Chapter 3 of Nocturne

By Arabella F.

Page 1 of 6

Those who desire her will fall deeper into longing, but she will always drift further away.

Candlelight flickered against the stone walls of Ciao Luna, stretching shadows across the floor like slow, reaching fingers. Earlier in the evening, the restaurant had been alive with voices and laughter, filled with the bright disorder of shared meals and clinking glasses, the warmth of people pressing close to forget the world beyond the cliffs. There had been a kind of hunger in the room that had nothing to do with food, a craving for normalcy, for music, for wine poured without counting coins twice, for a night where the word war did not sit in the back of every conversation like a locked drawer no one dared to open.

Now, the hour had thinned the noise to nothing. Chairs stood empty, pushed back at odd angles, and tables bore the quiet remains of dinners long finished. Half-melted candle stubs leaned in their holders as if exhausted, wax pooled like pale tears across chipped brass. The air smelled of rosemary and cooling oil, of citrus peel crushed underfoot, of smoke that would not leave the stone no matter how often the windows were opened. It was the smell of a place that kept feeding people even when the world had taught them to ration joy, a stubborn domestic warmth clinging to the building as if it could keep the darkness outside by sheer repetition.

Silence pressed in from every corner, heavy and deliberate, as though the room itself were holding its breath. The last of the staff had gone upstairs, their footsteps fading into the old bones of the building, leaving only the small, ordinary sounds that followed an evening’s work: a basin settling, a shutter tapping once in the wind, the faint creak of wood as the restaurant cooled. It was not that the room felt colder. It felt older, as if it carried the residue of something unseen that had passed through and left its imprint behind. The kind of feeling that made a man glance over his shoulder in an empty room, then resent himself for it.

Alaric sat alone in the far corner, elbows braced against the table, fingers tracing the rim of a wine glass that had long since gone warm. The wine had lost its edge hours ago, grown flat and tired, but he kept it there anyway, more out of habit than taste. There were nights when a glass was less a comfort than an excuse, something to occupy his hands so they did not betray the tremor that lived beneath his skin whenever the world grew too quiet. He told himself he was only tired. He told himself the war had left everyone jumpier than they admitted. He told himself that scarce sleep and too many long days could make a man build monsters out of shadows, because admitting anything else felt too close to surrender.

Beyond the window, the cliffs cut sharply against the night sky, their jagged edges silhouetted beneath a scatter of distant stars. Down below, the wind drove the sea into restless motion, waves battering the rocks with relentless force. The sound rose and fell without end, circular and insistent, like a warning repeated too many times to ignore. The sea had always unsettled him, not because it was violent, but because it was indifferent. It did not mourn. It did not remember. It did not soften for anyone. Tonight it sounded like it was repeating something he had been trying not to hear.

No amount of drink or distraction could pull his thoughts from her.

Page 2 of 6

Even in her absence, Lua lingered. Her laughter echoed in his memory, unrestrained and bright, refusing to fade, threading itself through quiet moments when it did not belong. It slipped into his mind while he scrubbed a pan, while he counted the cash drawer, while he listened to Donovan’s footsteps in the room above and tried not to measure how much lighter they sounded than they used to. Sometimes, in the space between wave and wind, Alaric would catch a sound that might have been her laugh, only for it to resolve into something else: a gull outside, a board settling, the last breath of the building as it cooled. He told himself it was nothing, and then he found himself listening again, as if his body had learned a reflex his mind refused to admit.

Her smile had a way of illuminating rooms that had never known light, of drawing attention without demanding it. People noticed her instantly, not only for her beauty, though that alone could unravel reason, but for the way the world subtly rearranged itself around her presence, as if gravity adjusted when she entered a space. Men stopped mid-sentence and forgot what they meant to say. Women watched her too long and then looked away, as if the act of looking carried its own consequence. Even the children, even the ones born into ruin and used to strangers, had gone strangely quiet around her, the way animals did before storms. Alaric had seen people like that before, people who made a room feel brighter simply by existing in it, who made others stand a little straighter, speak a little softer, as if the air had suddenly become sacred. But with Lua, the feeling went further. It was not admiration. It was not infatuation. It was something like being pulled toward a shoreline without realizing your feet were already in the water.

That was where Alaric’s doubt first sharpened into something uglier, not fear of her, but fear of what people became around her.

He told himself he was imagining patterns, because patterns were easier than helplessness. He told himself he was seeing danger because he wanted an enemy he could name. And yet the longer she stayed in their lives, the more he recognized the shape of what was happening, even if he could not prove it in any way that would satisfy reason.

The Nocturne’s Curse was not a sailor’s myth meant to fill empty nights with superstition. It was not the kind of story people told tourists with a wink over limoncello to make the village seem older and stranger than it already was. It was the kind of story men told each other in low voices when the shutters were closed and the candles burned down, when the room smelled faintly of incense from the church and the sea sounded like it was trying to climb the cliffs. It was a legend that did not survive because it was entertaining. It survived because enough people had been harmed by something they could not explain, and calling it a curse was easier than admitting the truth: that some forces could take you apart without ever touching you.

Alaric had seen its aftermath before, scattered across years and places he no longer spoke of, etched into faces that had once been familiar and voices that had grown thin and hollow. There had been a man in Marseille once, years back, a fisherman who stopped going out at dawn because he could not stop staring at the water like it had stolen someone from him. There had been a woman in Naples who lit candles every night in a chapel and whispered the same name until her family begged the priest to intervene. Alaric remembered the way people looked at them, pity mixed with irritation, the quiet fear that grief might be contagious. He remembered, too, how those people did not die. They simply became less, slowly, until their own lives felt like something happening to someone else.

And yet even now, he could not swear the curse was real in the way hunger was real, or a knife was real. He could not put it on a table and point to it. He could only watch what it did. He could only measure its presence by subtraction.

He had never expected to see it here, in a place built from routine and bread and steadiness.

He had never expected to see it take hold of Donovan.

That was what made his anger feel useless, a thing with nowhere to go, because Donovan had always been the steady one. Donovan was not a man prone to fantasies. He did not fall apart in public. He did not chase his own shadows. He was the man who woke before dawn without complaint, who worked through pain without naming it, who could lift a crate with one hand while arguing about bread prices with the other. If a storm tore through the coast, Donovan would be the one on the terrace first, tightening ropes, checking lanterns, making a plan. If a delivery did not come, Donovan would be the one who turned scarcity into a meal and pretended it was generosity. He did not break easily. He had survived hunger. He had survived grief. He had survived years of living with questions about his parents that never had answers. He had survived the strange, quiet cruelty of a postwar world that demanded endurance and offered little tenderness in return.

And yet Lua had stepped into his life, and in weeks she had begun to unmake him in a way time and war and hardship never had.

Lua had not claimed him in any way that resembled love. She had not taken him with intention or malice. The curse required neither. It fed on proximity, on attention, on those who opened themselves too wide and did not know when to close their hands. Donovan had done so willingly, and that was the cruelest part, because it made his suffering feel like choice when it was closer to compulsion.

At first, the changes were small enough to dismiss. Donovan pausing mid-sentence as if listening for a sound no one else could hear. Donovan smiling at nothing, then looking startled, as though he had been caught doing something private. The way he began to linger near the terrace rail at night, eyes fixed on the shore below, as if the sea might return something it had stolen. The way his gaze drifted when Lua was gone, unfocused and searching, as if she had taken something intangible with her. Alaric tried to tell himself it was ordinary, that men did strange things when they fell in love, that Donovan had simply been lonely longer than he admitted, that everyone was hungry for brightness and Lua happened to be bright.

Then it grew.

Lua’s name began surfacing unprompted, slipping into moments where it did not belong. In the kitchen. In the storage room. During conversations about bread deliveries and broken shutters and whether the market would have eggs in the morning. Her name on Donovan’s tongue like a habit he could not break, like prayer, like hunger. Donovan laughed less. He slept worse. He ate without tasting. He moved through the world as if it had become a place he no longer recognized.