Chapter 3 The Jazz Confession

POV: Catherine

I meet Anastasia every Wednesday night on Frenchmen Street. It is my sanctuary, the only place where the smell of beer and jazz manages to drown out the scent of glossy paper and Eric Wood’s contempt.

She sees me walk in and sets her drink down, her face turning serious immediately.

“You’ve got the look of a woman about to do something stupid.”

I collapse into the seat because my body is screaming with exhaustion.

“I’m thinking, Anas. I’m thinking too much.”

And then it all pours out of me.

I tell her about the anonymous text on my phone that begged me not to touch that red folder, the one I have not even seen but that already has my name on it like a sentence. I tell her about the humiliation this morning, about Eric tearing me down lower than dirt for three hours of lateness when I am killing myself to pay my dad’s debts and buy Liam’s shoes.

“I want to gut him, Anas,” I hiss, and my voice is raw with rage. “I want to rip off that three-thousand-dollar suit and see if he bleeds like the rest of us. I hate him. I hate his calm, his perfection, and the way he treats me like I am part of the furniture.”

I take a long drink and my stomach burns from it. That is when the filter breaks. The fatigue, the beer, the rage all rise up at once.

“But the worst part, the most fucked up part, is that this hate makes me want him so badly I cannot control it anymore. I imagine pushing him to the edge and forcing him to lose that control he loves so much. I want him to slam me against his oak desk and order me to shut up with that low voice that gives me chills. I want to feel his hands on me, I want him to take me with the same violence he puts into his deals. I want to tell him to his face everything I want him to do to me in bed, and I want to watch him break.”

Anas stares at me with her mouth open and her eyes frozen. She grabs my arm and crushes my fingers in her grip.

“Catherine… shut up.”

“No! I am sick of it! I want him to punish me, to dominate me, to stop being that wall. I want him to stop seeing me as a problem to fix and to actually see me.”

“Catherine, for fuck’s sake, shut up!” she hisses.

An arctic cold drops down my spine. The noise of the bar seems to die out all at once. Not completely, but it changes and becomes heavy and thick, like the air is being sucked out of the room.

I turn around slowly.

Corner table.

Darkness.

Eric Wood.

Dark suit.

Completely still.

He is not alone. There are five men in suits with predator faces sitting with him, and among them is the man from the security video last night, the one who dropped off the red folder.

And Eric is not looking at his associates. He is sitting there with one hand resting casually on the tablecloth, and he is staring directly at me.

His eyes are not storm-gray anymore. They are total black.

The sound of the bar comes back in waves, too loud and too alive, and my stomach drops.

Anas whispers with her lips white, “Catherine… he’s been there the whole time.”

“Fuck, Anas,” I breathe with my throat dry and the blood draining from my face. “He heard everything.”

I cannot move. My fingers are welded to my glass and my legs have melted. I am nailed to my barstool and unable to break eye contact.

Eric does not move. He does not smile and he does not frown. He just stares.

The men at his table have gone quiet. They look at me like I am a sideshow, or like prey that just threw itself into the wolf’s jaws. The guy in the hoodie, the one from the folder, leans back in his chair and his eyes never leave me.

“Catherine, look at me,” Anas begs under her breath while she squeezes my wrist. “Don’t look at him.”

And suddenly the leather of his chair creaks.

The sound is faint and almost drowned out by the saxophone wailing at the back of the room, but to me it sounds like a gunshot. Eric stands up in one motion. Without ever taking his eyes off mine, he detaches himself from the shadow of his table.

My breath locks in my throat. Anas lets go of my wrist because she is frozen too. I should leave. I should run to the Mississippi and never look back. But my body refuses to obey and I stay there, exposed, with my heart pounding in my temple as he starts cutting through the crowd with calculated slowness.

He reaches me. He does not stop, but he passes so close that his coat brushes my shoulder. The air shifts, carrying with it a scent of forest after a storm that sends a shiver down to my marrow.

“We’re leaving,” Anas hisses, jumping up the second he has passed us.