Saint of Wolves (5 Ebooks)

The fear was never that my mother would die.

It was hearing her at the door and knowing the night had just gotten worse.

In daylight, people adored her. She could pull her mouth into a sad little smile, touch a wrist, lower her voice, and make strangers feel cruel for doubting her. Teachers said she was trying. Church women said life had not been kind to her. Men offered rides, groceries, money, mercy.

They got ten polished minutes.

I got the key missing the lock at one in the morning.

I knew the sounds. Metal scraping. A shoulder hitting the frame. The pause before the first step. From that alone, I could tell if she was drunk, high, furious, or so gone she might look right at me and see a wall.

The night I still carry was summer-hot and airless. Milo had fallen asleep on the couch with the television flashing blue over his face. I was fourteen, stirring boxed macaroni, telling myself the same lie I always told: if food was ready, maybe she would eat; if she ate, maybe she would sleep; if she slept, maybe nothing in the apartment would get broken.

Then headlights slid across the kitchen wall.

My stomach dropped.

I got to the door before she did. The hall smelled like wet concrete and stale beer. One shoe was gone. Mascara had bled under her eyes. Somebody else’s smoke clung to her hair. When she saw me, she smiled like I was the answer to a question she had forgotten asking.

“Baby.”

Then she fell into me.

Her weight slammed the breath out of my chest. The smell hit next. Liquor. Sweat. Sweet rot under cheap perfume. Milo woke up crying in the next room while I dragged her inside with both arms locked around her ribs.

I got her to the bathroom.

That part never left my hands.

Her wrist slipping through my grip. Her shoulder striking the tub. Tile biting through my knees. I held her hair while she vomited between us, hot and sour, and the plastic shower curtain stuck to my bare arm in the steam. She was crying by then, but not because Milo was sobbing for her. Not because I was fourteen and kneeling in her mess.

Because she had lost an earring.

I found it under the toilet.

A tiny gold hoop. Warm from the floor.

She looked at it in my palm and laughed. Clear. Mean. Awake in the worst way.

Then she said, “This city eats what you leave unattended.”

I did not know if she meant herself.

Years later, I still thought she meant me.

After that, childhood narrowed into chores and waiting. Good mornings that made fools of us. School lunches packed like apologies. Then the vanishings. Calls to hospitals. Long sits outside county lockup. Men in and out. Bills tucked under sugar bowls. I learned how to sign forms, stretch groceries, lie to teachers, and keep Milo behind me when the door opened.

When she died, everyone got gentle.

They said she loved us. They said addiction was an illness. At the funeral, women who had never climbed our stairs held my face and called me strong.

My throat tightened so hard I thought I might choke.

Strong was what people called a girl nobody came back for.

So I built my life around what could not charm me. Reports. Timelines. Evidence. I learned how to make a room surrender the truth it was hiding. I learned to trust blood before tears, paper before promises, the body before the mouth.

What hurt me taught me one rule: need is not love.

What I feared becoming was simpler. A woman who mistakes rescuing someone for being chosen by them.

What life had already taken felt simpler still. Rest. Trust. The right to hear a door open without bracing.

And still, some hard stupid part of me wanted one thing that would stay.

The night before the first body dropped in the Quarter, my phone buzzed just after midnight.

Unknown number.

I almost let it ring.

Then I answered, and a man I had never heard before said, “Detective Vigne, if your brother walks home alone tonight, he won’t make it there.”