Chapter 2: No Mercy in the Morning
Sunlight, the kind that felt like a physical weight, bled through the thin curtains of my bedroom. I was awake before the rooster, a habit so ingrained it felt wired into my bones. The digital clock read 5:17 AM. The familiar twist of anxiety was already there, coiled tight in my gut. Mortgages. Feed prices. The damn sagging roof on the west barn. And now, a kidnapped French crime lord sleeping in my spare room.
I lay there for a minute, listening. No sound from Carter’s room. From the spare room, nothing. The house held its breath.
My morning routine was a ghost dance performed on autopilot. Pull on jeans, a faded t-shirt, work boots laced tight. In the kitchen, the percolator gurgled, the smell of cheap coffee cutting through the lingering scent of last night’s fear-sweat and… was that cologne? I poured a mug, black, and stepped out onto the porch.
Dawn over the farm was a quiet punch to the gut. Gold light gilded the dew on the long grass, made the old windmill look almost romantic. And there was the west barn, its roof slumped in like a tired old horse. The warped wooden planks groaned in the slight breeze. One good storm and the whole thing would be kindling. I took a sip of scalding coffee. It tasted like bitterness and debt.
Enough. I set the mug down and went back inside.
The door to the spare room was closed. I didn’t knock. I just turned the knob and pushed it open.
The room was dim, dusty. Jean-Luc was awake. He sat upright in the wooden chair we’d tied him to, his posture rigid, but his eyes were alert, tracking me from the moment I entered. The thin cotton shirt we’d given him last night was damp with sweat at the collar. Carter’s zip-ties were still around his wrists, secured to the chair’s spindles. He looked like hell—dark shadows under his piercing blue eyes, his hair a mess—but the awareness in his gaze was unnerving. A predator waiting out a trap.
“You’re awake,” I said, leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed.
He tilted his head, the movement slow, deliberate. “The accommodations lack a certain… je ne sais quoi. The mattress, for instance, appears to be stuffed with gravel.”
“It’s corn husks. Local product.”
“Ah.” He tried to shift his shoulders, winced. Carter’s punch had left a nasty bruise blossoming on his temple. “The binding is unnecessary. I give you my word.”
I snorted. “Your word’s worth about as much as a bucket with a hole in it right now.”
A flicker of something—irritation, maybe respect—crossed his face. “Consider the logic. If I run, I am a man in borrowed clothes with no resources, wandering a landscape I do not know, pursued by people who wish me significant harm.” His voice was hoarse but precise. “I am many things, Briar, but I am not a fool. I would prefer to be inside, with the people who, however misguidedly, removed me from that trunk.”
He knew my name. Carter must have used it. The casual way he said it felt intimate, violating. I walked over, the utility knife already in my hand. For a long second, I held his gaze. Then I sawed through the plastic. It snapped apart.
He brought his hands to his lap, rubbing the raw, red marks on his wrists. He stood slowly, unfolding his height in the small room. He rolled his shoulders, another wince ghosting across his features. His eyes landed on the open door, then down the hall toward the bathroom.
“The shower,” he said, a statement, not a question. He eyed it like a pilgrim spotting an oasis.
“Towels are in the cabinet. Don’t use all the hot water.” I stepped aside to let him pass. The scent of him—sweat, old panic, that underlying note of something expensive—filled the space between us as he moved by me.
I busied myself making more coffee, listening to the pipes groan as the shower ran. Carter stumbled out, hair sticking up, squinting at the light.
“Is he…”
“Showering.”
“You untied him?”
“He made a good point about not wanting to get shot wandering the back forty.” I shoved a mug toward him. “We need to talk. About Tommy.”
The shower stopped. Minutes later, Jean-Luc emerged. He’d cleaned up. His face was sharp, alert. My brother’s sweatpants hung comically short on him, and the plain white t-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. He’d slicked his dark hair back with water. He looked less like a prisoner and more like a dangerously underdressed fashion model who’d taken a wrong turn.
He leaned against the kitchen doorway. “An improvement.”
“You look like a drowned rat,” I said, but the effect was undercut by Carter pouring him a mug of coffee without being asked.
Jean-Luc took it, nodded his thanks. He sipped, and his face did a complicated little dance before settling into neutrality. “Your coffee is… robust.”
“It’s tar. It gets the job done.” I leveled my gaze at him. “You said you knew where Tommy was.”
“I said I knew where he was,” Jean-Luc corrected, placing the mug carefully on the counter. “Past tense. The game he was involved in was a trap. Poorly conceived. He owed money to dangerous people who are not me.”
“Who?” Carter’s voice was tight.
“It does not matter. They used him as bait to draw out a rival. They believed this rival was meeting with me at the Flambeau Royale. When Tommy arrived for his ‘sure thing,’ they subdued him. They put the sack on his head and placed him in that room as a warning to anyone who entered.” He looked between us. “You entered.”
A cold dread settled in my chest. “So where is he now?”
“When a message is delivered, one disposes of the envelope.” Jean-Luc’s voice was flat, devoid of any attempt to soften the blow.
The world tilted. Carter’s chair scraped back. “No.”
“It is a probability.”
I stood up, my hands flat on the table. “You’re lying. You’re trying to scare us into letting you go.”
Jean-Luc met my anger with a chilling calm. “Why would I lie? You are already terrified. You have a collapsed barn and a debt you cannot pay. You do not need more ghosts.” He’d observed, calculated, filed our weaknesses away in the few hours he’d been conscious here. “I am telling you the truth because the truth is what you bought when you put me in your car. Tommy is likely gone. The men who took him, and the men who were after me, are now, thanks to your intervention, possibly conflating our problems. They will be looking for me. And by extension, for you.”
The kitchen was silent except for the hum of the old refrigerator. Sunlight streamed in, too bright, too cheerful.
“We need to know for sure,” Carter whispered, his eyes shiny.
“Then we look,” I said, the decision solidifying as I spoke. “We find out what happened.”
Jean-Luc arched a brow. “‘We’?”
“You’re going to help.”
He laughed, a short, dry sound. “And why would I do that?”
“Because you’re here. Because they think you’re with us now. And because,” I said, stepping closer, “if Tommy is really gone, then those men are the reason. And they tried to put a sack on your head too. Seems like you might have a stake in this ‘we’ now.”
He held my gaze for a long time. I could see him weighing it, the odds, the risk, the sheer absurdity of being drafted into a Texan tragedy. Finally, he gave a single, slow nod.
Finally, he gave a single, slow nod.
“D’accord,” he said quietly. “But on my terms.” He held up a hand before I could protest. “My terms are thus: I will not be tied to a chair. I will assist, as you say. But we do things correctly. No more cowboy rescues.”
“Cowboy rescues got your head out of that sack,” Carter pointed out.
“And into another kind of sack. A rural one.” Jean-Luc took another sip of coffee, shuddered, and set the mug down decisively. “First, we require information. I cannot access my usual channels from a device that can be traced.” He looked at Carter. “You are tech-savvy?”
Carter nodded, a spark of pride cutting through his grief.
“Good. You will need to be a ghost. Layers of encryption, burner phones purchased far from here, cash only. Can you do this?” He spoke with a sudden, galvanizing authority that made the kitchen feel like a war room.
“I can figure it out,” Carter said, sitting up straighter.
“He’ll need money,” I said, the practicalities crashing in. “Cash we don’t have.”
Jean-Luc studied me, his gaze dropping to my worn jeans, my cracked nails. “Your barn. The one that is… listing. It is insured?”
“Not for enough. And the deductible would wipe us out.”
“But it is insured.” A slow smile touched his lips, devoid of humor. “A localized, contained fire. Not my area of expertise, but the principle is universal. Create a loss to finance a greater gain.”
I stared at him. “You want me to burn down my own barn?”
“I want you to claim a fire. A small one. Electrical. Very tragic. The insurance payout solves your immediate financial instability and funds our investigation into your friend.” He let the idea hang in the air between us. “It is a tool. Like your knife.”
The shock of the suggestion was a cold splash. Then the ruthless logic of it seeped in. It was monstrous. It was also the first coherent plan anyone had offered since Tommy vanished. My father’s barn, my collapsing legacy, as kindling for a chance at answers.
“We’re not burning anything,” I said, my voice low. “Not yet.”
“Then we work with what you have.” He shrugged, the movement graceful despite the borrowed, ill-fitting clothes. “Which appears to be stubbornness, some cattle, and this very aggressive coffee.”
The next few days were a tense, strange equilibrium. I laid down the rules over a breakfast of eggs that Jean-Luc eyed with deep suspicion.
“You don’t work, you don’t eat,” I said, sliding a plate toward him. “This isn’t a hotel. You don’t leave the property, not even to check the mailbox. Carter’s setting up a… a ghost net, or whatever. You make no calls. Nothing that can ping a tower or be traced back here.”
“You are describing a very comfortable prison,” he observed, picking up a fork as if it were a scientific specimen.
“It’s a farm. The difference is, here you get to feed the chickens.”
Carter took the lead on his education. Jean-Luc’s initial foray into farm life was a study in elegant failure. He approached the tasks with the intensity of a general surveying a battlefield, which was entirely the wrong energy.
“Why do they not obey?” he demanded, stepping back from the chicken coop, his borrowed boots—a pair of my dad’s old ones—already coated in a patina of mud and things best not examined.
“They’re chickens,” Carter laughed, sprinkling feed. “They don’t obey. They just… are.”
Jean-Luc’s disdain for livestock logic was profound. The cows, with their slow, rolling gazes and complete lack of regard for his strategic positioning, baffled him. Milking was a catastrophe of spilled buckets and offended bovine sighs. Mending a section of fence, he swung a hammer with lethal precision but no control, bending three nails before sinking one.
He ruined the borrowed boots completely the second day, slicing the leather open on barbed wire while trying to untangle a ewe. The Texas sun, relentless and indifferent, painted his fair skin a vicious shade of crimson across his neck and forearms by the afternoon.
“You are purposely trying to kill me,” he stated that evening, moving stiffly in the kitchen. The smell of aloe vera lotion competed with the simmering pot of chili.
“It’s just sunlight,” Carter said, grinning. “You get used to it.”
“I am from Marseille. We have sun. It is civilized. It accompanies wine and seafood. It does not… assault.” He winced as he lowered himself into a chair.
But he learned. Fast. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed. Once he accepted that the animals operated on a chaos principle rather than command hierarchy, he adapted. He watched Carter, mimicked his motions, asked short, precise questions. By the third day, he could milk a cow without causing a stampede. He fixed a leaking pipe in the dairy shed with a clever twist of wire and a bit of chewing gum, a solution so bizarrely effective it left Carter and me staring.
“It is a temporary fix,” he said, wiping his hands. “But then, so are most things.”
The work was relentless, but with three of us, the rhythm changed. Feed was distributed faster. The milking finished before noon. One afternoon, we tackled the sprawling junk pile near the collapsed barn, sorting salvageable lumber from rust. Jean-Luc worked in silence, his sleeves rolled up over his sunburned arms, moving with an economy of motion that spoke of a different kind of labor in his past.
“You’re not from here,” I said eventually, not a question. I was hauling a rotten beam to the burn pile.
“My mother was American,” he said after a pause, hefting a bent sheet of corrugated metal. “A dreamer from Baton Rouge who married a fisherman’s son from Marseille. A poor decision on both counts.” He tossed the metal onto the scrap heap with a clatter. “They argued about where to live until they died. I chose a third option.”
“New Orleans.”
“It seemed a compromise. It was, in fact, the worst qualities of both.” He stopped, leaning on a piece of fencing. “But it had opportunity. Of a certain kind.”
He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to. The sharp look in his eyes, the careful way he measured every space and person, said enough.
A spark happened on the fourth day. The compressor for the bulk milk tank failed. Carter was in town for supplies, trying to find parts without using a traceable card. The tank’s temperature was creeping up, threatening the entire morning’s yield.
I was elbow-deep in the machine’s guts, swearing under my breath, grease on my cheek. Jean-Luc stood beside me, holding a flashlight.
“The capacitor is burnt,” I muttered. “It’s fried. We’re gonna lose it all.”
“Let me see.” He took the flashlight from my hand, his fingers brushing mine. A simple, accidental touch. He peered into the mechanical innards. “The relay beside it is also damaged. See the scorch marks?” He pointed with a clean, precise finger. “You are replacing the wrong part.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have, in the past, caused machines like this to fail in very specific ways.” He said it plainly, without pride or shame. It was just a fact. “You need the part Carter is fetching, and the one next to it. The second is likely still good on the old unit in the west barn.”
He was right. We spliced the wiring from the carcass of the old compressor, his hands steady and sure beside my frantic ones. The machine coughed, shuddered, and hummed back to life. The tank’s temperature gauge began its slow descent back to safety.
In the sudden, grateful quiet of the cooling unit, we stood there in the dim shed. The adrenaline drained away, leaving a shared, exhausted solidarity. He smiled then, a real one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look younger. I found myself smiling back, a flush of relief warming my face. For a second, it was just two people who’d fixed a thing together.
The moment broke with the sound of a car engine, too smooth, too quiet to be Carter’s truck, coming up the gravel drive.
My blood went cold. Nobody visited. Not ever.
I dropped the wrench. It clanged against the concrete floor. Jean-Luc’s smile vanished, replaced by instant, neutral alertness.
I ran to the window and peered out. A sleek, silver Lexus was rolling to a stop in front of the farmhouse.
“It’s my mother,” I hissed, panic spiking. “You have to hide. Now.”
“Where?” he asked, already moving toward the shed door, his eyes scanning the open yard.
The west barn. The collapsed one. It was the only place she’d never go.
“The barn. The old one. Go, straight back, don’t be seen.” I shoved him toward the back door of the shed that opened towards the fields. “Move!”
He didn’t argue. He slipped out, blending into the shadows of the afternoon with a startling ease. I watched him dash across the ten yards of open ground and vanish into the dark maw of the collapsed barn’s side entrance.
I wiped the grease from my cheek with a shaky hand, took a deep breath, and walked out to meet my mother.