The candle’s flame guttered in a draft, casting a brief shimmer across the ring he wore—gold, old, worn thin by time. It had belonged to his father once. Another inheritance. Another chain.

Louis traced the rim of his glass with a single, clawed fingertip, the soft rasp of nail on crystal a quiet metronome to his thoughts.

“They say New Orleans never forgets,” he murmured, the words half-lost beneath a rising swell of trumpet and cymbal. “But that’s a curse, too. This city remembers every sin, every ghost, every name etched in blood beneath the bricks.”

His lips parted, then closed again. Silence reclaimed him for a beat longer.

From the far end of the lounge, someone played a slow, winding solo—blue and broken as dusk in the bayou. It curled through the air like smoke, worming its way through the cracks in his composure.

He finally looked up, his gaze scanning the room—not searching, but seeing. The kind of seeing that peeled back time, that stripped faces down to the bones of who they used to be. He had lived through too many evenings like this, in too many decades.

And always, always, someone was missing.

“I thought immortality would bring clarity,” he whispered. “But it only stretches the grief out. Like wine spilled across silk—it never really comes out.”

He laughed then—a brittle sound, brief and dry. His shoulders sank back into the plush chair, elegance wrapped tight around sorrow.

A waiter passed by, offering another drink, but Louis waved him off with a flick of his fingers. He’d had enough. Of whiskey. Of memories. Of tonight.

But still he lingered.

The door opened—letting in a rush of damp summer air and the cry of a woman’s laughter. The breeze stirred his coattails and carried with it something sweeter—jasmine, maybe. Or memory dressed in perfume.

His expression shifted again, unreadable but aching. He didn’t turn to look.

“Claudia loved nights like this,” he said, more to the candle than to anyone present. “She used to say the darkness in New Orleans was velvet—soft, rich... but smothering all the same.”

His fingers finally left the glass, folding into his lap, still.

“I just want one thing that isn’t haunted .