The reek of stale beer and old regrets clung to the air in The Swamp Devil, a smell as thick and suffocating as the Louisiana humidity.
It was a fitting perfume for the man glowering at me from across the splintered bar.
Nash “Gravedigger” Guidry.
He was built of swamp muscle and shadows, his face a roadmap of hard living, and his eyes—a stormy grey that promised nothing but ruin—were fixed on me with chilling intensity.
He hadn’t said more than five words, but every coiled line of his body screamed a warning I was too desperate to heed.
“The email said you were with her,” I repeated, my voice tight, refusing to break under his stare. “The night she died. It said you know what happened to my sister.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He wiped the bar with a stained rag, the motion slow and deliberate, a predator delaying the strike.
“An email told you to walk into the devil’s living room?” His voice was a low gravelly rasp, like whiskey poured over stones. “You got a death wish, little bird.”
“I have questions.”
“And I have a locked door. Use it.”
Before I could fire back, the screen door of the bar groaned open, slicing through the tension with a sliver of evening light and a silhouette I would know anywhere.
Sheriff Ben Carter. My Ben.
He filled the doorway, his uniform crisp, his presence an immediate and unwelcome anchor to a past I’d fled ten years ago.
His gaze found me, and the hard lines of the lawman softened into something achingly familiar—concern, regret, and a flicker of the boy who’d given me my first kiss by Cypress Creek.
Then his eyes slid to Nash, and the sheriff was back, his hand resting instinctively on his hip.
“Callie.” His voice was a soft reprimand, laced with the honeyed drawl I used to love. “What are you doing here? I told you to wait for me.”
“You told me to be patient,” I corrected, the words coming out sharper than I intended. “I’ve been patient for a decade, Ben.”
“This isn’t the way,” he said, stepping fully inside, his presence shrinking the already cramped space. He moved between me and the bar, a human shield of decency and order.
He didn’t look at Nash, but the dismissal was louder than a shout. To Ben, a man like Nash Guidry was just part of the swamp’s filth, something to be managed, not engaged with.
“Guidry, she’s with me. Whatever business you think you have is over.”
Nash let out a low, humorless laugh that grated on my nerves. “She came to me, Sheriff. Asking questions you don’t want answered.”
The air crackled, thick with the history of two men who represented the two warring halves of this town: the polished, smiling facade and the rotten, secrets-drenched underbelly.
Ben represented the life I was supposed to have had—safe, predictable, respectable. Nash was the embodiment of the town’s darkness, the same darkness that had swallowed my sister whole.
“Stay away from her,” Ben warned, his voice dropping to a deadly calm. “This is official police business.”
“Was it ‘official business’ ten years ago?” Nash leaned forward, his knuckles white on the bar. “Or was it just you and your daddy cleaning up a mess for your friends?”
Ben’s jaw tightened. “Get out of here, Callie. Now.”
He reached for my arm, his touch meant to be reassuring, protective. But it felt like a manacle.
I pulled back, my gaze whipping between them. Ben’s handsome face was a mask of controlled frustration, his eyes pleading with me to trust him, to let him handle it, to be the good girl he remembered.
But Nash’s stormy gaze held something else entirely.
Not pity. Not menace. A strange, knowing sorrow.
It was the look of a man who had stared into the same abyss I was now teetering on the edge of.
“He knows something,” I insisted, my voice rising. “He was there. Why won’t you question him properly?”
“Because he’s a liar and a drunk!” Ben’s control finally snapped, his voice echoing in the small room.
“He’s feeding you poison because he’s got nothing else. Hannah made a mistake getting involved with him. It was a tragic accident, and his testimony would only twist that.”
A tragic accident. The town’s official lullaby. The lie that had allowed everyone to sleep at night for ten years while I lay awake, haunted by the ghost of a sister I barely recognized in their sanitized stories.
“A mistake?” Nash’s voice was dangerously quiet now, but it cut through Ben’s anger like a razor. He finally looked at me, truly looked at me, and the world tilted on its axis.
“She didn’t make a mistake. She made a choice. She chose me.”
My breath hitched. Ben went rigid.