He’d grinned wide and she’d seen a little of herself in his face. His sharp jawline perhaps, or those dark eyes that were almost black.
Maybe he hadn’t disliked her, but she’d never know. Her eyes burned with something that was more complicated than grief. Her parents had been murdered before she could know them, and it had changed her forever.
Chapter Two
Severine felt haunted.
Years ago, she’d been measured in this very room, on this very stool, for school clothes. It was just before her parents had purchased the oversized house in the countryside. Back then, Severine’s mother had been lounging, feet up, sipping a cocktail while Severine stood as a statue, ignoring the prick of every needle. She had been too-slim, too-white, with too-dark eyes peering out of a pinched face and her mother had squeezed her cheeks, bemoaning Severine’s lack of color.
Severine felt as though she could turn her head towards that blood-red chaise lounge near the fire and see Flora DuNoir, with her blonde curls and ready smile.
She shivered and closed her eyes, breathing in deeply. She was alone in the French Quarter mansion, save for her dog, Anubis, and the two puppies, and she’d yet to tell her family she’d left the convent, let alone that she’d moved back into the mansion.
“You’re so quiet,” Lisette, one of Meline’s roommates, told her.
“I suppose so,” Severine said simply, shrugging slightly and getting a dark look from Meline when she moved.
It was too hard to apologize when she could hear the echo of her younger self during that other fitting long ago.
“Oh, she’s not a giddy little girl,” Flora had laughed. “She’s like a little ghost.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” Severine had said, seeing the odd look from the seamstress and was uncertain of what it meant.
“What do you like to do?” Lisette asked, ignoring the even darker looks coming from Meline, who had already discovered Severine was almost always uncomfortably quiet.
“I—” she started to answer and then slowly shrugged. She wasn’t quite sure. She’d taken long walks in the woods near the convent. Helping to bake the bread with Sister Sophie had always been…fine. Severine had rather enjoyed helping in the herb garden and reading in the library, but would she have done those things if she’d had options?
Too much time passed before she gave a reply, and she’d already crossed the line from awkward to strange. She didn’t blush, any more than she had as a child, and she shifted slightly. She had always wished she were effusive, and she’d always struggled to be more than silent.
“Where have you been?” Lisette asked, ignoring the quieting looks from Meline.
“Austria,” Severine answered, grateful for an easy question. “A convent.”
“A convent!” Lisette’s declaration caused Severine to start, and Meline pricked her with a pin.
“Oh, I am sorry,” Meline said.
“This whole time?” Lisette demanded. “Ever since—”
She gasped when Meline pricked her friend with another pin, this time purposefully.
Severine watched the appearance of the small dot of blood on her bicep for too long and then, too late, answered, “Don’t worry about it.”
Meline had blushed for all of them, and the rosy color on her dark cheeks made her all the more lovely.
Severine admitted, “I’m not entirely sure what I like to do. It’s not as though hobbies and the like were even choices at the convent.”
Both Meline’s and Lisette’s gazes widened and they glanced at each other. Severine didn’t let the looks bother her.
“Are you from the DuNoir family that had that murder when we were girls?” Lisette asked, and Meline elbowed her friend, not even trying to hide it.
Severine swallowed, the feeling of being haunted flowing over her so strongly that gooseflesh appeared on her arms and prickled down her back. Even the hair on her head seemed to be saluting the ghosts that had swirled around her since the moment she’d returned to New Orleans, let alone to this mansion.
“Lukas and Flora DuNoir, the victims, were my parents.”
Meline gasped, but the loquacious Lisette wasn’t deterred. “Were you at the convent when they died?”
Severine slowly shook her head. “I spent most of my time at school in New York. After their deaths, I was sent to the convent.”
“Can you imagine?” Lisette said to Meline. Then Lisette turned to Severine and demanded, “Who killed them? Did they ever find out?”
“No.”
She could feel their presence as though they were standing across from her. The spookiness she’d felt since she’d come home was intensifying and transforming into something else. Something more personal. It would be so easy to see them there, in front of the fireplace. How many times had she found them that way, kissing, or sharing a drink, or fighting?
She tried not to imagine them. Her last sight of them had been grisly and too often when she remembered them, their images shifted from what they had been in life to what they were in death. Slowly, blood would spread across her mother’s chest. Slowly, her father would stagger. He’d shift from enjoying beignets and coffee with Severine to lying across the table, just as he’d once laid over the top of his wife’s body.
“We’re sorry for your loss,” Meline told Severine precisely, with a direct gaze, so Severine knew the words were heartfelt.
“Thank you,” Severine said and it was, perhaps, the easiest thing she’d said to them yet. There was something wrong with her mind, she thought. She was a half-step from seeing her parents in front of her and could discuss their murder more easily than she could discuss dresses.
“There was more family, wasn’t there?” Lisette asked. “A daughter and a son?”
“My mother had been married once before,” Severine said. “Her son, my half-brother, was at the
