The gravel crunched under the tires of my rental car, a sound like grinding teeth.
The anonymous email had been specific: The Swamp Devil. Ask for the Gravedigger.
The name alone was a parody of Southern Gothic cliché, but the place itself was no joke. It squatted at the edge of the cypress swamp, a ramshackle structure on stilts that looked like one good hurricane would return it to the bog.
A neon sign of a cartoonish red devil flickered erratically, casting a diseased-looking glow on the murky water below.
Ben’s warning from earlier echoed in my head. Let it lie, Callie. But Ben’s concern felt less like protection and more like containment.
He wanted the pretty, manageable version of me, the one who left Veridian and never looked back. That girl was gone. Hannah’s ghost had seen to that.
Taking a breath that tasted of humidity and decay, I pushed open the car door. The night’s symphony swelled to greet me—a chorus of bullfrogs and the incessant, high-pitched whine of cicadas.
The bar’s door was a heavy slab of wood that groaned in protest as I shoved it open.
The inside was a blast of cold air, stale cigarette smoke, and the sharp tang of cheap whiskey. It was dark, the only light coming from the flickering neon sign outside, a string of chili-pepper lights over the bar, and the glow of a muted baseball game on a corner TV.
A handful of patrons, leathery men in worn-out jeans and faded caps, turned to stare. Their eyes slid over me, cataloging my city clothes—the silk camisole and dark jeans that had felt appropriate in New Orleans but here marked me as an outsider, as prey.
I ignored them, my gaze sweeping the room until it landed on the man behind the bar.
He wasn’t what I expected. And yet, somehow, he was exactly what I should have.
He was wiping down the warped wooden counter with a slow, deliberate motion, his focus absolute. He was big, not in the soft, football-player way of Ben Carter, but in a harder, more elemental way.
Broad shoulders strained the fabric of a plain black t-shirt, and thick, corded muscles moved in his forearms, decorated with the faded ink of tattoos that snaked under his sleeves. His dark hair was a little too long, falling over his brow as he worked.
When he finally looked up, the air in my lungs seized.
His eyes were the color of a stormy sky over the Gulf, a turbulent gray-blue that held no welcome. A faint, white scar cut through his left eyebrow, giving him a permanent look of dangerous appraisal.
He didn’t smile. He just watched me walk toward the bar, his expression a flat, unreadable mask. This had to be him.
The sheer force of his presence was a physical thing, a pressure change in the room.
I slid onto a rickety barstool, the vinyl cracked and peeling. The other men went back to their drinks, but the silence he commanded lingered.
“What can I get you?” His voice was a low rumble, like stones grinding together deep underground. It vibrated through the wood of the bar, straight up my arms.
“I’m looking for Nash Guidry.”
His eyes narrowed infinitesimally. He placed the damp rag on the counter. “Who’s asking?”
“Callie Evans.”
He didn’t react to my name, but a flicker of something—recognition, or maybe just annoyance—passed through his stormy gaze. “You’re a long way from home.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact, an accusation. “I’m here about my sister. Hannah.”
The name hung in the air between us, thick and heavy as the swamp fog outside. The low murmur of conversation in the bar died again.
He picked up a glass and began to polish it with a clean cloth, the movement precise and dismissive.
“Got nothing for you,” he said, his eyes fixed on the glass.
“The email said—”
“I don’t give a damn what some email said.” He finally met my gaze again, and the hostility in it was so potent it was like a physical blow.
“Some folks around here like to stir shit just to watch it stink. You’re chasing shadows, little girl.”
Little girl. The condescension was a lit match to my frayed temper. It was the same tone the whole town used, the one that said I was too fragile, too emotional, that I should have just gotten over it.
“My sister is dead,” I said, my voice low and tight. “She was found not a hundred yards from here. People say you were the one who found her. That you were friends.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He set the glass down with a definitive thud that made me flinch. “People in this town say a lot of things. Most of ’em are lies.”
“Is that a lie? That you knew her?” I leaned forward, refusing to be intimidated. “That’s all I’m asking. Did you know Hannah?”
He moved with a sudden, startling speed, bracing his large, calloused hands on the bar and leaning in close.
The space between us crackled. I was enveloped in his scent—whiskey, sawdust, and a clean, earthy smell of damp soil after a rain. It was intoxicating and terrifying.
His gaze dropped to my mouth for a fraction of a second before snapping back to my eyes.
“Yeah, I knew her,” he bit out, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper that was for me alone. “She was naive. Trusted the wrong people. Saw good in places there was only rot. Look where it got her.”
His words were brutal, a deliberate cruelty meant to wound, to make me retreat. But instead of pain, a hot flare of anger surged through me.
He was confirming it. He knew something.
“What rot?” I pressed, my voice barely more than a breath. “What people?”
He laughed, a harsh, humorless sound. “You got a lot of nerve, I’ll give you that.” He straightened up, the intensity receding, leaving me feeling strangely cold and exposed.
“But you don’t have any sense. You’re asking questions that are gonna get you hurt.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a promise.” He turned his back on me, grabbing a bottle of bourbon from the top shelf.
“Go back to whatever pretty, clean city you crawled out of, Callie Evans. The past is dead and buried. You start digging around here, you’re just gonna find a grave with your own name on it.”
The finality in his tone was absolute. The conversation was over. But I couldn’t move.
I was pinned to the stool by the predatory way he’d looked at me, by the raw, unapologetic power rolling off him. Ben wanted to wrap me in cotton wool, to protect me from a past he’d already decided on.
This man, this ‘Gravedigger,’ was throwing the danger in my face, daring me to run.
And God help me, some broken part of me didn’t want to run. It wanted to push back, to meet his storm with my own.
He was abrasive, hostile, and utterly terrifying, but he wasn’t handling me. He wasn’t managing my grief.
He was treating me like a threat, and in a twisted way, it felt more honest than anything I’d experienced since I’d been back.
I slid off the stool, my legs feeling unsteady. As I turned to leave, his voice stopped me.
“Evans.”
I looked back. He hadn’t turned around, his broad back still to me as he poured a drink for one of the regulars.
“Some things are better left in the mud,” he said, without a trace of emotion.
I walked out of The Swamp Devil, the bell on the door jangling mockingly behind me. Back in the oppressive heat of the Louisiana night, I leaned against my rental car, my heart hammering against my ribs.
My hands were shaking.
Nash Guidry was a dead end, a wall of violent refusal. He’d told me nothing and everything all at once.
He’d known Hannah. He believed she’d trusted the wrong people.
And he was terrified—or determined—that I would make the same mistake.
Despite his words, his warning, the image that burned in my mind wasn’t his anger. It was the fleeting, intense way his stormy eyes had dropped to my lips.
The charged heat in the air when he’d leaned in close, the rough timbre of his voice vibrating through my bones. It was a dark, dangerous energy that had nothing to do with my sister’s case and everything to do with the man himself.
It stirred something deep inside me, a reckless current I hadn’t felt in years. It was equal parts fear and a sharp, terrifying fascination.
And it was a problem. Because I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that I wouldn’t be able to stay away.