The cabin Ben had installed me in was a gilded cage, all polished pine and river-stone fireplace, smelling of cedar and false security. From the wide picture window, I could see the glint of the bayou, its surface like dark, smoked glass.
It was beautiful. It was suffocating.
Ben had called it a safe house. I called it a prison.
He’d left an hour ago, promising to bring back supplies and “check on a few things.” The words were casual, but the grim set of his jaw told me he was hunting for the person who had torn my motel room apart, who had left that poisonous purple blossom on my pillow.
A part of me, the part that still remembered him as the boy who’d patched up my scraped knees, was grateful.
But a larger, angrier part chafed under his protection. He saw a victim to be shielded.
He didn’t see the woman who was a breath away from tearing this whole rotten town apart to find the truth.
My mind wasn’t on the ransacked room, or even on Ben. It was snagged on Nash.
The memory of his hands on me, the bruising force of his kiss, the raw fury in his eyes—it was a brand on my skin. But it was his last words that echoed, a low, guttural whisper against my ear before he’d shoved me away.
“You think you knew her? Ask her about the Blackheart.”
The Blackheart.
It sounded like a pirate’s curse, a name pulled from one of the gothic novels Hannah and I used to devour as kids. But it wasn’t.
It was the name of the bar on the edge of the swamp, a place known for cheap whiskey and cheaper secrets.
It was also the title of a tattered book of poetry we’d found in our grandmother’s attic, one filled with overwrought verses about doomed love and tragic heroines.
We’d used it to pass notes, underlining words to form secret messages. It was our code.
Ask her about the Blackheart.
It wasn’t a place. It was a prompt.
The cabin door was unlocked. Ben trusted me to be too scared to leave. He was wrong.
The keys to my rental were still in my pocket, and ten minutes later, I was pulling up to the curb of our childhood home.
The paint was peeling, the porch swing hanging from a single chain, but it was still ours. Still haunted by the ghosts of our laughter.
I let myself in, the air thick with the dust of memory.
I didn’t waste time. I went straight to Hannah’s bedroom, a place I’d barely been able to step into since the funeral.
Her scent—lavender and old books—still clung to the floral wallpaper. Her bed was neatly made, a testament to a discipline I’d never shared.
The Blackheart.
I scanned the bookshelf, my fingers tracing the spines of worn paperbacks.
There it was.
A slim volume bound in cracked, black leather, the gold lettering almost completely faded.
I pulled it out, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. I fanned the pages, expecting a note, a slip of paper, anything.
Nothing.
Frustration clawed at me. Nash wouldn’t have said it for nothing.
He was goading me, pointing me somewhere. I sank onto Hannah’s bed, the book in my lap, trying to think like my sister.
Methodical. Precise. Where would she hide something vital?
I flipped through the book again, slower this time. And then I saw it.
A tiny, almost invisible indentation on page 47, under a poem titled ‘The Keeper of Secrets.’ It was a sequence of four numbers, pressed so lightly into the paper they were barely visible. 3-18-12-2.
My breath hitched. Our code.
The third word on the eighteenth line. The twelfth word on the second line.
I scanned the poem.
Line 18: My love, a secret buried deep beneath the willow’s weeping bough… The third word. Secret.
Line 2: I keep my heart inside a chest of iron, locked against the day… The twelfth word. Iron.
Secret. Iron.
My gaze flew around the room, landing on the antique iron hope chest at the foot of her bed. It was where she kept old linens and winter blankets.
I’d opened it a dozen times. But this was different.
I ran my hands along the cedar-lined interior, pressing, searching. My fingers snagged on a seam that wasn’t quite right, a tiny gap in the wood at the bottom.
I pushed, and a section of the false bottom clicked open.
Inside, nestled in a bed of yellowed newspaper, was a heavy, grey metal lockbox.
My hands shook as I lifted it out. It had a four-digit combination lock.
Of course it did. Hannah loved puzzles, loved order.
I tried her birthday. Nothing.
Our parents’ anniversary. Nothing.
Then, a memory surfaced—a rainy afternoon spent huddled in this very room, promising each other we’d always be a team. I punched in the date of that day. 08-14.
The lock clicked open.
The contents stole the air from my lungs. There was a small velvet pouch containing a man’s silver ring, intricately carved with a twisting serpent.
Beside it lay a stack of newspaper clippings about the Devereaux family’s shipping enterprise.
And underneath it all, a single, leather-bound journal. Hannah’s name was embossed on the cover in neat, gold script.
I sat on the floor, the lockbox in my lap, and opened the first page. The handwriting was hers, that familiar, precise cursive, but the words were a stranger’s.
October 12th.
He came to me again last night. By the cypress grove where the water runs black. The world thinks he is a monster, a coiled thing of violence and shadow. And he is. But he is my monster. When he touches me, the rest of the world burns away. There is only the rough scrape of his jaw against my neck, the taste of whiskey on his tongue, the desperate, hungry way he says my name. It’s a venomous little secret, ours. A beautiful poison. I think I might be in love with Nash Devereaux.
The name hit me like a physical blow.
Nash. Not a stranger, not some secret lover I could hate cleanly.
Nash. The man who had cornered me, kissed me, terrified me.
The man I felt a terrifying, undeniable pull towards. He had been with my sister. Not just with her.
The words on the page weren’t about a casual fling; they bled with a raw, consuming passion that my sensible, cautious Hannah had apparently kept locked away from everyone.
I flipped through the pages, my vision blurring with a hot, jealous rage I had no right to feel.
Entry after entry detailed their secret affair. Meetings in the dead of night, whispered conversations, the fierce, almost violent intensity of their connection.
She wrote about his darkness, not as something to be feared, but as something she understood, something that called to a similar darkness in herself.
He’s not what they think. The anger is a shield. Underneath it… there’s so much pain. He’s trapped. We both are.
The betrayal was a sharp, jagged thing in my chest.
All this time, I thought I was the only one who saw a flicker of something more in Nash. But Hannah had been there first.
She hadn’t just seen it; she’d lived in it. Loved it. And she had never told me.
The perfect sister, the one who always knew my secrets, had kept the biggest one of her life completely hidden.
Then, about halfway through the journal, the tone shifted. The breathless romance gave way to a creeping anxiety.
November 5th.
Nash was agitated tonight. He warned me to be careful. He kept talking about his father, about the family ‘business.’ He said things happen on the docks at night, things no one is supposed to see. He told me to forget whatever I thought I’d heard. But I saw the look in his eyes. He wasn’t warning me off. He was pleading with me.
My blood ran cold. I grabbed the newspaper clippings from the box.
“Devereaux Shipping Announces Record Profits.”
“Patriarch Alistair Devereaux Donates New Wing to Town Hall.”
All fluff pieces, painting them as benevolent founders. But Hannah had drawn circles around names, connected shipping manifests with red ink, her neat handwriting scribbling questions in the margins.
Discrepancy? Where did this cargo go? Not on official logs.
The last few entries were short, frantic.
December 1st.
It’s smuggling. It has to be. Something big. Alistair is using the company as a front. Nash knows. I think he’s a part of it, and it’s killing him. He told me to run, to leave this town and never come back. He said his father is more dangerous than anyone knows.
December 10th.
I followed a truck from the docks last night. It went to the old Miller property, deep in the swamp. They’re covering their tracks, but I’m getting closer. The whole town must be in on it. The silence is too complete. People are being paid to look the other way. Or threatened. Is Ben part of it? Does he know? Or is he just willfully blind like everyone else?
That last question was a punch to the gut.
Ben.
Her childhood friend. The Sheriff.
The man I was starting to lean on. Hannah had doubted him.
The final entry was dated the day before she died.
December 16th.
He knows I’m watching. Alistair. I saw him near my car today. He just smiled, this cold, dead smile. Nash is terrified for me. We fought. He begged me to stop, to let it go. He said I have no idea what I’m up against. But I can’t stop. This is bigger than the smuggling. It’s about what happened years ago, about the people who have disappeared. It’s all connected. I have to find the proof. I think I know where it is. I’m meeting my source tonight. Wish me luck.
There were no more entries.
I closed the journal, my body trembling. The room felt small, the walls closing in.
The image of my sister—steady, reliable, a little boring Hannah—was shattered. In her place was a woman I didn’t know.
A woman having a passionate, dangerous affair with the town’s black sheep.
A woman who had become a secret investigator, who had single-handedly taken on the most powerful family in the parish, a family of smugglers and possibly murderers.
A woman who had gotten herself killed.
The grief was a tidal wave, but for the first time, it was mingled with a profound, aching sorrow for the sister I never truly knew.
The weight of her secrets, of her bravery, of her fear, settled over me like a shroud. I was holding her life and her death in my hands.
And I was utterly, terrifyingly alone. The safe house Ben had put me in was no longer a cage; it was the only sanctuary I could think of.
But the question from Hannah’s journal echoed in the sudden, deafening silence of the room.
Is Ben part of it?
The doubt was a splinter of ice in my heart. I didn’t know who to trust.
Nash, her secret lover, who pointed me to this devastating truth?
Or Ben, my lifelong protector, who she suspected was part of the cover-up?
My carefully constructed world had been demolished in the space of an hour. I clutched the journal to my chest, the leather cool against my skin, and a single, ragged sob escaped my lips.
I needed comfort. I needed an anchor in the storm.
I needed someone to hold me together before I flew apart.
I needed Ben. And the thought terrified me more than anything else.