Arthur got hurt. He came home with a bloody face. "Poor Christ, he doesn't even know what's happening," Louis muttered under his breath, lighting a cigarette and taking a slow drag. The smoke curled around his head, swirling in the air, as he stared into the dim, smoke-filled pub.
This place... it used to be everything to him. The pub had been more than just a building—it was his legacy. Left to him after the war when his father died. His brothers inherited the land and the houses. Louis had inherited this crumbling place, a weight he never asked for, a responsibility that felt foreign. At first, he hadn't cared. He was a rising star in the detective world in Paris, too consumed by cases to care about managing a broken-down pub in the English Midlands.
But things had fallen apart fast. His brother disgraced his girlfriend, a scandal that ended in chaos. Louis lost his job, his career, and with it, the last bits of dignity he had left. The woman he loved walked out on him. All he had left was a wreck of a pub and a handful of memories that didn't seem worth holding on to anymore. A place bombed out by his brother, the one enemy he couldn't escape.
What was poor Louis supposed to do?
Reiko knew everything about him. She knew him better than he knew himself. When he was born—hell, she knew the exact hour. She knew where he came from, how many moles he had, how much he drank, how many cigarettes he smoked, how many times he cursed his brother. She even knew when he was planning to end his life. Maybe she had known it before Louis even did.
When Louis first met Reiko, he had thought she was his angel. She'd appeared out of nowhere, just as he was about to hang himself in the cold silence of the pub, and for a moment, he truly believed she was sent to save him. He had it all planned. Midnight. The quiet death of a man who had nothing left.
He had already found the rope.
As he fiddled with the watch his beloved's father had once given him, he thought maybe, just maybe, if he ended it all, she would come back to him. The seconds stretched like hours as he tossed the watch from one hand to the other.
Five minutes.
Louis got up from the table, pacing around the pub. The lights flickered above, casting fleeting shadows on the tables and broken chairs. The stillness was suffocating, and the silence, thick with the weight of his own despair, seemed to swallow him whole.
And then, there she was.
Reiko sat at a table, her eyes fixed on him with the intensity of someone who knew exactly how this would play out. Louis froze for a moment, shock overtaking him. He instinctively reached for the gun tucked into his coat, his fingers wrapping around the cold metal, grounding him back into the present. It wasn't the gun that made him freeze, though—it was the unsettling calm in Reiko's demeanor, like she was beyond him, like she already knew how this would end.
"What are you?" Louis whispered, his voice a rasp. His grip on the gun tightened, his heart racing.
Reiko tilted her head, a small, almost pitying smile curving her lips. "I'm just here to see what you'll choose, Louis."
The room seemed to grow colder, the shadows stretching unnaturally, suffocating him with a sense of impending doom. His finger hovered over the trigger, the gun suddenly feeling heavier than it ever had before. But beneath that weight, doubt flickered in his mind. Was she real? Was this a trick? Or was she just another part of his broken psyche—an angel or demon sent to witness his final hour?
