack of encrypted ledgers in his lap, quietly working while Del prepared the evening bottles or read battered paperbacks from the estate's sprawling library.
They didn't talk much. They didn't need to.
An unspoken truce had settled over them—a fragile, domestic peace built on exhaustion, shared silence, and the quiet comfort of mutual understanding.
Until Thursday night.
It was 2:14 AM. The house was dead silent, save for the hum of the central air conditioning and the soft ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. Del had crept down to the kitchen to grab a glass of ice water, her bare feet making no sound on the cool marble floors.
As she walked back past the library on the second floor, she noticed a narrow sliver of yellow light cutting across the dark hallway.
The door was cracked open.
She wouldn't have looked inside, except she heard a voice—a low, tense whisper that didn't belong to Antoine.
"I'm telling you, Vincent, the board is getting restless," a man hissed from inside the room. It was a voice Del recognized instantly: smooth, oily, and dripping with a forced charm she had heard twice before when visiting the estate’s administrative office.
It belonged to Julian Moreau—Antoine’s cousin and second-in-command, a man who always wore expensive silk ties and smiled with his teeth while his eyes stayed completely dead.
Del froze, pressing her back flat against the dark wooden paneling of the hallway.
"Antoine hasn't looked at a single shipping manifest in four days," Julian’s voice continued, crackling softly through a secure speakerphone on the desk. "He’s holed up in that nursery playing nanny to a plus-size diner waitress he dragged off the street. If we don't move the cargo through dock fourteen by Tuesday, the Colombian buyers are going to walk."
"Let them walk," a second voice replied coldly through the speaker—Vincent, the old-guard capo who ran the port operations. "Antoine’s losing his edge. Ever since Isabella bought it on the causeway, he’s been a liability. That car crash wasn't just bad luck, Julian. And you know it better than anyone."
Del’s breath caught in her throat.
The crash on the causeway.
The official story: a blown tire. Wet road. Tragedy.
Julian let out a low, arrogant chuckle. "Of course I know it. The brakes don't fail themselves unless someone bleeds the lines while the car is parked in the private garage. It was messy, sure, but it got the job done. With Isabella gone and Antoine drowning in grief, the empire was supposed to fall right into our laps. Instead, he’s adopting stray waitresses and humming lullabies."
"Fix it, Julian," Vincent snapped. "Get him back to the docks. Or get him out of the way permanently. We didn't spend twenty years building this syndicate to watch it dissolve over a crib."
"Relax," Julian murmured, his voice dripping with venom. "I've got a meeting with the federal prosecutor tomorrow morning. Just a little anonymous tip about unregistered cash flows through Bayou Grace Diner—now owned by our dear leader. When the feds raid the place and find the ledger books I planted in the basement safe yesterday morning, Antoine’s new pet waitress is going away for a very long time. And Antoine will have no choice but to step down to manage the fallout."
Inside the hallway, Del’s blood turned to ice water.
A plant. Ledger books. A federal raid scheduled for tomorrow morning.
She backed away from the door, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She needed to move. She needed to pack her bags, grab Biscuit, and run out the front gate before the sun came up.
She turned sharply on her heel—and collided hard with a solid wall of cedar and wool.
Strong hands caught her by the shoulders before she could stumble, steadying her instantly.
Del looked up.
May you like
Antoine Moreau stood towering over her in the dim hallway. His face was carved from absolute, terrifying stone. His dark eyes weren't looking at her with confusion or sleepiness; they were burning with a cold, righteous fury that looked like the surface of a dying star.
He had heard every single word.
